Epistemic status: I’m still pretty confused about this whole thing, and wasn’t involved in ideation. (Though I helped when asked by choosing whom to email, editing the LW email , and making a post.)
A few good people who were genuinely concerned about me mentioned to me privately that if I don’t take the Red Button exercise, there could be social consequences, or it might even lead to me missing out on job opportunities in the EA Community.
I’ll second Ruby in taking some blame for the overly serious/sanctimonious tone of the email, which I made some edits to before both emails were sent. I didn’t make it more serious, but neither did I make it less serious, even though this whole practice feels more like a “fun social game” than “serious community ritual” to me.
To be clear, I don’t know whether the aforementioned “social consequences” would exist. I wouldn’t plan to think about the results of Petrov Day if I were considering someone for a job, or in any other context where I had any say in someone’s EA community experience. And maybe everyone else is on the same page with me — judging by the comments here, it feels like the Forum’s users generally don’t take the activity seriously in its current form.
But if someone out there does plan to “impose consequences” in some form, and states that desire, I think they risk damaging our ability to do fun community things that aren’t also tied to future professional success.*
In the future, I don’t want this event to be associated with social pressure or coercion, however incidentally. I’ve also never been enthusiastic about it in its current form, and if I’m still working on the Forum this time next year, I hope I’ll be helping to produce something different for the holiday.
*Though fun community things can still be meaningful! The best discussion I’ve seen on different ways to interpret the activity, and the balance between “serious and fun”, is here.
Habryka’s reply is a good representation of what seems valuable about the activity to me. But I wouldn’t want to follow him in “losing trust” in anyone who pressed the button. (As long as they had a good reason; if the reason is “I never liked the Forum much and I wanted to watch it burn”, that’s obviously a bit different.)
Epistemic status: I’m still pretty confused about this whole thing, and wasn’t involved in ideation. (Though I helped when asked by choosing whom to email, editing the LW email , and making a post.)
I’ll second Ruby in taking some blame for the overly serious/sanctimonious tone of the email, which I made some edits to before both emails were sent. I didn’t make it more serious, but neither did I make it less serious, even though this whole practice feels more like a “fun social game” than “serious community ritual” to me.
To be clear, I don’t know whether the aforementioned “social consequences” would exist. I wouldn’t plan to think about the results of Petrov Day if I were considering someone for a job, or in any other context where I had any say in someone’s EA community experience. And maybe everyone else is on the same page with me — judging by the comments here, it feels like the Forum’s users generally don’t take the activity seriously in its current form.
But if someone out there does plan to “impose consequences” in some form, and states that desire, I think they risk damaging our ability to do fun community things that aren’t also tied to future professional success.*
In the future, I don’t want this event to be associated with social pressure or coercion, however incidentally. I’ve also never been enthusiastic about it in its current form, and if I’m still working on the Forum this time next year, I hope I’ll be helping to produce something different for the holiday.
*Though fun community things can still be meaningful! The best discussion I’ve seen on different ways to interpret the activity, and the balance between “serious and fun”, is here.
Habryka’s reply is a good representation of what seems valuable about the activity to me. But I wouldn’t want to follow him in “losing trust” in anyone who pressed the button. (As long as they had a good reason; if the reason is “I never liked the Forum much and I wanted to watch it burn”, that’s obviously a bit different.)