This was a really great Petrov day thing-to-do. I clicked on the link basically instinctively, after having a panic about being under time pressure, and about having my preferred outcome not taken, and therefore not being able to think so well about what my actions would actually do. Immediately after clicking, I felt very good, and like I had made the right decision, and then I felt a sinking sensation in my gut as I realized that if I had not taken any action, and nobody else had taken any action, then in a year I'd get to see what LessWrong as a collective decided, and I realized that actually I really wanted to see the result of that Petrov day, even if it meant Petrov day wouldn't be about preventing the end of the world.

For the rest of that day, and into today, I could not be in the world where LessWrong both collectively voted on what they wanted, and collectively refused to overrule the majority. It felt like I had ruined Petrov day. Even if others had still clicked the link in my stead, I still didn't want to have been among the people who ruined Petrov day, and it would feel even worse if I was the first, which I place nontrivial probability on (according to Firefox's history, and my LessWrong message history, I received the message at 6:49 PM, and closed the tab the link opened at 6:51 PM, so it does indeed seem like I was the first one to click the link).

I've been feeling really terrible about this since doing it, imagining how sad people will feel when they see that someone has clicked this year's instantiation of the button.

While feeling bad about it, I could also feel my mind trying to come up with excuses for why it isn't so bad. The following are interesting rationalizations I've come up with:

1. Unilateralism to save the world is in the Petrov day spirit. Petrov was in fact a unilateralist, and he decided contrary to his legitimate government that he would overrule his country, and refuse to report incoming missiles.
2. The LessWrong team are the ones ultimately in charge of LessWrong. They set up a democratic process with a unilateralist element. Their word on their justifications should be taken as literal, if they believe allowing for the option to overrule the majority will better the kind of aggregation of will they're aiming for to decide next year's virtue, then I should use the special power they gave me in the way they described they wanted me to use it.

But both fell when I just imagined the world I created, and felt sad because I wouldn't see the Petrov day decided by the communal process that I liked better than my own personal decisions.

My mind went through other processes, among them being my mind attempting to blame the LessWrong team for giving me this choice (to be clear: I do not blame them, and actually thank them), wanting to swear off my own ability to make unilateralist decisions on anything forever & always getting a second opinion on anything I could do that significantly affects anyone's life (seems overkill, but lesson learned about the kind of situations my mind is bad at thinking under!), trying to blame things on the fact that this year's button was not a button but a poorly labeled link (true buttons are not universally labeled as such, and I did have the hint that it was Petrov day, which future people won't. Also the link wasn't so poorly labeled), and blaming my own terrible reading comprehension (situationally induced panic that I should have seen ahead of time for some reason is a less self-serving label to put on the situation than generally being bad at reading comprehension in all situations).

Probably this was the most emotional experience I've felt around LessWrong's Petrov day, and I learned a lot about a particular state my mind can get into for which I should not make actions, and about how the world may likely end. Perhaps in a similar circumstance one day, where three different people across the world have the option to click their own links and buttons, but not enough space or time to make their minds actually think about the actual worlds they're making possible or impossible. Or maybe two of them can actually think, but the third has the kind of mind that panics in that particular way when under that particular pressure who then clicks their button, and maybe lives long enough to regret their decision once they get to think about it.

Some of the experience does get taken away knowing my group was not in fact the minority, and there was no absolute plans to change next year's Petrov day plans.

This all sounds bad, but I really did love the experience. And you don't need to worry that you distracted me from work I could have otherwise done! I worked double-time in order to try to distract myself from the issue!

I picked "resisting social pressure" and then when I got the second message, I thought "Aha, I was asked if I value resisting social pressure, and now I'm offered the chance of applying social pressure to make things go my way, to see if I will defect against the very virtue I claimed to be in favor of! I'm guessing that there's a different message tailored for each of the virtues, where everyone is offered some action that is actually the opposite of the virtue they claimed to endorse, to see how many people are consistent. Clever! Can't wait to see what the opposite choice for the other virtues is."

Now I'm slightly disappointed that this wasn't the case.

I saw the poll, found it really yucky, and thus didn't answer it. I like LW for mostly staying on low simulacrum levels [? · GW], and this poll felt like anything but. In more detail:

"Today is Petrov Day! A day celebrating that the world didn’t end, and the virtues that helped it not end. There’s been a lot of discussion." [...]

Virtue A – Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance that civilization is destroyed [...]

