Thanks for writing this! I personally am a pretty big fan of the idea of this Petrov Day celebration, and have gotten joy from previous years, but mostly within the frame of the game or prompt for interesting discussions and explorations of norms. To me, this doesn’t feel like a community ritual, though it clearly does to some. Though I could imagine getting value and connection from an alternate version of this that did feel like a real ritual.
But I strongly agree that not asking people for consent/to opt-in is clearly bad here, and significantly under-cuts a lot of the possible value. In particular, I just do not think a community ritual works without asking people to buy in to it. And I feel pretty uncomfortable that people are entered into a game that may have real social consequences to them or give them opportunity to upset other people, without really having context on this—in particular, what happened at LessWrong last year seems terrible.
Thanks for writing this! I personally am a pretty big fan of the idea of this Petrov Day celebration, and have gotten joy from previous years, but mostly within the frame of the game or prompt for interesting discussions and explorations of norms. To me, this doesn’t feel like a community ritual, though it clearly does to some. Though I could imagine getting value and connection from an alternate version of this that did feel like a real ritual.
But I strongly agree that not asking people for consent/to opt-in is clearly bad here, and significantly under-cuts a lot of the possible value. In particular, I just do not think a community ritual works without asking people to buy in to it. And I feel pretty uncomfortable that people are entered into a game that may have real social consequences to them or give them opportunity to upset other people, without really having context on this—in particular, what happened at LessWrong last year seems terrible.
Yes, looking at the aftermath of last year is pretty grim. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K7jrkyKArvxJ224GD/on-destroying-the-world