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.. meta::
:description: The Jonah Carnival: a month of amateur Jonah Plays, from Petrov Day (26 Sept) to Arkhipov Day (27 Oct), calling to prevent catastrophes that have not happened.
:keywords: Jonah Carnival, Jonah Play, Jonah-shpil, purimshpil, Petrov Day, Arkhipov, accidental nuclear winter, nuclear war, AI dilemma, Fast of Nineveh, Purim, amateur theatre, Jonah License, AuditTheMath
:author: LLoL as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea, ClaudeOp50Max, and Everyone
:seo:title: Jonah Carnival
:og:card:title: The Jonah Carnival
for averting disasters
:og:card:description: A month of short amateur party plays on how to avert catastrophes that have not happened yet. The world is spared if it stops rolling dice of doom in time.
.. TODO AA: Page maturity --- update StayC when reviewed
Page status: MMv3r1p0_2026m09d24 (MMv3r0p0_2026m09d24; MMv2r0p0_2026m09d24; MM_draft_v1_2026m09d22)
.. TODO AA: All open questions and action items for this page go here.
- [ ] Review
- [ ] Decide footer form type (open-std or shut-std) before MM -> OO
- [ ] Add the "Plays performed" list as soon as the first report arrives
- [x] Staging folder CLOSED 2026-09-24: this page and b11 are canonical.
***********************************************************
The Jonah Carnival
***********************************************************
**A season of celebrating short amateur Jonah Plays about a catastrophe
that has not happened yet but could be locked in
at any moment.** The prime example here is accidental nuclear winter, starving billions
after failing harvests are caused by blocked sunlight due to soot blown into the atmosphere
by burning cities after a nuclear war gets triggered by accident.
Such near-disaster accidents have happened on 26 Sept 1983 and 27 Oct 1962,
respectively commemorated from Petrov Day on 26 September to Arkhipov Day on 27 October.
The free plays, amateur by design, are named after the ridiculous prophet Jonah
who saved Nineveh, the capital city of the superpower of his day from annihilation
by getting its citizens to organize a grass-roots movement for
changing each their own hearts and minds. They did this fast enough to
avert disaster in a real-world explosion of gentle kind reasonableness
that changed the direction of Reality in less than 40 days.
Use the pilot play script below (Jonah Play b11) or rewrite it to your heart's content.
No permission needed. The core idea of the play is that whether the city
is spared at the end depends on what the city does.
.. admonition:: If you read only this box
:class: tip
Somebody, somewhere, has to be the person who notices in real time that
a disaster is approaching for a city, and that city has to listen to avert it.
**A Jonah Play is a short play about that person and that city.** It needs three people or
more, a bedsheet or more, one die and no stage. Put it on in a city hall, a common room, a bar,
a classroom, a street corner, and maybe even in a synagogue, a church hall, a mosque,
or whatever other place of worship or gathering you can find.
Let's all cry out with all we have to any higher power we can reach to
help us do the right thing so that accidental nuclear winter
(and other human-made disasters may be averted).
Will it be enough to organize a month-long carnival
of Jonah Plays between 26 September and 27 October
to change enough hearts and minds?
Or will this world need more time
for this KISS by Reality to Keep Its Study Simple?
#. **Take a seed play:** the ancient :doc:`Jonah-Play-b11 --- Forty Days, Overturned `,
or the modern :doc:`Jonah-Play-b12 --- Arkhipov and the Steel Fish `.
#. **Rewrite it**, in your own words and your own language.
#. **Share what happened and tell us.** Every Jonah Play performed anywhere that keeps the
:ref:`seven rules ` gets a link from this page.
Why these two dates
===================
Between them, the two dates hold both halves of the accidental nuclear winter
story: the machine that raised a false
alarm, and circumstances nearly wrongly interpreted by people as "forcing them to act".
**26 September 1983 --- Petrov Day.** The screens at the Soviet early-warning station
Serpukhov-15 reported American missiles inbound. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged it a
false alarm and reported it as one, at great personal risk. He was later shown to be right:
it was sunlight on high cloud. Almost nobody
heard about it for years. The UN keeps the same date as the International Day for the Total
Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.
**27 October 1962 --- Arkhipov Day.** On the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
Soviet submarine B-59, hunted by US ships and cut off from Moscow, carried a nuclear torpedo the
Americans did not know about. Twice that day her exhausted captain reached for that nuclear torpedo.