Virtue D – Resisting social pressure

1. So the poll begins with an explanation of Petrov Day, and then leads with that as the first answer. This felt like one of those television thingies where they aren't allowed to just enter you into a giveaway, and instead make you answer a question like "The president of the US is X. Who is the president of the US?", so that it's considered a game of skill, rather than pure chance. This kind of yucky Dark Arts [? · GW] style of leading questions is common, but I expect much more from LW.
   1. Another leading / biasing aspect: Virtue A is by far the longest answer, and on my screen is the only one that covers two lines rather than one.
2. Anyway, having decided that I don't like the poll, there's no option for me to pick. Since the poll is so transparently biased towards making people pick Virtue A, even if I would've answered that in other circumstances, that's not an option now. And choosing Virtue D is not "resisting social pressure", it's conforming to the social pressure of answering a flawed poll. Where was my option for "I'm cranky and this poll is stupid"?
3. Or if not that, then where was the option for "I saw the poll but don't want to answer it?". Twitter polls often have that, so that people don't just pick an option at random to see the results.
4. Due to the lack of such a "mu" option, conscientious objection to the event didn't work well this time, in contrast to some previous Petrov Day celebrations, where "do nothing" was a legitimate option.
   1. There's something ironic about the poll rewarding answers of the form "avoiding actions", while actually punishing the avoidance of action.

Anyway, overall, I really didn't like this.

I didn’t participate in the poll because it didn’t make much sense, the options didn’t seem to cover the possibilities or really contain what I’d pick if asked in free-response form, and the whole thing seemed rather slapdash. Clicking any of the options wouldn’t’ve reliably communicated anything about my beliefs.

(Also, there was a spelling error in the poll option URLs, which said “petroy” instead of “petrov”. This further undermined any confidence I may have had in the poll meaning anything.)

I think answering "how should you behave when you're sharing resources with people with different values?" is one of the projects of contractarian ethics, which is why I'm a fan.

A known problem in contractarian ethics is how people with more altruistic preferences can get screwed over by egalitarian procedures that give everyone's preferences equal weight (like simple majority votes). For example, imagine the options in the poll were "A: give one ice cream to everyone" and "B: give two ice creams, only to the people whose names begin with consonants". If Selfish Sally is in the minority, she'll probably defect because she wants ice cream. When Altruistic Ally is in the minority, she reasons that more total utility is created by option B - since consonant names are in the majority, and they get twice as much ice cream - so she won't defect and she'll miss out on ice cream. Maybe she's even totally fine with this outcome, because she has tuistic preferences (she prefers other people to be happy, not as a way of negotiating with them, simply as an end-in-itself) satisfied by giving Sally ice cream. But maybe this implies that, iterated over many such games, nice altruistic kind people will systematically be given less ice cream than selfish mean people! That might not be a characteristic that we want our moral system to have; we might even want to reward people for being nice.

So we could tell Ally to disregard her tuistic preference (her preference for Sally to receive ice cream as an end-in-itself) and vote like a Homo economicus, since that's what Sally will do and we want a fair outcome for Ally. But maybe then, iterated over many games, Ally won't be happy with the actual outcomes involved - because we're asking her to disregard genuine altruistic preferences that she actually has, and she might be unhappy if someone else gets screwed over by that.

In this game you have an additional layer of complexity, since some people might have made their initial vote by asking, "What value do I think has the most universal benefit for everyone?" and others might have made the vote by asking, "What's my personal favourite value?" - Those people are then facing very different moral decisions when asked, "Do you want to force your value on everyone else?"

If people who made their initial decision by considering the best value for everyone are also less likely to choose to force their value on everyone, while people who made their initial decision selfishly are also more likely to choose to force it on others, then we'd have an interesting problem. Luckily it looks similar to this existing known problem; unluckily, I don't think the contractarians have a great solution for us yet.

First, I clicked the link in the second poll^[1]. My thought process looked as follows:

• I quickly skimmed the content of the message
• My split-second-judgement registered that there is a RACE
• Moreover, the race is on very small time scales: every second of indecision might cost me victory!
• Moreover, split-second-judgment estimates that winning the race is good-in-expectation (where "expectation" should be thought of as including the "logical uncertainty" resulting from having to rely on split-second-judgement).
• Therefore, click NOW before it's too late!

Worse, even after clicking and reading the text again, I misunderstood its content. Somehow, I thought that this year's celebration will be determined by the plurality, whereas next year's will be determined by the fastest minority. This system is strange, but is not obviously defect-y, i.e. not obviously inferior to e.g. using plurality twice in a row, from behind the veil-of-ignorance.

