I agree that this is a correct application of security mindset; exposures like these can compound with, for example, someone's automatic search of the 100 most common ways to screw up secure random number generation such as by using the current time as a seed. Deep security is about reducing the amount of thinking you have to do and your exposure to wrong models and stuff you didn't think of.

Furthermore, It is also not inconceivable to me that an adversary might be able to use the hash itself without cracking it. For example, the sha256 hash of some information is commonly used to prove that someone has that information without revealing it, so an adversary, using the hash, could credibly lie that he already possesses a launch code and in a possible counterfactual world where no one found about the client side leaking the hash except this adversary, use this lie to acquire an actual code with some social engineering.

Like:

"Attention Lesswrong! With trickery I have acquired a launch code capable of destroying your site. As proof here is the sha256 hash of it: <hash>.

This is not a trick, I will leave plenty of time for you to check with your EA buddies that the hash is valid before you need to meet my demands.

I demand a launch code capable of destroying the EA forum sent to me until <time> or I will nuke this site and to this I precommitted. I won't reveal what I plan to do with the launch code you will send to me, but by basic game theory your interest is in sending it to me as your site's destruction is not certain that way.

I can't prove it to you, but irl I precommitted to nuking the site if my demands are not met and also that I won't send any more messages to prevent useless debating.

I hope you will make the correct choice!"

I sort of disagree. Not necessarily that it was the wrong choice to invest your security resources elsewhere--I think your threat model is approximately correct--but I disagree that it's wrong to invest in that part of your stack.

I do not know what the difference here is. Presumably one implies the other?

Yep, this seems right to me. In this case, the set of attackers is also quite narrow, since the codes are only relevant for 24 hours, and then only in a somewhat bounded way that's easy to revert.

A thousand times this! I haven't seen anyone pointing out what's wrong with this ritual more clearly. Exactly, we turn the celebration of individual courage into a celebration of unity/conformity, what an irony.

Just be aware that other users have already noticed messages which could be deliberate false alarms: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EW8yZYcu3Kff2qShS/petrov-day-2021-mutually-assured-destruction?commentId=JbsutYRotfPDLNskK [LW(p) · GW(p)]

I don't think you'll be able to retaliate if the site is down.

I agree that "emotional blackmail" is inaccurate, but this exercise is pulling reader's emotional strings in a bad way. The label was wrong but the overall criticism has merits. Would relabeling it into "gratuitous drama" be a good steelmaning?

The obvious thing is to ask people to consent before entering the game? It's weird to get an email, out of the blue, with launch codes, telling you that you are now part of this game. While an email that spells out some of the explicit norms, and asks people to opt-in, seems great.

A light-touch intervention could just be giving people a link to click to get the launch codes, that shows some text spelling out norms like this, and ask people to only click the link if they actually want to participate.

EDIT: To be clear, I am participating in this, and would have opted-in - I just think it's a really bad norm to not ask for consent first, when we're putting people in a situation with real risks and social consequences, and with wildly differing perceptions of the depth of meaning in this event.

I don't know if this would defeat part of the purpose, but what about making it opt-in over a long time period, e.g. giving people all year to put themselves on the list of people who might be chosen to receive codes? 

Other than that, I think it's mostly a question of (to the extent possible without undermining what you're trying to do) making it pretty clear to the recipients that people take this seriously and would genuinely like them to refrain from using the codes. As far as I can tell, that has already improved from last year. (It seems like there might have been some tonal ambiguity last year, with phrasing intended to be heightened but mostly serious coming across to some readers as playful and mostly joking.)

I am pretty interested in ideas from people on how to reduce the bad parts of the social ritual.

One way to make it seem more serious (to me) would be to make the effects bigger. E.g. taking down the frontpage (or the whole site?) for a whole week rather than just a day.

Thank you for clarifying. I think your stance is a reasonable one, and (although I maintain that your initial comment was a poor vehicle for conveying them) I am largely sympathetic to your frustrations. Knowing that your initial comment came from a place of frustration also helps to recontextualize it, which in turn helps to look past some of the rougher wording.

Having said that: while I can't claim to speak for the mods or the admins of LW, or what they want to accomplish with the site and larger community surrounding it, I think that I personally would like to offer some further pushback. In particular, I think that there is a tension between what you term "making the vibes a little less weird", and something that I might term "being able to visibly, publicly care about things most people haven't thought about".

There is an argument, perhaps, to be had about whether the Petrov Day game is something "worth" caring about, even for a group of people with a history of caring about strange things. As I wrote in a separate comment response [LW(p) · GW(p)], I don't necessarily have a strong opinion about this. I am less involved in the "rationalist community" than many members of this site; I have not attended any LW meetups in person, have not interfaced IRL with any outstanding members of the rationalist community, and am not particularly involved in the inner circles of either the rationalist or the EA community. (Needless to say, I do not possess the launch codes for either site.)

So as far as the "community" is concerned, and the ability of its members to coordinate with themselves, I am less directly impacted than many here. Insofar as I would like the community to be able to coordinate with itself better, it is purely in the abstract—because I believe that coordination is an important resource, and communities with more of it do better in the long run. Insofar as I believe that coordination is an important resource, it's unclear to me whether the Petrov Day game is actually useful in enhancing coordination; that would depend on many specifics, some of which I am not privy to.

However, what is clear enough to me is that there are a substantial fraction of LWers who do take the game seriously, or at least seriously enough to post comments like these:

Attention LessWrong - I am a chosen user of EA Forum and I have the codes needed to destroy LessWrong. I hereby make a no first use pledge and I will not enter my codes for any reason, even if asked to do so. I also hereby pledge to second strike - if the EA Forum is taken down, I will retaliate. [...]