Vasili Arkhipov gentle kind reasonably infused the right reasoning into both situations,
even though he knew that his prioritizing to "save the world" may cost him the submarine and his life.
It took until 2017 for his family to receive
the first Future of Life Award on his behalf. More details and documented uncertainties are
in the :doc:`Matheo-b16 forecast study ` (its Appendix SIA-X7).
**A month in between.** As Annie Jacobsen shows in her 2024 book "Nuclear War", a credible scenario runs from the first launch to the end of a nuclear war in `about 72 minutes `__: far too fast for even the most alert people to react. The question posed to humanity is therefore: will the month between Petrov Day and Arkhipov Day be sufficient for a Jonah Carnival to motivate enough gentle kind reasonable actions to tip the balance of the world towards transitioning to a sustainable future? A month may be long enough for most motivated groups like schools, congregations, book clubs, bars, companies, and others, who understand the problem to organize some amateur plays or other meaningful actions to help highlight the problem and opportunities they see for changing.
Yet, since a Jonah Carnival starts with a single person, it may take a few more initial weeks to gain sufficient traction to lock in the new direction as required for averting the disasters at hand.
Either way, the essence of a Jonah Carnival is the limited time available for achieving an existentially important system-wide change.
**"Carnival" means many plays, not one.** A single short play in a single hall is a Jonah
Play. When enough of them happen in the same season, then they can become a Jonah Carnival.
What a Jonah Play is
====================
It is not a new invention but an old art form with many parents.
Like any carnival, a Jonah Carnival is meant to liberate the imagination to envision what
would usually be unthinkable, albeit in this case by focussing creative energies on
averting a very specific disaster at hand. In that sense it is more targeted
than a general carnival, where anything goes.
At the other end of extremes are the highly specific nativity plays
meant to take a very specific historic story for re-enacting it. A Jonah Play
is deliberately broader than that. While it does have a template, the point of a Jonah
Play is to adapt it to a well-defined set of circumstances in the real world.
Not merely for entertainment value, but with the explicit goal to inspire
existential change for the better where it matters most.
Maybe Jonah Plays are best seen in the tradition of the **purimshpil**. This is the amateur folk play
of Purim, the Jewish festival for a genocide, planned by dice, that did not happen because someone
dared to speak up. Millennia old in principle and much refined in recent centuries,
purimshpils motivated ordinary people to put on costumes, make a racket at the villain's name, and turn the world upside down for a day. The repertoire was never only Esther: it included Joseph as well as
Jonah. So a Jonah Play (in the old form, a *Jonah-shpil*) needs nobody's
permission. It is an old thing being picked back up. More serious theatrical adaptations exist as well.
At least three traditions already mark a catastrophe that did **not** happen: **Purim**
(Jewish), the **Fast of Nineveh** (kept by Syriac, Assyrian, Coptic and Armenian Christians: a
city warned and spared) and **Petrov Day** (secular). These show that humanity knows how to hold a
festival for a disaster that did not happen. If people choose to remember.
What is new here is that humanity has never before held such a festival in advance
for a disaster that it hopes to avert because if it is allowed to occur it would be of such
cataclysmic global proportions that barely anyone would be left to celebrate anything.
Many Jonah Plays, merging into a grand Jonah Carnival are meant to be such a festival of hope.
In order to maintain the essential levers of hope all Jonah Plays in this sense
must preserve certain functional elements to avoid falling into either of these extremes:
- **Despair** destroys true hope by presumptively concluding that no true hope exists;
it's like throwing out the baby of true hope with the bathwater of unavoidable illusions.
- **Presumption** destroys true hope by faking a certain yes about what is not certain yet;
it's like trying to preserve the bathwater as if it was the baby, even if no baby exists.
Both destroy true hope by suppressing the uncertainty that must necessarily exist for
any hope to be a true hope. Without this uncertainty at the core of true hope the
respective system collapses into an oversimplified, closed, deterministic system.
This functional core of Jonah Plays is described in more detail below after giving
a seed example for what a Jonah Play might look like.
Jonah Play Seed Examples
===================================
:doc:`Jonah-Play-b11 --- Forty Days, Overturned ` is the ancient seed play: the book
of Jonah itself, told close to the original as a play. :doc:`Jonah-Play-b12 --- Arkhipov and the Steel
Fish ` is the modern one. Each stands alone; played together, they make a double
bill. Treat both as scaffolding drafts, not a text to be set in stone. Both are currently at the maturity
of a Mockup Model.