Only after reading the OP and starting composing this comment in my mind, did I understand the actual meaning of the text in the second poll: that only the next year's celebration is decided upon, and only according to a minority (if anyone in a minority clicks). Now, this is more or less clearly defect-y and in hindsight I don't endorse clicking it.

What is my take-away lesson? The process I used to make the decision seems correct to me: if you have to make a split-second decision, then you need to use your split-second judgement because there is nothing else to go by. There might be some case for a bias towards inaction, but it's not an overwhelming case. Personally, I know that I'm usually too slow to respond in emergency scenarios, so I don't want to train myself to prefer inaction.

The right way to optimize this is to train your split-second judgement to do well in the sort of situations in which split-second judgement is likely to be required. The sort of reasoning required of us here is not likely to be tied to a split-second decision anywhere outside of Petrov Day games^[2], so I think my split-second judgement did as well as expected and there's nothing to correct.

[EDIT: Actually, there is a correction to be made here, and it refers to my wrong reading of the message after clicking the link. The lesson is: if I make a split-second decision, I need to carefully reexamine it after the fact, in order to understand its true consequences, and beware of anchoring on my split-second reasoning: this anchoring is probably motivated by wanting to justify myself later.]

Second, I think that going with the majority in this case is not honoring your word. You explicitly said "the first to do so out of any minority group". If you break your word and go with the majority, I won't completely lose my trust in you: but that's mostly because this is a game. In a situation with more serious stakes, I expect you to take the precise meaning of your promises way more seriously, and I would be extremely disappointed if you don't.

Third, I think this was a cool way to celebrate Petrov's Day (modulo the issue with breaking your word, which is really bad and must not be repeated). Kudos!

1. ^{^}

   My choice in the first poll was "accurately reporting your epistemic state".

2. ^{^}

   The actual Petrov had more time to make his decision, and also if I got Petrov's job I would train my fast-judgement on Petrov-like situations in advance.

I'm the one who picked the particular virtues we displayed, and it seemed good to explain a bit more about where I was coming from. We've had a lot of interesting discussion each year about the True Meaning of Petrov Day. 

Eliezer's original post on Petrov Day [LW · GW] begins:

Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983.  

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.

The theme of "Reflect on the fact that the world could have been destroyed, and be the sort of people who don't destroy the world" was a central element most Petrov Day celebrations for years going forward. In 2019, when the LW team first built The Button experiment for LessWrong [LW · GW] (where some users could press a button that took down the LessWrong frontpage for a day), we leaned heavily into this framing.

But throughout the years, some people have objected to this being the primary (or at least only) framing of the event. We've had a lot of interesting discussion each year about the True Meaning of Petrov Day. 

Some people argued that it's actually kind of confused to celebrate Petrov for the sake of "not taking dangerous unilateral actions", when in fact it's quite important that Petrov did act unilaterally in some sense – he violated the rules he had agreed to in favor of his own judgment. He was non-unilateralist with respect to the World At Large, but quite unilateralist with respect to his role in the Soviet military.

Some people argued that one of the most important aspects of Petrov is that he resisted social pressure, and did what he thought was right. In this frame, there was something ironic about everyone dutifully not-clicking-a-button as part of a tradition, especially if they were doing so mostly/entirely because they expected to be socially shamed if they clicked it.

Some people argued about whether it made sense to think of the thing more as a sacred ritual or as a fun game. Some people countered with "Look man, it doesn't matter whether it's a ritual or a game. The important thing is to notice that your action is going to destroy a bunch of value for no reason, and decide not to do that, regardless of what social role you think you're supposed to be playing."

In the last couple years, I've personally come to believe that the skill of orienting is quite important – noticing when you're in a new situation (or a different situation that you thought you were in), and you need to reprocess your background information in light of that information. Decide what your actual goals are, and then figure out what to do in light of those goals. This feels like one of the important things that Petrov did to me.

Finally, just last week, Jimrandomh pointed out to me that one of the noteworthy things about Petrov is that, while he didn't relay-the-information according to what the machine said and what the rules dictated... he also was accurately representing his epistemic state to his superiors. Petrov had helped build the missile-detection-system, and he had an idea of what it's limitations were. The indicator was weird (I haven't looked up the details right now, but my recollection is that it was showing only a small number of incoming missiles, which wasn't what you'd actually expect if the US was attacking). 

