I thought it was explicit in the announcement post that we should take this seriously, but in not the e-mail I got:
If LessWrong chose any launch code recipients they couldnāt trust, the EA Forum will go down, and vice versa. One of the sites going down means that people are blocked from accessing important resources: the destruction of significant real value. Whatās more, it will damage trust between the two sites (āI guess your most trusted users couldnāt be trusted to not take down our siteā) and also for each site itself (āI guess the admins couldnāt find a hundred people who could be trustedā).
For exact rules of the game, see the final section below.
Last year, it emerged that there was ambiguity about how serious the Petrov Day exercise was. Iāll be clear as I can via text: there is real value on the line here, and this is a real trust-building exercise that was not undertaken lightly by either LessWrong or the Forum. Both sites have chosen recipients who we hope will understand this.
FWIW, I made a joke comment on the EA Forum announcement post shortly after I got my code, and then deleted it (without a trace) a few minutes after, maybe after more carefully reading the announcement post. The joke was that Iād try to make the average predictions in this comment as wrong as possible (and I made it clear that I was only joking after an edit). I was indeed worried that it would hurt my reputation and the reputation of those in EA I associate with, and wanted to see what tone things would take first.
I thought it was explicit in the announcement post that we should take this seriously, but in not the e-mail I got:
FWIW, I made a joke comment on the EA Forum announcement post shortly after I got my code, and then deleted it (without a trace) a few minutes after, maybe after more carefully reading the announcement post. The joke was that Iād try to make the average predictions in this comment as wrong as possible (and I made it clear that I was only joking after an edit). I was indeed worried that it would hurt my reputation and the reputation of those in EA I associate with, and wanted to see what tone things would take first.