I was not aware of this story and happy to hear it. While I think having the day of celebration and rememberance should be done, I wonder about the exercise with the button.
First, just not pushing the button and bring the page down for a day seems not to fit the problem. The button should be shutting down someone else’s site with the realization that they will have some knowledge of that coming and have a button that shuts your page down. Perhaps next year the game could include other sites, and particularly sites whose members do not really see eye-to-eye on things.
Second, it doesn’t really tell others much about avoiding such situations. Reading Eliezer’s post the critical insight for me seems to be that of remaining calm and taking the time available to think a bit rather than merely react and follow instructions of a mindless process. That Petrov realized that launching 5 missiles just made no sense, so came to the conclusion that there was a system error/false positive is critical here.
Regarding the Fauci’s statement, I was just reading an article on the NIH site on the history of quarantines which included this observation:
“Decisions made by health authorities often seemed focused more on reassuring the public about efforts being made to stop transmission of the virus rather than on actually stopping transmission of the virus .” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559034/) This was made in the context of the 1918-1919 flu epidemic and Italy.
In some ways it is a bit of a disappointing read in that we don’t seem to have really learned anything for centuries in some ways.