# The Illustrated Petrov Day Ceremony

Since 2014, some people have celebrated Petrov Day with a small in-person ceremony, with readings by candlelight that tell the story of Petrov within the context of the long arc of history, created by Jim Babcock.

I've found this pretty meaningful, an it somehow feels "authentic" to me, like a real holiday. Which, as the creator of [Secular Solstice 2020](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zdKCifZXQTKNazFyk/secular-solstice-2020) it is humbling to say, feels more true than Solstice did (for the first few years, Solstice felt a little obviously "made up", and now, although it has more storied history, it instead often feels a bit too much like "a show" as opposed to "a holiday", at least when you go to the large productions in the Bay or NYC).

I don't know how much my experience generalizes, but having been familiar with Seders (classic Jewish, or [rationalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FxrqQbZKff9BoGhtc/the-rationalist-haggadot-collection)), it just felt to me like a real historical holiday built from a parallel dimension that tumbled into my world.

Solstice was originally intended to be a small affair that people held in people's living room. I ended up holding a large version as an attempt to draw more attention to it. Then it turned out the large version ended up being where most people anthropically end up experiencing Solstice.

Jim designed the Petrov Day ceremony to be deliberately awkward to scale – it's designed to find around a dining room table, with everyone within reach of a set of candles. If you end up with more than 20 people, Jim recommends splitting up into multiple groups in multiple rooms. There was a hope for it to fill a niche that encouraged small groups, copying the format of a Seder.

This is nice, but, it does mean it's harder to actually get a lot of people to know about it. 

* * *

For the last several years, LessWrong has done some kind of interactive (some might say "gimmicky") Petrov Day event each year. Some people complain that it's unclear if they are more like "playing a game" or more like "participating in a sacred ritual where people will judge you horribly if you defect", which has been disorienting. 

We've worked on various ways to signal more clearly what type of activity it is in recent years.

Normally, we conceive-of-and-implement Petrov Day basically the week-of in a matter of days. This means whatever symbolically-world-destroy-ing activity we implement has a higher-than-usual propensity for bugs that we ship at 1 AM. Some Lightcone team members dislike that and think it's horribly embarrassing. I agree it is horribly embarrassing but also think it is a) hilarious and b) surprisingly on-theme and giving the event a weird sort of authentic uncertain about "did the site go down On Purpose For Reasons, or was it technical mistake in our Missile Detection Code?".

Last year's Petrov Day we did a particularly elaborate LARP/Social-Deception Game (see [announcement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6LJ6xcHEjKF9zWKzs/completed-the-2024-petrov-day-scenario) and [retrospective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NsxFcB2EAxcY6cdGh/2024-petrov-day-retrospective)). It was cool in some ways. But it made it feel kinda... hard to top? Anything game-like we did felt like it'd either need to be *even more elaborate*, or feel a bit weaksauce in comparison.

So, this year, despite successfully beginning to plan Petrov Day weeks in advance, I pitched:

"What if instead a button that destroys the site, we just... encourage people to celebrate Petrov Day, and make a nice illustrated Petrov Day story?"

And then we did that.

I ended up deciding to just implement the existing ceremony as an animated ritual, so people who didn't have an existing community of Petrov Day celebration participants could get a feel for what it was like.

The "encourage people to celebrate Petrov Day meetups" didn't obviously work super well, although in our defense it turned out it was overlapping with both ACX Everywhere and IABI reading groups and we had recently tapped out our usual resources for hustling up a lot of meetups. 

The Illustrated Ceremony is available from the frontpage today. Tomorrow, it'll live on at [http://lesswrong.com/petrov/ceremony](http://lesswrong.com/petrov/ceremony).

I had fun making it. I hope you like it. 

Thank you Jim for creating it originally, and thank you Stanislav Petrov for not destroying[^v8mtt6agyv] the world that one time.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/ba62881fa636c00e20b9c5674a87b8c2ecaad7a27f94c3f7.png)

Jim designed the ceremony to work with a regular menorah, to make it more accessible,  
but I like doing the ceremony with dope-ass candles.

[^v8mtt6agyv]: According to Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction, "destroy the world" might be two levels of false instead of the usual one (i.e. "the world's still there guys, it's just us who are fucked.") But, you know what I mean.