I pressed the button, and it asked me to confirm that I want to participate in a "social deception game", which I did.  I'm somewhat ambivalent that this event does anything except raise awareness of a specific thing that happened during the cold war (and presumably has been patched away in current response procedures), but it's interesting to see people taking it seriously.

Depending on the framing, I will or will not press it if I'm chosen.  I'll try to play along with the rules and guidelines as published, including the in-game motivations specified.

Thanks for posting this - I never look at the front page, so would have missed it.

If ‘Opt into Petrov Day’ was aside something other than a big red ominous button, I would think the obvious answer is that it's a free choice and I'd be positively inclined towards it. Petrov Day is a good thing with good side effects, quite unlike launching nuclear weapons.

It is confusing to me that it is beside a big red ominous button. On the one hand, Petrov's story is about the value of caution. To quote a top comment from an older Petrov Day,

Petrov thought the message looked legit, but noticed there were clues that it wasn't.

On the other hand, risk-taking is good, opting in to good things is good, and if one is taking Petrov Day to mean ‘don't take risks if they look scary’ I think one is taking an almost diametrically wrong message from the story.

All that said, for now I am going to fall for my own criticism and not press the big red ominous button around Petrov Day.

that's a good point. i decided to press so that I can test myself. hopefully testing myself not to end the world on lower stakes means I improve at doing it if ever the stakes are larger.

↑ comment by Yoav Ravid · 2024-09-25T17:23:45.715Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Did anything happen after you pressed it?

Replies from: nicolas-lacombe

↑ comment by Nicolas Lacombe (nicolas-lacombe) · 2024-09-25T21:54:17.557Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

the only change i can see is the button ui (see screenshot). i assume that it only signs me up for a game which is going to happen tomorrow on petrov day.

what would you do with such an ability anyway except not use it?

Leverage it to create a better world. (Well, this button doesn't really do much, but y'know, pretend it's the ability to destroy the world.)

I was thinking the same thing this morning! My main thought was, "this is a trap. ain't no way I'm pressing a big red button especially not so near to petrov day"

The funniest possible outcome is that no one opts in and so the world is saved but the blog post is ruined.

I would hate to remove the possibility of a funny outcome. No opt in!

Button is very intimidating, indeed.

for people that didn't see it yet, the following post explains today's petrov day game: The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario [LW · GW]

Seems to me that the only winning move is not to play. 

Hm, sounds like a setting for a sci-fi movie. First you get human life extension: humans can live 200 or 300 years. Then you get some horrible criminal who got 300 years prison sentence. But the criminal cloned himself before being caught. The judge decides both versions should get 300 years. The owner of the private prison thinks "nice, free labor!" and makes ten thousand clones of the criminal -- because the criminal is extra smart and/or extra strong, so he is more profitable than an average prisoner. Turns out the clones cooperate with each other, and together they escape from the prison... and then the usual Hollywood story starts, with explosions and stuff.

Later they find out that the criminal actually made one more clone of himself before he became a criminal. So the clone is a good guy. (Or maybe unauthorized cloning of yourself is already a crime, so this old clone is hiding from the law, but he is not a violent criminal, unlike all the other clones.) Now the police tries to recruit him, maybe promise an amnesty to him if he helps to eliminate the other clones. Between the action scenes, there are flashbacks to the past, explaining why one of the two original clones became a violent criminal and the other did not. Possibly a love story that ended tragically. (Were both in love with the same girl, and did they fight for her? Or maybe, both were in love with the same girl, then she died in a traffic accident, one of them decided to forgive the guy who accidentally killed her, the other one murdered him.)

Or perhaps the old clone helps to kill all the fugitives and get the amnesty, and then it is revealed he was actually the worst of all... only his crimes were never exposed, because he managed to frame the other clone.. so he was the bad guy, who just murdered ten thousand copies of the good guy...

At the end, the bad guy kidnaps the corrupted judge, and tells him he just made ten thousand copies of him. One randomly selected copy will be released, the remaining 9999 will be tortured to death, and all evidence will be destroyed, so no one will believe that any crime happened. The bad guy is just bluffing here, there was only one copy of the judge, and he is finally released, but he is traumatized because he will never know whether the threat was real or not.

Sure.  Moral culpability for past acts should go with the decision-making apparatus, the pattern of connections and data in the brain.  If that's copied, so is the blame.  We can't let these jerks get away with stuff just by using a Star Trek teleporter!