We don't know what would have happened if it had looked to Petrov like a full scale attack was inbound. But in our current timeline, when he reported "false alarm", it's noteworthy that that was his actual epistemic state.

...

I'm sure there are many more frames to look at Petrov Day through. The Petrov Incident was not a movie, written with a theme in mind to communicate a particular message. It was a real thing, with lots of messy details. We can choose how to look at it and think about it, and take what lessons we want.

I was interested, this year, in leaning somewhat into the fact that Petrov actually had to decide what was right. I wanted LessWrong's Petrov Day commemoration to present users with something more ambiguous that they had to reason about themselves.

(Also, separately, the Lightcone team was very busy last week and we scrambled to put Petrov Day together at the last minute. I'm fairly happy with what we came up with at the last minute but, like, don't wanna oversell it as particularly well thought out)

A couple people have said "man none of these virtues carve up virtue-space the way I care about." I've heard "'not taking actions that might destroy the world' isn't a virtue even though it's the most imprtant thing", and "the most important virtue was 'having agency in the face of systemic pressure to follow orders'", which the person conceptualized as sort of a mix of the "Orient quickly" and "Resist Social Pressure" virtue. (or rather, I said "well, I think I basically split that into these two other virtues, so, uh, you gotta pick one?", which they did grudgingly).

Reasoning through the consequences of removing all virtues but the chosen one, an inability to avoid actions that lead to noticeable increase that civilization was destroyed tended to outweigh the others in expected negatives, so I picked that. It's also traditional, and is the one that makes any sense for the day to be about, though that wasn't what I was asked. I also thought through how the poll link might be a red button in some way but didn't see it.

I was quite puzzled by the second message that my choice to maintain the traditional and expected value for the site was in the minority. That did not fit with my model of basically any subset of the LessWrong community. My past experience with Petrov Day celebrations is that rash action tends not to be the thing anyone wants you to do, so I read the message trying to figure out what rash action I was being poked to do, noted the 'unilateralism' parameter, wondered if I was in fact 'supposed to' take unilateral action to not destroy civilization, figured that if that was the case someone else would do it here but it probably meant it was bad, and left it alone. And at some point probably processed that there weren't particular negative stakes to not choosing a value, and continued leaving it alone.

This one made sense to be a red button in disguise, partly because I had a strong probability the message was false, partly because it was strange, and partly because it's a day I expect a red button. So I avoided it.

I voted for correctly reporting your epistemic state. I claim that this is the actual virtue Petrov displayed, and that his primary virtue being "don't take actions which destroy the world" because he decided to buck the chain of command is a mistaken belief. From the Wikipedia article:

Petrov later indicated that the influences on his decision included that he had been told a US strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start;^[3] that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly;^[15] and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay.^[16] However, in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian training helped him make the right decision. He said that his colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile launch if they had been on his shift.^[4]

More specifically I claim two things:

1. Stanislav Petrov actually believed that it was a false alarm.
2. Had he not believed it was a false alarm, he would have reported an attack.

Yes, we told everyone they were in the minority. It's a "game".

I think this is bad. I mean, it's not that big a deal, but I generally speaking expect messages I receive from The LessWrong Team to not tell falsehoods.

Hmm.

I don't think Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance civilization is destroyed is necessarily the most practically-relevant virtue, for most people, but it does seem to me like it's the point of Petrov day in particular. If we're recognizing Petrov as a person, I'd say that was Petrov's key virtue.

Or maybe I'd say something like "not doing very harmful acts despite incentives to do so"—I think "resisting social pressure" isn't quite on the mark, but I think it is important to Petrov day that there were strong incentives against what Petrov did.

I think other virtues are worth celebrating, but I think I'd want to recognize them on different holidays.

I clicked the link in the second email quite quickly--i assumed it was a game/joke, and wanted to see what would happen. If I'd actually thought I was overriding people's preferences, I... probably would have still clicked because I don't think I place enormous value on people's preferences for holiday reasons, and I would have enjoyed being the person who determined it.

There are definitely many circumstances where I wouldn't unilaterally override a majority. I should probably try to figure out what the principles behind those are.

