First of all I'd like to thank the Forum team for their hard work producing this nuclear deterrent. We have been extremely lucky that LessWrong did not heed Bertrand Russell's advice during their period of nuclear monopoly. However, I am concerned that we have not yet tested these weapons, and hence we cannot be entirely sure they will function as intended. Perhaps a test strike against a lightly populated military target like the https://www.nytimes.com/ would make an effective demonstration?

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.

Thanks for this interesting exercise. Three things I want to say:

#1: For people unaware, pressing the red button means you cannot un-press it, though nothing bad will happen unless you enter a launch code. 

After I read this page carefully, I thought it was going to be fine and harmless/reversible for me to press the red button, since I had not received a launch code.  I have no intention of bringing the LessWrong site down, and don't plan on entering any launch code, whether random or someone else's, into the page.  I also thought pressing the button would be anonymous, but entering launch codes would not be.

I was just curious at what the user interface/experience would be if I press the button, but not enter anything into it. Anyway, apparently pressing the button means you cannot "un-press" the button. So if you're similarly as curious as me, here's what it looks like after pressing the button:

It was only after I read this LessWrong postmortem about Petrov Day 2020 that pressing the red button, even without entering anything into it, will likely be known as done by you by the Forum/LW team, but probably not announced publicly. So I'm posting this ahead saying me pressing the button was out of curiosity, not out of some bad intention. 

#2: I think the EA Forum/LW teams should not publicly name the people who enter random codes into either webpage.

In the same LW postmortem, I also found out that the name of someone entering random codes could be revealed. I think both the EA Forum and LW team should probably not do this. (I haven't entered a random code, but maybe someone else would, without knowing they'd possibly be publicly named.) 

You probably don't know whether the person entering random codes had read this post and understood the exercise before doing so. And they might feel some distress about being publicly named as having entered a random code.

#3: The EA Forum/LW teams should not read in too much about the number of people who press the red button without entering a correct launch code. 

I assume they probably won't read into it, but I thought it would still be worth saying.

As seen in another comment here (which I assume is not a joke), someone accidentally pressed the button. And there's probably others who didn't understand what the exercise was about, and were just tempted to click a big red button when they first landed on the Forum today. And then there's probably a few people like me who wanted to see what would happen if the button were pressed but no launch codes were entered.

Anyway, hopefully neither site gets taken down!

I'm coming to the conclusion that a private Petrov day game is good but a public one without community buy-in leads to a lot of tense disagreements as to what the game means. In some ways that's a nice analogy for the human condition, in other ways it feels like afterwards we should have some kind of group therapy.

I think I'm softly in favour but I'm glad this only happens once a year. Also I'm 1% worried this is going to end in reputational damage to the community.

I've included a series of forecasting questions, in case people excited about forecasting on global catastrophic risks want a fast-feedback way to test their data gathering or calibration. 

EdoArad @ 2021-09-26T06:59 (+14)

(Note that there is a relation between these questions - the sum of the last three probabilities is twice the first)

Peter Wildeford @ 2021-09-26T19:49 (+7)

People offering forecasting questions like this is really cool, but is there any way to resolve these questions later and give people track records? Or at that point are we just re-inventing Metaculus too much?

Probably a question for Aaron Gertler / the EA Dev team. Semi-relatedly, is there a way to tag Aaron? That might be another good feature.

Aaron Gertler @ 2021-09-28T04:54 (+4)

You can tag me with a quick DM for now — totally fine if you just literally send the URL of a comment and nothing else, if you want to optimize for speed/ease.

Tagging users to ping them is a much-discussed feature internally, with an uncertain future.

Chi @ 2021-09-26T21:24 (+4)

edit: Feature already exists, thanks Ruby!

Another feature request: Is it possible to make other people's predictions invisible by default and then reveal them if you'd like? (Similar to how blacked-out spoilers work, which you can hover over to see the text.)

I wanted to add a prediction but then noticed that I heavily anchored on the previous responses and didn't end up doing it.

Ruby @ 2021-09-26T21:32 (+9)

There's a user setting that lets you do this. 

Peter Wildeford @ 2021-09-26T21:38 (+3)

I agree this would be good to see!

MichaelStJules @ 2021-09-26T07:36 (+7)

I'm also interested in people's predictions had the codes been anonymous (not been personalized). In this case, individual reputational risk would be low, so it would mostly be a matter of community reputational risk, and we'd learn more about if EAs or LWers would stab each other in the back (well, inconvenience each other) if they could get away with it.

Linch @ 2021-09-26T07:39 (+2)

I mean, having a website shut down is also annoying. 