The clone has an alibi: not existing at the time.

Suppose you got 'cloned to the atom'. 10 years later, one of you commits a crime. Who is punished? Who should be?

On first thought, it does not seem to me that (im)morality is something that is commonly ascribed to atoms. Just as bits do not actually have a color, so it seems to me that atoms do not have morality. But I'm not a moral philosopher, so that's just my feeling.

On second thought, consider a thought experiment where we judge the clone. Was the clone a direct / proximate cause of the immorality? It would seem not, as the original was. Did the clone have the intention to cause the immorality? It would seem not, the original did. So I don't think I would hold the clone liable for the committed immorality.

A more interesting scenario to me would be - We have two clones, we know one of them committed an immorality, but we do not know which one. How do we proceed?

Honestly, I prefer the more obvious generalities.  They're false often enough that one is able to see that it's not a literal universal truth, but more an extremely common experience being used as an example of something uncontroversial, even with well-known non-explicitly-mentioned exceptions.

All 4 statements are incomplete - these aren't properties of the object, but relational experiences of a person to the object.  None of them are universally true for all situations (though the latter two are closer).  

I've seen some convincing arguments that water is not wet.

LLMs can be very good at coming up with names with some work:

A few I liked:
Sacrificial Contest
Mutual Ruin Game
Sacrificial Spiral
Universal Loss Competition
Collective Sacrifice Trap
Competition Deadlock
Competition Spiral
Competition Stalemate
Destructive Contest
Destructive Feedback Competition 
Conflict Feedback Spiral
 

To me, the heart of the matter is being trapped in local minima which involve negative sum competitions. Pyrrhic victory is sometimes involved, but sometimes not. An example of not a mutual loss would be if Actor A does come out ahead of where they started, but Actor B lost more than Actor A gained.

A rat race which devours slack, as Dagon mentions is another example. Although that doesn't seem as central to Moloch to me as Negative Sum competition.

Also, there's a related psychological aspect to this. When people get scared and insecure and hostile in their trades and competitions, they have a tendency to stop even searching for win-win solutions. Liv Boeree talks about Win-Win being the opposite of Moloch. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC09fp6hZ2RHiUYwY8hNCirA

I think competition is an important element to capture in the name.  I'm not sure that any of sacrifice, race, or trap are defining concepts, though they usually apply.  I think of it as over-focus on a few somewhat-visible (if not perfectly legible) dimensions, at the expense of harder-to-notice-analytically value dimensions.  So maybe "goodharted value optimization", but that's not great either.

In my head, I tend to think of it as related to "moneyball over-focus" - taking the wrong lesson from Billy Beane's success - he optimized for winning on a budget, not for great baseball athleticism or developing player excellence (except as part of the visible optimization).  He was very successful in that, but the world lost something for it.

The antidote is Slack, which is the ultimate illegible value.  I'm not sure how/whether to work that into the name.

Thank you! 

And yeah, agree that it should respect the user's pinned post. Seems like it should be an easy change.

New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable.

Another place to go from there is that ideas aren't proving as useful as they used to. As if they're being monopolized somehow. i.e. one could investigate/compare 'productivity' and the rules around 'intellectual property' such as 'copyright'.

I think science can be moved forward by a variety of things. Novel hypotheses is one way. Novel observations is another. Novel tools or technology that enable novel observations is another.

We've picked a lot of the long hanging fruit in novel tools for many research areas. A multimillion dollar laser microscope is a hard bar to beat in biology. CERN is a hard bar to beat in physics. James Webb telescope recently upstaged Hubble, and the result was a rapid surge in exciting new astronomy papers fueled by the new observations enabled by this new tool.

So I don't disagree that the lame incentives for predictable incremental grant proposals are part of the problem, but I'm also pretty confident that that isn't the main source of the slowing of scientific progress.

I can challenge the idea, but I'm not sure whether my challenges would help flesh out the position. Might be worth trying and seeing how it goes and whether my questions are worth publishing.

Hmm, I disagree with Taleb's quote.

I think there are three things important to understanding the universe: empiricism, logic/math, and theorizing. I would say that you can do good empiricism without logical extrapolation or theorizing. You can do math and formal logic without doing empirical fact-finding or theorizing. But you should never trust theorizing that is not based in either logic/math or empiricism.