In the first poll I voted "Accurately reporting your epistemic state" because I feel like it is systemically important and sort of a foundation on which other things like not destroying the world can be built (e.g. avoiding actions that noticeably may lead to the destruction of the world is more effective if you are better at sharing information relevant to which actions do or do not destroy the world). However if I had known that it was a poll about the next Petrov day celebration, I would have voted "Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance that civilization is destroyed" because I feel like that's the point of Petrov day.

clicked first relative to receiving are the same person! And also that person is from the majority group

A majority member being the initial clicker also isn't terribly surprising because a group being larger means one-or-more of any given sort of person -- in this case, a quick-responder-type -- is likelier to crop up among them.

I would be curious to see what the poll results for Question 1 look like, say, a week from now. I only saw the message in my inbox after Petrov day was over, and still responded.

Ah, for the purposes of responding to the PMs (and writing my explanatory comment) I accepted the truth of the setup mostly without question, but it makes more sense in hindsight that the "Avoiding actions..." virtue was actually a strong majority vote.

About what to do about next Petrov Day, I mostly agree with Vanessa's reasoning, but I don't think it matters too much either way and don't really think it's about "honoring your word".

Once the truth of the setup is violated, it's mostly just about whether you want to do the thing that predictably would have been the result had the setup been honest.

If you had built in a special case to not send a second message to the majority-choosers at all, the result would have been that "Accurately reporting your epistemic state." would be the winner.

If you had instead built in a special case where the majority-choosers get a slightly-modified second message ("currently in the minority" -> "currently in the majority"), and "any minority group" were edited to "any group" in everyone's second message, the result predictably would have been that "Avoiding actions..." wins.

I don't know which of these modifications, if any, you would have actually built if you had more time to think / implement, but I don't see any reason why you should feel particularly bound to do something a year from now by either of these counterfactuals about a 1-day game.

I selected "Quickly orienting to novel situations" (QOTNoS) because it's strictly superior to the alternatives:

• If you have the QOTNoS virtue, you can deal with the novel situation of AI destroying civilization
• The necessity of "accurately reporting your epistemic state" is a novel situation for most people. QOTNoS helps again.
• "Resisting social pressure" is a common situation. But if the survival of civilization depends on it (as the poll implies), this is a novel situation. Thus, QOTNoS will help with it.

In essence, QOTNoS (as in being able to make the right decisions in novel situations) is a synonym for general intelligence, and thus is the strongest power. 

Okay, I'm one of the unilateralists and I totally haven't thought about poll as "value" choice. I've perceived poll as if it was: "Which ability is the most important to prevent destruction of the world? 1. INT 2. WIS 3. CHA 4. LUK", and question "which virtue has the most impact on chance of world not being destroyed" is a factual question, not value question. If I thought about poll more seriously, I would consider "I'm in minority on factual question on site with smarter than me people, maybe I'm wrong", but I was pretty confident and mostly took it as fun activity, not Very Serious thing.

Also, it can be the matter of language differences: English is not my native, maybe we have different connotations around word "virtue".

To me, the initial poll options make no sense without each other. For example, "avoid danger" and "communicate beliefs" don't make sense without each other [in context of society].

If people can't communicate (report epistemic state), "avoid danger" may not help or be based on 100% biased opinions on what's dangerous.

• If some people solve Alignment, but don't communicate, humanity may perish due to not building a safe AGI.
• If nobody solves Alignment, but nobody communicates about Alignment, humanity may perish because careless actors build an unsafe AGI without even knowing they do something dangerous.

I like communication, so I chose the second option. Even though "communicating without avoiding danger" doesn't make sense either.

Since the poll options didn't make much sense to me, I didn't see myself as "facing alien values" or "fighting off babyeaters". I didn't press the link, because I thought it may "blow up" the site (similar to the previous Petrov's Day) + I wasn't sure it's OK to click, I didn't think my unilateralism would be analogous to Petrov's unilateralism (did Petrov cure anyone's values, by the way?). I decided it's more Petrov-like to not click.

But is AGI (or anything else) related to the lessons of Petrov's Day? That's another can of worms. I think we should update the lessons of the past to fit the future situations. I think it doesn't make much sense to take away from Petrov's Day only lessons about "how to deal with launching nukes".

Another consideration: Petrov did accurately report his epistemic state. Or would have, if it were needed (if it were needed, he would lie to accurately report his epistemic state - "there are no launches"). Or "he accurately non-reported the non-presence of nuclear missiles".

I never registered that I was being asked to make a decision on behalf of the whole site. I might have considered that interpretation of your second question for a fraction of a second, but then dismissed it as extremely unlikely to be your actual intent.

