omark

What better way to bond with strangers than to tell them your most controversial viewpoints right off the bat? It’s basically like Cards Against Humanity for rationalists. More specifically, for the Less Wrong Community Weekend in Berlin, all participants were asked to come up with one session to run for their fellow participants. Overton Gymnastics was born from an interest in exploring how we can stretch our Overton windows. Then I got the stomach flu and couldn’t attend the meetup… But people were psyched about the idea! So here are some iterative takes on how to run a session of Overton Gymnastics. If you end up trying it, I’d be excited to hear how it was for you in the comments. Also, as this is a new idea, please do just take it where you’d like. Some variants will be more useful than others, and we can all learn from your experiences! The Initial Idea The following was the initial write up of Overton Gymnastics for the LWCW in Berlin. > Stretch our Overton windows! One person starts by saying something controversial they believe. Someone then volunteers to counter them. First you provide an Ideological Turing Test (ITT) of the controversial claim, then your counter, and then you provide your own controversial claim. The goal is to practice tolerating uncomfortable viewpoints and ITT'ing them accurately. We'll first review some failure modes that became apparent when trying to run the exercise as described, followed by three possible variants you could run. Possible Failure Modes The two greatest challenges during Overton Gymnastics are generating controversial viewpoints and avoiding discussions during the exercise. To help people come up with controversial viewpoints it is useful to prime them with examples of claims that are controversial to different social groups. The goal of the exercise is to come up with claims that are controversial to the current group, but if people struggle with this, then they can be prompted to volunteer more generally co