Tetraspace Grouping @ 2021-09-26T20:10 (+3)

As of this comment: 40%, 38%, 37%, 5%. I haven't taken into account time passing since the button appeared.

With 395 total codebearer-days, a launch has occurred once. This means that, with 200 codebearers this year, the Laplace prior for any launch happening is 40%  ($1-(1-\frac{1}{396}{)}^{200}$). The number of participants is about in between 2019 (125 codebearers) and 2020 (270 codebearers), so doing an average like this is probably fine.

I think there's a 5% chance that there's a launch but no MAD, because Peter Wildeford has publicly committed to MAD, says 5%, and he knows himself best.

I think the EA forum is a little bit, but not vastly, more likely to initiate a launch, because the EA Forum hasn't done Petrov day before and qualitatively people seem to be having a bit more fun and irreverance over here, so I'm giving 3% of the no-MAD probability to EA Forum staying up and 2% to Lesswrong staying up.

SiebeRozendal @ 2021-09-27T11:53 (+3)

Also, the reference class of launches doesn't fully represent the current situation: last launch was more of a self-destruct. This time, it's harming another website/community, which seems more prohibitive. So I think the prior is lower than 40%.

SiebeRozendal @ 2021-09-27T11:50 (+2)

There is a chance to remove MAD by removing Peter's launch codes' validity, per my request.

WilliamKiely @ 2021-09-26T15:02 (+2)

My forecasts just before the button appeared: 25%, 17%, 19%, 14%.

I just want to say, I'm having a really bad day, and this made me feel a little better about myself.

So I won't be launching the missiles, but er... I was also  offered codes on LessWrong, so launching still kinda seems like blowing up my own side.

So it looks like we survived? (Yay)

I think it would be good for CEA to provide a clear explanation, that it (not LW) stands behind as an organization, of exactly what real value it views as being on the line here, and why it thinks it was worthwhile to risk that value.

I have a code. How much should I charge in counterfactual donations to effective charities to push it? How much do we think it's worth to "win" this year's Petrov day game?

I thought this comment was apt: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KQnYogkFTKc9wpWjY/postmortem-to-petrov-day-2020?commentId=Ye23vB8amHhxHLTdz

I can't really tell if this is supposed to be a game or a sacred ritual.

Some of the LessWrong and Forum moderators are away at a conference, so we won't be publishing a retrospective right away, but we do expect to publish one eventually. Stay tuned!

An obvious question which I'm keen to hear people's thoughts on - does MAD work here? Specifically, does it make sense for the EA forum users with launch codes to commit to a retaliatory attack? The obvious case for it is deterrence. The obvious counterarguments are that the Forum could  go down for a reason other than a strike from LessWrong, and that once the Forum is down, it doesn't help us to take down LW (though this type of situation might be regular enough that future credibility makes it worth it)

Though of course it would be really bad for us to have to take down LW, and we really don't want to. And I imagine most of us trust the 100 LW users with codes not to use them :)

I briefly saw a "Missile Incoming" message with a 60:00 timer (that wasn't updating) on the buttons on the front pages of both LW and the EA Forum, at around 12pm EST, on mobile. Both messages were gone when I refreshed. Was this a bug or were they testing the functionality, testing us or preparing to test us?

Correction: The annual Petrov Day celebration in Boston has never used the button.

On the one hand, in order for MAD to work, decision-makers on both sides must be able to give credible threats for a retaliatory strike scenario. This is also true in this experiment’s case: if we assume that this will be iterated on future Petrov Days, then we must show that any tit-for-tat precommitments made are followed through.

But at the same time, if LessWrong takes down the EA Forum, it just seems like wanton destruction to similarly take it down, too. I know that, as a holder of the codes, I should ensure that I’m making a fully credible threat by precommitting to a retaliatory strike, but I want to take precommitments seriously and I don’t feel confident enough to precommit to such an action.

After giving this much thought, I decided to present the perhaps-too-weak claim that if the EA Forum goes down due to a LessWrong user pressing the button, I may press in retaliation. While this is not an idle threat, and I am serious about potentially performing a retaliatory strike, I am falling short of committing myself to that action in advance. I give more of my reasoning in my blog post on this.

(Ultimately, this is moot, since others are already willing to make such a precommitment so I don’t have to.)

oh crap! I accidentally pressed the button :O I'm super sorry

Attention EA Forum - I am a chosen user of LessWrong and I have the codes needed to destroy the EA Forum. 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 LessWrong is taken down, I will retaliate.

I can't parse the concept of 'precommitment'. I don't intend to launch a first strike, but maybe something will happen in the next few hours to change my intention, and I don't have any way to restructure my brain to reduce that possibility to 0. The reverse applies for second striking.