Many people have no context in their life where they can get feedback on socially undesirable ideas from thoughtful people so that they can potentially update them. E.g. you hear socially undesirable thing online that you suspect has some truth to it, you can't have any reasonable discussion about which aspects might be true, which might be false, and even amongst the more true parts how to navigate having that belief or what would be a wholesome framework to use to work with it, bc no feedback.

I'll give an egregious example. At one time, iodizing salt in developing countries was opposed by some NGOs on the grounds that the argument that it raised IQ was some sort of fake racist thing. A person in that environment might have wanted to be able to discuss things in a safer space than whatever environment produced that insanity.

If OP were advocating banning normal parties, in favor of only having cancellable parties, I would agree with this comment.

What makes a discussion heavy? What requires that a conversation be conducted in a way that makes it heavy?

I feel like for a lot of people it just never has to be, but I'm pretty sure most people have triggers even if they're not aware of it and it would help if we knew what sets this off so that we can root them out.

“Cancel culture is good actually” needs to go in the hat ;)

i think i agree that this does justified harm, but maybe for some subgroups or communities the justified harm is worth the benefits of such an event? our local rationality community has developed to a point where i think people are comfortable talking about "controversial" statements with their real faces on because the vibes are one where any attempt at cancellation instead of dialogue will be met with eyerolls and social exclusion but like, you know, it took a pretty long time and sustained effort for us to get here. (and maybe im wrong and there are people in the group with opinions they are still afraid to voice!)

im modelling this as something kind of like authentic relating - you're hacking the group's intimacy module and ratcheting up the feeling of closeness with a shortcut. it's not going to be as good as the genuine thing, but maybe it's a lot better than what one would have general access to. it's not everyone's thing, people with enough access to the genuine goods are likely to be like "wtf this is weird", sometimes it can go catastrophically wrong if the facilitator drops the ball... but despite all of that, for some people it's a good thing to do occasionally bc otherwise they will never get enough of that social nutrient naturally

There's a connection to the idea of irony poisoning here, and I do not think it is good for the person in question to pretend to hold extremist views. This is a parallel issue with the fact that it's terrible optics and creates a difficult tension with this website's newfound interest in doing communications/policy/outreach work.

Wouldn't that destroy the whole idea? Anyone could tell that an opinion voiced that's not on the list must have been the person's true opinion.

In fact, I'd hope that several people composed the list, and didn't tell each other what items they added, so no one can say for sure that an opinion expressed wasn't one of the "hot takes".