To add some missing context to this:
-I’m part of the EA community and have been for several years. To the extent that you need a community member to blame for this, it is me. When doing this, I was operating under the belief that the community would be judging me personally, which is why I openly admitted to doing this on Facebook.
-I would have known about Petrov Day anyway regardless of Chris’ message.
-Phishing attacks can often have in excess of 80% success rate. If you had received this, you would have likely entered the codes as well, even though everyone thinks that they wouldn’t. Which is just one of the reasons why it doesn’t make sense to punish recipients for making this kind of mistake.
-The campaign wasn’t targeted at Chris, it was sent to lots of users. Retrospectively, I should have excluded Chris from the list of users. (I really regret not doing this, and I would like to apologise to Chris for this.)
I think maybe 6-8, not sure. I was going to go further but the site went down too quickly. Users were selected based on having a large number of posts.
I wanted something to make it sound realistic. And rationalist/EA culture loves surveys and collecting data. :)