For empiricism which stood the test of time, look at Cajal's neuron drawings which are still revered by scientists today. Those images alone moved neuroscience forward in an important way.

For logic/math, see Einstein's theories which far preceeded the tests which were able to empirically validate them.

For theorizing without either, see the nonsensical ideas put forth by 'armchair geologists' before actual data had been gathered. Unlike Einstein, they did not support their ideas with math.

I don't think this makes much sense, honestly. Taleb isn't even a LW rationalist, so that's the first reason to doubt that this quote alone could imply something of great importance about the essence of this site.

Is the Scientist in Eliezer's recent anti-Empiricism dialogue [LW · GW] not using reason and logic? Are Traditional Rationality and Science, which are spoken of as ultimately helpful but fundamentally incomplete in many parts of the Sequences (1 [LW · GW], 2 [LW · GW], 3 [LW · GW], 4 [LW · GW]) having trouble because its practitioners are doing "empiricism without logic"? Because they can't process or make sense of observations? Are they not using reason? If that were so, how on Earth would we have achieved the tremendous amount of pre-LW rationalism advances in science, engineering, and our understanding of the outside world?

I absolutely disagree with the notion that LW rationalism is about using logic to process observations. On the contrary, it is about using Bayesianism [LW · GW] to figure out what hypotheses are even worth taking seriously in the first place [LW · GW], keeping multiple working theories in mind [LW · GW], and ultimately converging to correct beliefs faster than science [LW · GW] ^[1] (because the social rules of traditional scientific institutions require far too much evidence than is needed to be individually convinced of the truth of a claim).

As a general matter, it seems the biggest and most common problem human beings face in trying to understand the world is not how to change their credence in a particular thesis when they face new evidence, but more so how to identify what broad frames and theories to even think about in the first place, i.e., what to update, instead of how.  Put differently, it is where to place to good use the limited amount of resources (time, attention, mental energy) we have to maximize the chance of stumbling upon something useful.

1. ^{^}

   One could make the case that this hasn't really happened in practice, but if so, it is probably because "the project of thinking more clearly has largely fallen by the wayside, and that we never did that great of a job at it anyways" [LW(p) · GW(p)].

There are Blockchains like Polkadot that require people to vote whether code changes get deployed. I'm not sure how that exactly works but looking at those crypto project might be valuable does for looking at existing uses and also to find potential users.

I like this idea, because I'm too lazy to review pull requests. It would be great if other people could just review and vote on them for me :P

This is a breathless article about something that's obvious to people who know the state of the art. (I've worked in geoinformational systems.) If you want a map that shows the shapes and sizes of continents without too much distortion, and don't mind having two circles, the Nicolosi globular projection is a thousand years old.

I don't know, something about this smacks of "prestigious people reinvent obvious thing that was previously dismissed out of hand because it didn't meet the criteria but if you're prestigious enough people might bend the criteria for you".

In particular I think the point was largely around having two dimensional projections. Using both sides is, in some sense, not really a 2D projection anymore since you have to interact with it by rotating it. And if you have to do that you're most of the way to just using a globe instead.

My guess was: you could have a different map, for different parts of the globe, ie a part that focus on Africa (and therefore has minimal distortions of Africa), and a separate part for America, and a separate part for Asia, and so on.

The biggest disadvantage of this that I could see is that it prevents you from seeing the entirety of the map at once. This is reflected in the article linked, ""Our map is actually more like the globe than other flat maps," Gott said. "To see all of the globe, you have to rotate it; to see all of our new map, you simply have to flip it over."".

Only if the punishment for non-punishing has no decay factor. With a decay factor, the punishments due for non-punishing decay with each step, and thus reach zero punishment at some point. I think most people imagine a pretty step decay factor, and might think that it drops to zero after the steps, maybe with an exponential curve so that only the first step is a substantial punishment. Like maybe 1st step is 40% of full, then 2nd is 15%, then 3rd is 3%?

I think if taken to the limit that it becomes "nobody is with me, not even me". After all, there are billions of people who you are not punishing and almost certainly will never punish for being non-punishers of non-punishers.

Looking at the sky suggests the Sun goes round the Earth.

Which causation?

If you are in the Apple ecosystem, I can recommend Day One. My oldest entry is nine years ago and I've been very happy with them.