**b11, in five scenes.** Jonah is sent, refuses, and is the first to put on the mask of
**ASON** (Hebrew :raw-html:`אָסוֹן`\ :raw-latex:`\balospehebrew{אָסוֹן}`, "disaster"). It is the abstract calamity that arrives without an author and proceeds to cause a
concrete calamity if nobody bothers to stop it. ASON acts as unexpectedly as a crocodile, which is an ambush-predator that stays hidden until it's too late. On this site
ASON is defined as the *Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing*. This ASON crocodile gets Jonah to run away
from his true calling by taking a ship to the opposite direction. So a storm arises (made by
people shaking a bedsheet at the boat). The sailors cast a real die to find whose fault it is.
Jonah is identified that way and proposes a radical solution to calm the storm.
Fast forward through a wild roller coaster that brings Jonah back to square one
and puts him on a path to get to Nineveh, the city he must warn to stay true to his conscience.
Jonah preaches possibly the shortest sermon ever:
*"Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned."* To Jonah's surprise the whole city
turns around; everyone contributes, down to the cattle in sackcloth.
Two dice run through b11. **Jonah's own die** keeps coming back to him, however often it is rolled:
that is what an odd vocation feels like from the inside. **Nineveh's die** rolls towards the city's
end by default, every day. Jonah's five words do not say which "overturned" they mean (the Hebrew
can mean destroyed, or turned around), so the city decides: every Ninevite who says *"later"* costs
a roll, and the city is spared only if it turns before the die shows a certain number. Either way, Jonah waits
under a dying plant, watching Nineveh in his "tele-vision". When Reality decides to turn Nineveh around, making Jonah formally a false prophet, the play ends on the question the book ends on (Jonah 4:11). Whether Jonah
stays a Cassandra or becomes Jonah, the false prophet, depends on whether anyone listened.
**b12, in four scenes.** On 27 October 1962 a Soviet submarine, a steel fish, has heard nothing from
home for days and is seemingly under attack. Its furious captain orders its nuclear torpedo readied;
Vasili Arkhipov speaks up for gentle kind reasonableness, and they surface instead.
That night, blinded by searchlights, the captain orders an urgent dive, again
with the torpedo tubes ready; Arkhipov sees an American ship signalling by lamp, and cancels the
dive. "Nothing" happens, in this case sparing the world by rewarding the courage to speak up.
But then the dice keep rolling, year after year, until the audience is asked who
they want to win, and to decide by remaining in their chairs by default or standing up to
avert accidental nuclear winter.
**The one idea to keep through every rewrite:** ASON is a *mask*, not a character. Anyone who puts
it on becomes an unwitting tool for ASON, the worst enemy ever.
ASON changes wearers at least three times. Nobody wants to fail due to ASON. Reasonable people
step into important jobs and want to do it well. Then at some unsuspecting moment ASON
takes over anyone to instigate mischief. There are no villains in this play, except for ASON.
ASON keeps tricking hapless people into unwittingly destroying civilizations.
The key problem here is the shape-shifting nature of ASON, the most universal villain ever.
More on ASON, and other ways to show it, :ref:`just below `.
.. _jonah-carnival-ason:
ASON: the disaster nobody authored
==================================
**ASON** carries two meanings here, and a Jonah Play needs both.
- In Hebrew, *ason* (:raw-html:`אָסוֹן`\ :raw-latex:`\balospehebrew{אָסוֹן}`) means **disaster**. In the Bible it is
the harm whose author the text declines to name.
- On this site, **ASON** also stands for the **Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing**
(:ref:`defined here `): the trap of reading "nothing happened" as "nothing is wrong".
Nothing from Moscow for days, nothing in the news for sixty years: the same nothing fits a safe
world and a doomed one. Disasters of this kind grow in that gap.
**What ASON technically is.** Not a spirit, and not a person. ASON is the sum of all ambiguities
in real-world networks of
causes and chances that decide, with probabilities, what actually happens: machines and
procedures, alert levels and launch doctrines, fatigue, misread signals, habits, budgets,
deadlines, and inner-most thoughts, each of them reasonable on its own.
Nobody designed the combination, and nobody controls it. That is
how it can end by accident a civilization that nobody wanted to end.
**Why ASON is never a person.** ASON can take over anyone without their noticing, the
best-intentioned people in the room included, simply while they do their jobs. So whatever form
ASON takes on stage, it is worn, carried or wrestled with, and it always comes off again. It never
gets a human face, a name or a nation. It remains an invisible crocodile.
