[W]hen you are given responsibility for a communal resource, even if the person giving it to you says “It’s fine to destroy it – play along!” then you’re still supposed to think for yourself about whether they’re right. One of the core virtues of Petrov day is how Petrov took responsibility for launching nuclear armageddon, and he didn’t “assume the people in charge knew best” or “just do what expected of him”. So in some ways I feel like this challenge was unfair in the same way that reality is unfair, and it is a question about whether people noticed their responsibility to the commons without being told that they were supposed to take responsibility.
Just because the site admins gave us the ability to shut down the site does not mean that it is harmless or permissible to do so. Even if they were to tell us it’s a game and it’s permissible to do so (which they did not) that still would not make it harmless nor necessarily permissible. The stakes still affect the permissibility regardless of what they were to say.
If it’s not permissable for me to shut down the site, why is it permissible for Aaron to send unsolicited emails to 100 people inviting them to shut it down?
He didn’t invite anyone to shut it down. He simply gave more people the power to shut it down than already had it and invited us to practice not using that power. (I think this was permissible.)
But for the sake of argument, even if Aaron did invite us to shut it down, that would not mean that Aaron’s action was necessarily permissible. Maybe it would be since service providers have the right to stop providing services, but when the stakes are sufficiently high suddenly deciding to just stop providing a service to harm all your customers seems unethical (e.g. if Bezos and/or whoever else has the authority at Amazon decided to just shut down Amazon without warning).
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.
I like Ben Pace’s response from the linked post:
Just because the site admins gave us the ability to shut down the site does not mean that it is harmless or permissible to do so. Even if they were to tell us it’s a game and it’s permissible to do so (which they did not) that still would not make it harmless nor necessarily permissible. The stakes still affect the permissibility regardless of what they were to say.
If it’s not permissable for me to shut down the site, why is it permissible for Aaron to send unsolicited emails to 100 people inviting them to shut it down?
He didn’t invite anyone to shut it down. He simply gave more people the power to shut it down than already had it and invited us to practice not using that power. (I think this was permissible.)
But for the sake of argument, even if Aaron did invite us to shut it down, that would not mean that Aaron’s action was necessarily permissible. Maybe it would be since service providers have the right to stop providing services, but when the stakes are sufficiently high suddenly deciding to just stop providing a service to harm all your customers seems unethical (e.g. if Bezos and/or whoever else has the authority at Amazon decided to just shut down Amazon without warning).