Regarding your second strike pledge: it would of course be wildly disingenuous to remember Petrov's action, which was not jumping to retaliation, by doing the opposite and jumping to retaliation. I believe you know this, and would guess that if in fact one of the sites went down, you'd do nothing but instead later post about your moral choice of not retaliating. [...]

I had one of the EA Forum's launch codes, but I decided to permanently delete it as an arms-reduction measure. I no longer have access to my launch code, though I admit that I cannot convincingly demonstrate this.

Independently of whether I personally put any stock in this game, I strongly approve of the ability of users to do things like this—to act in ways that treat this game with far more seriousness than the objective consequences it has, to speak and behave the same way they would if the game actually had far more serious consequences—and, moreover, to be able to do so without being concerned about any "weird vibes" they may or may not be putting out in the process.

Caring about things is hard. Caring about things publicly, in a space where you can be judged for it, is more than hard: it's uncool. There is, by default, an omnipresent pressure in social spaces to conform; and since caring is uncool, people who acquiesce to such pressures will often end up caring less.

I think this is VERY BAD. As such I am EXTREMELY STRONGLY OPPOSED to any attempts to increase this pressure in spaces that are lucky enough to have (relatively) little of it to begin with; especially attempts that use rude and inflammatory language as a social hammer to increase their force. In other words, I am extremely wary of the (often invisible) incentives behind sentences like this,

These present core LWers risk severely underestimating how off-putting this stuff is. How many people would be interested in participating in this community, constructively, if the vibes were a little less weird. [...]

I have to abandon my identification as an LW rat, because I just don't want to be associated with it anymore.

and downright allergic to the blatantly visible incentives behind sentences like this:

Calling a website going down for a bit "destruction of real value" is technically true, but connotationally just so over the top. A website going down is just not that big a deal. I'm sorry, but it's not. Go outside or something. It will make you feel good, I promise.

Sentences like these pressure those who read them to reshape themselves to be less unusual, and insofar as "usual" is net-negative, that corresponding pressure is also net-negative. I would like to decrease the magnitude of said pressure, and as such I will continue to push back if and when I see it.

my willingness to identify as a LWer that was burnt [...] HPMOR and the sequences were pretty profound influences on my development [...] frustrated at feeling like I have to abandon my identifaction as an LW rat

I've struggled a lot with this, too. The thing I keep trying to remember is that identification with the social group "shouldn't matter": you can still cherish the knowledge you gained from the group's core texts, without having to be loyal to the group as a collective (as contrasted to your loyalty to individual friends).

I don't think I've been very successful; multiple years after my alienation from "the community", I'm still hanging around leaving bitter comments about how terrible they/we are. It's very dysfunctional! Why can't I just write it off as a loss and move on?

I guess the main difficulty is that, for humans, knowledge actually isn't easily separable from a community of other people with shared vocabulary [LW · GW]. I can't just ignore what the central rat social hierarchy is doing, because the central hierarchy nodes exert a lot of control over everyone in the world who I can really talk to.

What's the value you get from it, and how does this once-a-year event affect the value you get from LW?

What? No, it can't be applied equally.

On a purely factual level: note that what I wrote was that the description as written could be applied equally to such things as "keeping promises". Once more, the quoted description:

Then getting upset at other people when they don't a take strange ritual as seriously as you do? As you've decided to, seemingly arbitrarily? When you've deliberately given them the means to upset you? It's tantamount to emotional blackmail. It's just obnoxious and strange behaviour.

This description indeed does nothing to distinguish between different norms like "keeping promises" or "taking the Petrov Day game seriously" (or, in fact, other, stupider norms such as "giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day"). Every norm involves expecting people to choose to do something they are not [counterfactually] constrained to do, meaning every norm involves "giving someone else the means to upset you". Every norm carries with it the expectation that people will comply with it without explicit enforcement, meaning every norm is a "ritual that needs to be taken seriously". And every norm starts out being "seemingly arbitrary", until and unless it is adopted more generally, at which point it becomes "the way things are".

In other words, the OP's description is a list of conditions that always returns true, regardless of input. And as an argument that does not produce differing outputs given different inputs provides no discriminatory power [LW · GW], such an argument should be highlighted as bad regardless of whether you happen to agree or disagree with its target in any particular case.

(This much you know, because this much you have argued yourself elsewhere [LW(p) · GW(p)]. If we are to speak of "disappointment", then I am indeed dismayed and disappointed that you in particular appear to be applying significantly less of a critical eye to comments with which you happen to share a premise, given what you've written in the past.)

Regarding the (separate and additional) argument that the Petrov Day game, and the norms surrounding it, are perhaps ill-thought-out: I don't necessarily have a strong opinion on that argument. It is plausible to me that the mods did not properly communicate the level of seriousness they expected participants to attach to the game, the last time it was played; but conversely, if their initial communications caused participants to systematically underestimate the seriousness of the game, then it is also plausible to me their response to the outcome (the website getting taken down) was a reasonable way to correct that misestimation.

There are also separate arguments to be had about whether the game ought to be treated so seriously, about its potential reputational effects and whether they are worth it, etc. etc. I am open to hearing any of those arguments. What I am not open to is the suggestion that the OP's initial description was anything but what it was: a list of conditions that apply equally to any norm, regardless of what it is, and hence an invalid line of argumentation.