**Ways to show ASON.** Pick one, or invent your own:
- **A mask** that passes from wearer to wearer, as in the seed play: the sailors, the King, the
Watchman and Jonah himself each wear it for a while.
- **A crocodile**: still, patient and nearly invisible,
until the prey gets close enough for an ambush and the jaws close. Two people's arms and
a strip of cardboard teeth will do.
- **Leviathan**, the sea monster of the book of Job, which some translators take to be a crocodile.
*"Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook?"* (Job 41:1). No single hook lands it. Put several
people under one sheet, moving as one creature, and let it take many hands on many ropes to hold
it. In an old Jewish retelling (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 10), Jonah, from inside the fish, faces
Leviathan down.
- **A web of strings**: cords tied loosely between the actors' wrists, so that one person's small
move pulls on everyone else. This is ASON at its most literal, the network itself.
- **A shadow** thrown onto a bedsheet from behind, larger than anyone on stage.
Whatever the form, show people wrestling with ASON together. The hope of a Jonah Play is not a hero
who slays the monster. It is a city that stops feeding ASON's madness
by starting to rediscover common sense for the benefit of all.
The hero journey of Jonah is that of the boy who, wearing no clothes,
points out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes, albeit without shaming the emperor
--- and saying all this in a way that motivates everyone to provide proper clothes for all.
No clothes stands for transparency: whoever asks the powerful to be seen as they are
must first let themselves be seen, and that symmetry is what keeps the emperor from being shamed.
.. _jonah-carnival-rules:
The seven rules of the form
===========================
These are what keep a Jonah Play about existential risk from becoming something worse than useless.
**A play that keeps
them gets a link from this page.** A play that breaks them does not. These seven are the only
rules. Everything else on this page is advice, because a carnival with too many rules would not be
a carnival.
#. **The way out is always shown, even if the city does not take it.** The city is spared if its inhabitants
listens and stops the rolling dice in time. If it will not listen as a whole,
or too many mean to act later, it may
fall. Either ending may be played.
A disaster that nobody could have prevented may not, like a disaster that is always prevented. Because
both would turn the play into a deterministic simulation that takes away
the human responsibility to choose between fate (death by default) and destiny (life by following the narrow, risky-looking escape from fate).
#. **ASON is the only enemy.** Here ASON is the *ambiguous semantics of nothing*, a highly dangerous
form of *nothing* that poses advanced persistent threats to all agents in complex worlds.
This is the real enemy and the only enemy. All others are merely perceived "enemies",
turned into "foes" when misguided algorithms for how to handle ASON demonizes others for nothing.
Therefore, no nation, government, ... or person, living or dead, is made the villain: no flag
is booed, no official is impersonated. A real city may be the place where a play happens (see
:ref:`Which city `), but its people are never the enemy.
Note that that doesn't mean that everything ever done by anybody has to be called good.
Mistakes are mistakes. Yet mistakes can become learning experiences if those who did them
turn them into fertilizer by taking down the fig-leaves that excuse those mistakes.
Everyone is free to present *their own* mistakes (by "impersonating" themselves
by presenting how they fell for their own Structurally Inconsistent Notions and their own
Least Inconvenient Explanations that tricked them).
Laughing at one's own expense is OK. At the expense of others is not.
Laughing at the expense of nothing in general and ASON in particular is OK. Trivializing it is not.
#. **Make a racket whenever ASON or nothing is summoned.** The summoning line is a version of *"and nobody
said anything"* or *"important persons said nothing"*. That *nothing* is where ASON lives.
Someone puts on the ASON mask and the room makes
as much noise as it can.
#. **The joke is at our own expense.** Jonah is the most ridiculous prophet in scripture. Play
him as one of us, because he is.
#. **Amateur by design.** Cardboard fish, bathrobes, a cooking pot for a helmet. Anyone who wants
a part gets a part. This is not to say that Holywould-productions will not be listed,
but it is to say that slick Hollywood or other institutional productions will not get
special treatment. The blood-red carpet of failing to avert disasters is rolled out for everyone equally.
#. **Never simulate a real alert, and never destroy anything real.** No sirens, no
emergency-broadcast sounds, no blasts or flashes, no "this is not a drill": a plausible false
alarm is the exact harm the play is about. The abstraction of *nothing* gets broken, burned and smashed,
but no real-world items of any type. Not even a card-board box. Missiles are pillows; nuclear winter can
be simulated by white sheets drawn over a city - or not-so-white-ones for simulating dirty fall-out.
