My thinking on this is slightly different than @omark’s. Specifically:
Everyone commits to being vulnerable by sharing their own controversial statements. This symmetry is often not present in normal conversation, where you focus on one topic where one person might have a controversial opinion and the other does not.
It’s much higher density on iterating through controversial opinions than a normal conversation would be.
It’s a session you can sign up for where you can trust everyone is coming to the session with the same intention to grow and show vulnerability.
Everyone opts in to being exposed to controversial viewpoints. Normal conversation seldomly features such opt-ins.
Thus, you can experience expressing and hearing controversial opinions much more quickly and safely than in a normal conversation.
That’s interesting though I don’t see how the commitment mechanism could work without some arbiter to decide if the follow up statement is actually controversial How do you envision disputes along the lines of not-actually-that-controversial will be resolved?
Explicitly coming together with a goal in mind instead of just chatting
Sharing controversial opinions gets harder the larger the group is, so having a small group seems like a good middle ground to get out of your comfort zone
Collaborating to come up with a good ITT works better with more people (referring specifically to Variant 1)
That being said, there is nothing wrong with doing this with just two people in an informal conversation.
People can explicitly come together in small groups with a goal in mind and have a normal conversation. It doesn’t seem credible to suggest that this is only possible, or even most efficiently done, by following certain procedures.
What advantages are there to these steps and procedures versus just talking it out in a normal conversation?
Good question!
My thinking on this is slightly different than @omark’s. Specifically:
Everyone commits to being vulnerable by sharing their own controversial statements. This symmetry is often not present in normal conversation, where you focus on one topic where one person might have a controversial opinion and the other does not.
It’s much higher density on iterating through controversial opinions than a normal conversation would be.
It’s a session you can sign up for where you can trust everyone is coming to the session with the same intention to grow and show vulnerability.
Everyone opts in to being exposed to controversial viewpoints. Normal conversation seldomly features such opt-ins.
Thus, you can experience expressing and hearing controversial opinions much more quickly and safely than in a normal conversation.
That’s interesting though I don’t see how the commitment mechanism could work without some arbiter to decide if the follow up statement is actually controversial How do you envision disputes along the lines of not-actually-that-controversial will be resolved?
Explicitly coming together with a goal in mind instead of just chatting
Sharing controversial opinions gets harder the larger the group is, so having a small group seems like a good middle ground to get out of your comfort zone
Collaborating to come up with a good ITT works better with more people (referring specifically to Variant 1)
That being said, there is nothing wrong with doing this with just two people in an informal conversation.
People can explicitly come together in small groups with a goal in mind and have a normal conversation. It doesn’t seem credible to suggest that this is only possible, or even most efficiently done, by following certain procedures.