I spent probably less than 3 seconds on the second question (message). To get me to spend more time than that, your first 25 words or so would have needed to include some sign that something significant was at stake in my response. "I'm prepared to send you 5 dollars," would have done it. So would signs that you sent the message only to me (or only to me and 4 other people) rather than to everyone on the site. (I was able to deduce the latter somehow.)

I didn't list in the main post or say until because I fear that I'm saying it defensively in response to criticism, but to model the design for this year requires knowing that we spent vastly less time on it, deciding to something at the last minute. (We'd been very busy with a massive conference in days before Petrov Day.

At 11am (US West Coast time) we started thinking there was something we could maybe do, and at 12pm we got started. I felt we needed to rush if we were to include European folks at all, so really was looking for something we could get done quickly. As the post mentions, we didn't spend much time on the poll options or trying to design it well, we just wanted something out so half the people wouldn't be completely excluded.

The second message idea wasn't even chosen until about half an hour before I sent it. We basically sent the first message and then worked on figuring out how to build on it, and then "next year's will be decided based on this" was an 11th hour insight. It gives it some stakes without being overwhelming stakes.

Could we have done something better with more time and effort? For sure. But I think this was better than letting Petrov Day pass without any kind of commemoration.

Registering my predictions for which groups clicked the second link most:

Percentagewise, I don't Groups A and C clicked on it that much (though I'd be surprised if the number from each group isn't non-zero), since they picked a choice that indicates that they care about making high-quality decisions and cooperating with the rest of the world. A higher proportion of C probably clicked than A, since a person might decide it's worth it even if they take their time to think it through (I'd disagree, but the commentor you quote fits into that category).

I'd then say the "accurately reporting your epistemic beliefs" group probably clicked on it the most because I don't model ⌞the kind of person who'd say that is the important trait of Petrov day⌝ as being a particularly ethical person

This is not responding to the interesting part of the post, but I did not vote in the poll because I felt like virtue A was a mangled form of the thing I care about for Petrov Day, and non-voting was the closest I could come to fouling my ballot in protest.

To me Petrov Day is about having a button labeled "destroy world" and choosing not to press it. Virtue A as described in the poll is about having a button labeled "maybe destroy world, I dunno, are you feeling lucky?" and choosing not to press it. This is a different definition which seems to have been engineered so that a holiday about avoiding certain doom can be made compatible with avoiding speculative doom due to, for instance, AI.

I would prefer that Petrov Day gets to be about Petrov, and "please Sam Altman, don't risk turning the world into paperclips" gets a different day if there is demand for such a thing.

Was everyone supposed to receive the second message? I only got the poll and not the second message with the unilateralist link.

I modestly propose that eating babies is more likely to have good outcomes, including with regard to the likelihood of apocalypse, compared to the literal stated goal of avoiding the apocalypse.

A Review of Petrov Day 2023, according to the four virtues. First a check on the Manifold predictions for the day:

• Will LessWrong Petrov Day 2023 be about blowing up home page(s)? - resolved NO, was 70%
• Will Less Wrong's big red button be used on Petrov Day 2023? - resolved NO, was 50%.

Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance that civilization is destroyed

LessWrong avoided creating a big red button that represents destroying civilization. This is symbolic of Virtue A actions like "don't create nuclear weapons" and "don't create a superintelligence" and "don't create the torment nexus". Given that LessWrong has failed on this virtue in past Petrov Days, I am glad to see this. Manifold had a 70% conditional chance that if the button was created then it would be used.

Rating: 10/10.

Accurately reporting your epistemic state

The following sentences in the second poll appear to be false:

• After some discussion, the LessWrong team has decided... (false, still not decided today)
• Your selected response is currently in the minority (false for 58% of recipients)
• If you click the below link and are the first to do so of any minority group, we will make your selected virtue be the focus of next year's commemoration. (not known to be true at the time it was sent, still not decided)

This is symbolic of actions lacking Virtue B like data fraud, social engineering and lazy bullshit. I don't think much of the excuses given.

Rating: 0/10

Other virtues

• Quickly orienting to novel situations. This was not a novel situation, it happens every year on the same day. Not applicable.
• Resisting social pressure. Judging from the comments, there was little social pressure to have a big red button. There was social pressure to do something and something was done. Overall, unclear, no rating.

Predictions

This was fun thank you!

There must be a hiccup in the data because you show < 30 total group b pickers in the first chart, but say there are 40 group b pickers in the "unilaterally make your virtue the focus" chart.

Rule 1: Don't destroy the world