I think a potential factor to consider here is that normally, even when speaking in private, there’s no spoken guarantee that the conversation will remain private, e.g. it’s entirely possible that at some point after having had a private conversation with you, I might offhandedly mention to someone else “Raemon said X a while back”—and the possibility of my doing so brings back the common knowledge/signaling aspect that so often leads to demon threads. Hypothetically, therefore, a private conversation where both participants agree beforehand to not make the conversation public unless both of them agree would lack this aspect entirely, and hence make it much easier to talk in good faith.
I admit that this may seem a bit like hair-splitting, though. I think most participants in this conversation have participated in enough demon threads in the past to have a fairly decent idea of what we’re all referring to, and slight differences in intuition like this may not be worth bringing up. (Of course, sometimes they point to a much deeper and more fundamental inferential gap, but I’m inclined to think this isn’t the case here.)
I think a potential factor to consider here is that normally, even when speaking in private, there’s no spoken guarantee that the conversation will remain private, e.g. it’s entirely possible that at some point after having had a private conversation with you, I might offhandedly mention to someone else “Raemon said X a while back”—and the possibility of my doing so brings back the common knowledge/signaling aspect that so often leads to demon threads. Hypothetically, therefore, a private conversation where both participants agree beforehand to not make the conversation public unless both of them agree would lack this aspect entirely, and hence make it much easier to talk in good faith.
I admit that this may seem a bit like hair-splitting, though. I think most participants in this conversation have participated in enough demon threads in the past to have a fairly decent idea of what we’re all referring to, and slight differences in intuition like this may not be worth bringing up. (Of course, sometimes they point to a much deeper and more fundamental inferential gap, but I’m inclined to think this isn’t the case here.)