#. **Your own mandate.** Nobody forces anyone to perform a Jonah Play, and nobody controls these
plays. Whoever performs one or participates does it on their own mandate and at their own risk, because they
believe it matters. Nobody performing speaks *for* anyone else: not for a movement, a religion,
a government, or any author of any particular analysis. If a Jonah Play calls for a mandate
then it is for all to follow Reality through real quests for real answers to avert
disasters for all in the interest of the common good. No special interest promotion.
.. _jonah-carnival-spared-or-fallen:
Fallen or Spared?
=================
A Jonah Play does not promise that the city is spared. In fact the default is that it falls. Whether Jonah's first call led to a near-miss disaster that got the city to pay attention once Jonah actually showed up remains for a play to interpret. Whether a city is spared in *your* play is yours
to decide; rule 1 asks only that the way out be visible, whether it is taken or not. Here is what to weigh.
**For letting the city fall:**
- Death by default. A city that is always spared starts to repeat a very comfortable LIE:
the Least Inconvenient Explanation that e.g. more than sixty years of *nothing*
already tell: that *nothing* always turns out to be harmless. The arithmetic says otherwise. As long as the dice keep rolling, the question is when, not whether doom arrives.
For accidental nuclear winter in our time, the model on this site finds disaster more likely than not within a human lifetime, as long as today's hair-trigger policies persist.
Such disasters haunt and hunt humanity like crocodiles. These ambush predators lie motionless
until some unwitting prey gets close enough. Then they unleash all their fury.
- The story itself is conditional. Nineveh is spared because the whole city turns, down to the
cattle, and the book of Jonah ends on a question, not a promise. The real Nineveh fell a bit later
in 612 BCE,
about a century and a half after the time in which the story is set; the book of Nahum is about
that fall. Being spared once is not the same as being safe.
- The same research that warns against discussing a threat without a way out finds that a threat *with* a
visible way out works. The answer is to *show* the way out, not to hide the fall.
- Tragedy ends in disaster, and for two and a half thousand years tragedies in theater have made people think.
Promising that it always works out, or that there is always a second try, is no kindness: it
teaches that this is not a real test and that human behavior doesn't matter.
Unless corrected at some point, this produces cultures where irresponsible children
grow up to become irresponsible blinded adults, causing such dooming by default.
**For letting the city be spared:**
- The form's promise is that a warning can work.
- A carnival is meant to be joyful.
- A threat with no visible way out tends to produce denial and fatalism. That is a well-studied
finding about fear-based messages.
- Amateurs who stage a catastrophe badly can hurt people in the room.
- The fall is the moment most likely to be clipped and passed around as doom-preaching.
- Preaching doom and gloom and fear-mongering are harmful; showing a way out by Facing Everything And Rising
is the easiest way to turn doom and gloom into delight and glory --- as long as the way out is genuine.
**Not wanting to look is human, but it cannot be a veto.** Many of us would rather not talk about
our own death, and it is natural that the same reluctance extends to the death of a civilization.
But a city cannot deal with a danger it is not allowed to name. This news may be as hard to hear as news
of one's own death, with one great difference: this civilizational death is actually avoidable. The rolling of dice can be stopped. But to do that the death-trifecta of **incurious ignorant indifference must be overcome.**
.. _jonah-carnival-which-city:
Which city
----------
The city in a Jonah Play can be Nineveh, an invented city, your own city, or a city your audience
thinks of as the "enemy's"". The choice is the playwright's. Whatever it is, Rule 2 holds: ASON is the
only true enemy, never the people of a city. Here are some pros and cons.
- **Nineveh, or a city with an invented name.** Nobody's home is shown falling, and the play travels
anywhere as the audience makes the connection by itself. *But* it can feel like a fantasy, far
away, and easy to shrug off as "just a story".
- **Your own city.** This is what is actually at stake, and nobody enjoys the fall of their own
home. *But* it is harder to watch, and a clip of it can be misread as a threat or a prophecy about
a real place. Say plainly, in the play and in anything you post, that it is a play and that
nothing has happened. Denounce any self-fulfilling prophecies in the clearest possible way.
- **A city your audience thinks of as belonging to the "enemy".** This is Jonah's own case.
Nineveh was the great and cruel
city of Assyria, the superpower that would later destroy the kingdom of Jonah's people.
He was sent by Reality to save
it; that is why he sulks. He didn't want to share a good thing with his "enemies".
