The Illustrated Petrov Day Ceremony
Since 2014, some people have celebrated Petrov Day with a small in-person ceremony, with readings by candlelight that tell the story of Petrov within the context of the long arc of history, created by Jim Babcock.
I’ve found this pretty meaningful, an it somehow feels “authentic” to me, like a real holiday. Which, as the creator of Secular Solstice 2020 it is humbling to say, feels more true than Solstice did (for the first few years, Solstice felt a little obviously “made up”, and now, although it has more storied history, it instead often feels a bit too much like “a show” as opposed to “a holiday”, at least when you go to the large productions in the Bay or NYC).
I don’t know how much my experience generalizes, but having been familiar with Seders (classic Jewish, or rationalist), it just felt to me like a real historical holiday built from a parallel dimension that tumbled into my world.
Solstice was originally intended to be a small affair that people held in people’s living room. I ended up holding a large version as an attempt to draw more attention to it. Then it turned out the large version ended up being where most people anthropically end up experiencing Solstice.
Jim designed the Petrov Day ceremony to be deliberately awkward to scale – it’s designed to find around a dining room table, with everyone within reach of a set of candles. If you end up with more than 20 people, Jim recommends splitting up into multiple groups in multiple rooms. There was a hope for it to fill a niche that encouraged small groups, copying the format of a Seder.
This is nice, but, it does mean it’s harder to actually get a lot of people to know about it.
For the last several years, LessWrong has done some kind of interactive (some might say “gimmicky”) Petrov Day event each year. Some people complain that it’s unclear if they are more like “playing a game” or more like “participating in a sacred ritual where people will judge you horribly if you defect”, which has been disorienting.
We’ve worked on various ways to signal more clearly what type of activity it is in recent years.
Normally, we conceive-of-and-implement Petrov Day basically the week-of in a matter of days. This means whatever symbolically-world-destroy-ing activity we implement has a higher-than-usual propensity for bugs that we ship at 1 AM. Some Lightcone team members dislike that and think it’s horribly embarrassing. I agree it is horribly embarrassing but also think it is a) hilarious and b) surprisingly on-theme and giving the event a weird sort of authentic uncertain about “did the site go down On Purpose For Reasons, or was it technical mistake in our Missile Detection Code?”.
Last year’s Petrov Day we did a particularly elaborate LARP/Social-Deception Game (see announcement and retrospective). It was cool in some ways. But it made it feel kinda… hard to top? Anything game-like we did felt like it’d either need to be even more elaborate, or feel a bit weaksauce in comparison.
So, this year, despite successfully beginning to plan Petrov Day weeks in advance, I pitched:
“What if instead a button that destroys the site, we just… encourage people to celebrate Petrov Day, and make a nice illustrated Petrov Day story?”
And then we did that.
I ended up deciding to just implement the existing ceremony as an animated ritual, so people who didn’t have an existing community of Petrov Day celebration participants could get a feel for what it was like.
The “encourage people to celebrate Petrov Day meetups” didn’t obviously work super well, although in our defense it turned out it was overlapping with both ACX Everywhere and IABI reading groups and we had recently tapped out our usual resources for hustling up a lot of meetups.
The Illustrated Ceremony is available from the frontpage today. Tomorrow, it’ll live on at http://lesswrong.com/petrov/ceremony.
I had fun making it. I hope you like it.
Thank you Jim for creating it originally, and thank you Stanislav Petrov for not destroying[1] the world that one time.
but I like doing the ceremony with dope-ass candles.
- ^
According to Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction, “destroy the world” might be two levels of false instead of the usual one (i.e. “the world’s still there guys, it’s just us who are fucked.”)
But, you know what I mean.
The mini website with animations is super cool! The LessWrong team’s design chops never fail to impress :)
Much appreciated. the page itself doesn’t have an upvote button to show recognition so I strong upvoted this one here. This is for me the best petrov day project (though of course made meaningful by all the previous) and I had a great moment reading this alone in my hotel room between work hours. May we all be well (and contribute to us being well).
Aww. Curious if this was your first time reading through the ceremony?
Yes, it was.
I was teaching an ai safety bootcamp during Petrov day so I organized the participants in two teams with possibility to nuke each other and false alarms. One team did nuke the other. The other didn’t respond, and was eliminated.
It was nice to take a break from that.
This is good and I approve of it.
A few random notes and nitpicks:
I believe the first Petrov Day was in Boston in 2013, not 2014.
“More than 20 people”? 20 seems to me like far too many; I never do a table with more than 11. (If you have exactly 11 people you have to put them all at one table, because you need at least six to do it properly, because that’s how many Children there are at the end. But if I had 22 people I might split them into three groups rather than two; I haven’t yet had to actually decide this.)
Boston significantly reduced the incidence of people reading the quote citations out loud by putting them in italic text, just like the stage directions, and then including a uniform “don’t read italic text out loud” stage direction.
The version of the ceremony on the site includes the inaccurate account of the Arkhipov incident made up by Noam Chomsky. You can see Boston’s corrected-after-fact-checking version starting on page 30 of this doc.
I have also been repeatedly told that the story in the ceremony of the Black Death’s effect on human progress is wrong, but haven’t changed it because I don’t really understand what’s wrong with it and don’t have an alternative lined up.
Petrov received the Dresden Peace Prize, not the International Peace Prize, which was long defunct by 2013.
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany started in 1919 and was complete by 1934, so can’t really be said to have occurred “in 1939”. (I just replaced this with “in the 1920s”.)
I still think the gag of duplicating the “preserving knowledge required redundancy” section is hilarious and should be included :-P
Thanks for the corrections. 2014 was based on the first-commit date in the git repo of the LaTeX version; I think we did something before that but IIRC it didn’t have the full ritual structure?
These are some good corrections and I’ll merge them in for next year.
FYI, my opinion is it’s a mistake to not have people read the quote-citations out loud (and a mistake not to read the stage directions out lout). Whenever I’ve done Petrov Day, not everyone is reading along, so people sometimes have the experience of “well I’m passing around a candle silently now but I don’t know why” or “I don’t really know who said that quote, I hope it wasn’t important.”
I think that either omitting the don’t-read-the-citations-aloud stage direction, or making it easier to follow (with a uniform italic-text-is-silent convention), would be fine, and I don’t have a strong opinion as to which is better. But before Boston made the change I’m now suggesting, what tended to happen was that people inconsistently read or didn’t read the citations aloud, and this was confusing and distracting.
Some feedback:
Reading the words “no longer symbolize anything” really irked me. Like what the hell, went through all that and now you yank away their meaning like it’s nothing?
This was a really abrupt way to end it and it didn’t feel good. The candles don’t lose their significance after going through the ceremony, even if the ritual is over. Maybe we let them burn out. Maybe we snuff them and store them to be used again next year. Maybe they get used for other purposes, and when that happens, we’re reminded of the time we celebrated Petrov Day. Anything other than having them suddenly lose all their symbolism.
I liked that bit. It made the ceremony feel like a closed container, so it was OK to “wake up” and talk normally with my friends. As you point out, there was in fact some lingering symbolism, but that’s OK.
Is there a PDF of the illustrated version for printing?