It asks the hardest question in the book (Jonah 4:11): do we still want
the disaster averted if it means our worst enemy is spared too? Nuclear winter does not stop at
borders: the smoke from the enemy's burning city darkens your own harvest.
If you choose to model an "enemy-city", the play must want ultimately want
that city spared, as the book does, and its fall must be mourned, never enjoyed.
This mourning must be made abundantly clear to merit a recommendation here.
Plays that beat down or look down on their enemies are not proper Jonah Plays as defined here.
.. _jonah-carnival-how-it-ends:
How it ends
-----------
Four endings are allowed. Each teaches something, and each can mislead.
- **The city is spared.** A warning is seen working. *But* if every play ends this way, the Carnival
teaches that it always works out --- making people complacent.
- **The city falls, and the play ends there,** as tragedy does. It shows plainly what happens if
nobody stops the rolling dice and the Titanic continues to plow through the ice-field
that sank it. *But* such a play becomes helpful when it shows how the potential for fatalism
turns into a fatalistic prison when people start to believe that they can do "nothing".
Make sure the moment when
somebody could have stopped it is highly visible (rule 1), and stay to talk.
- **The dice decide.** Every *"later"* costs one honest roll, and the city falls only if the die
comes up before anyone stops the rolling. The outcome is really open, as in the real world. *But* a
fall can feel like bad luck rather than a delay in acting, so make sure the room knew it could act.
This is where it can help to visibly define the ASON Crocodile (see below)
and make a racket whenever it shows its deceptive face.
- **The scene is played again,** and this time anyone in the room may shout *"Stop!"* and step in,
as in forum theatre. It is a strong rehearsal for acting. *But* it suggests there may be a
second try, or a third, which may or may not exist in the real world.
Hence, to take Jonah seriously means to embrace all uncertainty as best as possible.
Fittingly, his Hebrew name is ambiguous. It can stand for "dove" or for "terrifying".
**How to show a fall without harming anyone or anything.** Nothing real is destroyed (Rule 6).
Pillows or paper-planes fall on the city as missiles: throw them onto the stage, never at the audience and never at
faces. A non-white sheet drawn over the city is for toxic soot darkening the skies (if modeled),
and a white sheet may shortcut to blanketing everything with the eventually unavoidable nuclear winter that kills global harvests and kills most people by starvation in the years after. Use
breathable cloth only, never plastic sheeting; let nobody lie under a sheet who does not want to;
keep cloth away from candles.
Then silence, for as long as the room can bear it. Consider it a real memorial silence for those who will die if accidental nuclear winter is not averted andOr
for the many who had to die for LLoL to finally take ASON seriously, simulate waiting times until accidental nuclear winter, describe a credible escape hatch, and put together this proposal for Jonah Plays.
When the play is
over, the cast stands up as themselves, so that everyone sees the fall happened only in the play.
.. _jonah-carnival-holding-the-room:
Holding space in the room
------------------------------
- **Say before you begin** that the play may end with the city falling, and that it falls only in
the play.
- **If young children are coming,** talk to their parents first.
- **If anyone may find this frightening** (death, disaster, questions about the end of things),
offer to talk with them before the play, after it, or both. Details see next.
- **For those talks, and for any Jonah Play,** two distinctions matter most. *Fear* is not
*danger*: fear is a feeling made in us, danger is the thing out there in the world that can hurt us.
Telling them apart is a skill that can be learned. And *fate* ("nothing can be done") is not
*destiny* ("I refuse to ignore it, and I explore what I can do"). Both are explained in
:doc:`Fate or destiny, a short guide `.
- **Stay afterwards.** Talk, and eat something if possible to help processing.
News like this is often taken in stages. :doc:`SD7 `,
this site's map of healing, names seven in its column on grieving. Condensed, with where some of
them show up in a Jonah Play:
#. **Denial, overcome from outside:** hear the bad news, and do not kill the messenger. (Jonah 1)
#. **Denial, overcome from inside:** see the cause for yourself, dismantle your own illusions. (Jonah 2)
#. **Anger** at reality: Jonah under his dying plant. (Jonah 4)
#. **Bargaining:** later; somebody else; one more roll. (Jonah 5?)
#. **Depression:** sorrow feeds the loss of hope, so real encouragement is a matter of survival. (Jonah 4)
#. **Acceptance** of the pain that cannot be avoided, which spares the suffering that can. (Jonah 6?)
#. **Homecoming:** understanding *why* is not needed in order to accept, but it is needed in order
to live together again. (Jonah 7?)
What is accepted is the news, not the disaster. People rarely go through the stages in order, and
nobody goes through all of them in one evening. A play can show that the road exists. Note that Jonah 1-4 are de-excerpted from the Hebrew Bible for this purpose, whereas "Jonah 5?-7?" are fictional chapters presuming that Jonah's story continued after Jonah 4.
Tell us what happened --- and how plays get their numbers
=============================================================
**After a performance, two things are asked of you.**
#. **Put it where someone can find it:** a photo, a phone video or a paragraph. Tag it
**#JonahPlay** and **#AuditTheMath**.
#. **Send a line** to `FF+jonah-carnival@balospe.com `__
saying where it was, roughly how many people came, **what went wrong** (probably
the more useful part) and what may be useful tips for others (what went right without becoming self-congratulatory).
**What happens next.** Every play that keeps the seven rules is listed here with a link. No one has
to register and no one approves scripts. The only thing checked is whether the rules were kept.
**Numbering.** Plays are numbered the way this site numbers everything
(:ref:`the lettered-numbering system `). **b10** is reserved for
the form's template, **b11** and **b12** are the seed plays above, and new plays take **b13, b14, …** in the
order they arrive, never skipped and never reused. **a1 to a9 are kept for the greatest hits**,
assigned later, by impact.
To maximize flexibility (until further notice and until someone can argue a better case):
numbering may be reserved for Jonah Plays that are open for use by anyone
under the free, open Jonah License (see at the bottom).
Not so free plays may still get mentioned without official numbers.
**How impact is judged, and why it is hard.** The measure that matters is how much a play did to
avert the disaster, and that measure cannot be read off directly. A warning that works leaves no
evidence: *it looks like a Tuesday*. So the greatest hits are judged by the nearest things that can
be seen: how many people a play reached, how many of them went on to check the arithmetic, and how
many put on a play of their own. That this is a proxy is clear. Ultimately it is the position
in the global causality chain that determines the impact. For example, anyone composing a play with the humor required to win the trust of all 10 Nuclear Kings of Earth (including Iran for ambition) and put them in such a good mood that they happily agree to put Earth in escrow by guaranteeing to not bomb ResearchCity efforts to smithereens and instead
helping ResearchCity to become truly transparent --- that would in this case probably become the winner on that global impact list. Let the race begin!
The one fact every play should carry
====================================
Whatever else changes, for a Jonah Play about averting accidental nuclear winter, the audience should afterwards be able to say roughly this:
*Most of us are likelier to die in an accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash. If today's
hair-trigger policies persist, the question is when, not whether: any yearly risk above zero, rolled
year after year, ends the same way. Readings of the record differ only in how fast; the model on
this site finds disaster more likely than not within a human lifetime.
Extended waiting times such as many decades or centuries are unlikely and do not change
the fact that the ending will be the same - unless the game is profoundly changed.
Like human nature, it is not fate: Hearts and minds do have the demonstrated ability to change
if people allow themselves to acknowledge all real-world uncertainties that exist.
The danger lasts as long as the dice rolling continues, and the rolling can
be stopped. The arithmetic is public, and anyone can check it.*
No precise number is needed for that, and the play should not lean on one. The readings differ about
*when*; given the stakes, the burden of proof lies with anyone who claims the dice can safely keep rolling. :doc:`Check it here `. Assume the
person who did the arithmetic is probably wrong somewhere. Even then, truly looking cost only a little.
But not looking, denying, doubting, ridiculing, ... costs everything if that messenger was indeed sent by Reality.
Needless to say, accidental nuclear winter is not the only existential disaster to which the Jonah dynamic
may be applied. Feel free to adapt to other scenarios, as long as they are grounded in real-world analyses.
Play about changing hearts and minds, build entirely from made up problems in fictional worlds can still be useful for changing hearts and minds in the real world. Whether it is still useful to call them Jonah Plays remains to be seen.
What the plays are for
======================
Each performance is a small public act of giving ourselves a mandate: to take human-made,
self-organizing disasters seriously before they happen, not after. Accidental nuclear winter is the
one at the center of this Jonah Carnival; but it is far from the only one. See recent discussions
of existential AI risks.
Nobody hands out a mandate to act on such long-ignored risks. People create such mandates
by paying attention, because they believe it matters (rule 7). A Jonah Play is an opportunity
for creating and amplifying such existential mandates, one play at a time. Written. Performed. Attended.
Documented. Published. Filmed. Shared. Discussed. Promoted. And so on.
This site's own proposal for what such a mandate should build is a
:doc:`ResearchCity `, scaled up in stages to work on exactly the
disasters that otherwise get ignored, with a :doc:`MADI `, a Mutually
Assured Destruction Inhibitor, made responsible for scaling it up. A MADI is a function, not a
person: any competent person could in principle fill it. One of the main contributions of the Balospe.com site is the development of formal, public criteria for testing credible MADI candidates.
You do not have to agree with that proposal to put on a Jonah Play. The arithmetic, and the play, stand
without it.
Other times to perform
======================
The Jonah Carnival has a proposed starting season (see above). The other Carnival has an established season. But the art form is not bound in time. If your community keeps one of these days, use it:
- **Purim** (late winter or early spring): the form's native ground. The festival is named after
the lot that Haman cast. The echo of stochasticity in nuclear roulette is eerie.
- **The Fast of Nineveh** (three days, in the weeks before Lent in the Eastern calendars): a city
warned and spared, kept for centuries by some communities.
- **Yom Kippur, afternoon**: Jonah is the assigned reading. Ask whoever leads your service first,
because that day is theirs, not yours.
- **Any day that is called Today.** The Jonah Carnival obviously aims for a global turnaround
at a globally critical decision-time. It's hard to predict when that turn-around will happen.
If now, wonderful. If a bit later, also good. Let's keep going until a real, workable
way appears that can credibly lead out of the current quagmire. Once committed, let's remember
the time to help everyone to recall that they might be Jonah or Arkhipov or Petrov or
whoever will be that rare odd-one-out person in their area that prevents the next disaster
by staying alert and acting gentle kind reasonably.
How this could fail, said plainly
=================================
A page that lists only its hopes is advertising.
- **It may not be funny**, and an unfunny play may be worse than none. We don't need more doom.
- **ASON may become a cartoon** that the audience blames, letting everybody off. The mask changing
wearers is the guard, and a careless production will drop it.
- **The dice may be read as fatalism**, and a fallen city even more so. The guard is rule 1: the
way out is always shown, and the city that falls is the city that waited too long.
- **A fall may be read as a threat or a prophecy**, or clipped and passed around as one. A superficial guard
is rule 6: it happens only in the play, with pillows and sheets, and never looks real.
The more important guard is to realize how believing in doom can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Those who see times of peace as opportunities for preparing the next war will inevitably
find themselves in the next war. (ResearchCity is about how to avert such self-fulfilling doom and gloom by turning it into delight and glory.)
- **It may re-terrify someone who has lived through a war.** Say beforehand how the play may end, and
offer to talk before and after.
- **It may be taken as a religious or a partisan claim.** Rules 2 and 7 exist to hopefully prevent that.
- **It may be performed three times and then stop.** Three is more than zero.
- **A dire warning may be real and work and leave no evidence at all.** That is the joke Jonah never got.
.. container:: fineprint
**Sources, for anyone who wants to check.**
- Leviathan and the hook: Job 41 (40:25 in Hebrew numbering),
`BSB `__.
- Jonah faces Leviathan: Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 10,
`Sefaria `__.
- Nineveh turns, and the book ends on a question: Jonah 3:9--10 and 4:11,
`BSB 3 `__, `BSB 4 `__.
- The fall of Nineveh: the book of Nahum, `BSB `__; and a
Babylonian chronicle for the year 612 BCE,
`ABC 3, the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle `__.
- Causal networks in plain words: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (2018), *The Book of Why: The
New Science of Cause and Effect*, Basic Books, New York
(`author's page `__). The technical version: F. R.
Kschischang, B. J. Frey and H.-A. Loeliger (2001), "Factor graphs and the sum-product
algorithm", *IEEE Transactions on Information Theory* 47(2): 498--519,
`doi:10.1109/18.910572 `__.
- Fear appeals: Kim Witte and Mike Allen (2000), "A meta-analysis of fear appeals: implications
for effective public health campaigns", *Health Education & Behavior* 27(5): 591--615,
`doi:10.1177/109019810002700506 `__; and Melanie
B. Tannenbaum and colleagues (2015), "Appealing to fear: a meta-analysis of fear appeal
effectiveness and theories", *Psychological Bulletin* 141(6): 1178--1204,
`doi:10.1037/a0039729 `__.
.. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/jonah-carnival-joli.rst
.. toctree::
:hidden:
jonah-play-b11
jonah-play-b12
fate-and-destiny