I would click the “disagree” button if there was one, because many parts of this post are askew to how I understand marriage, divorce, commitment, etc.,
I think of a marriage as two people deciding to build a life together, and commitment as essentially about being “in” on that shared project. This post seems to be coming at it from a different angle, where explicitly specifying things in advance is much more fundamental. It centers honesty vs. dishonesty, ironclad promises, and public accountability in places where those don’t feel like the central concepts to me.
A few of the places where that disagreement came up most strongly:
The paragraph about marriage beginning “The point of a public pledge is help structure our own incentives to fulfill our commitment.” That does not seem like the main point of having a public ceremony, which IMO is more about marking the occasion of the couple building a life together, in common knowledge so that their surrounding community will treat them as a unit.
The paragraph about the mountain climbing promise. Agreeing to climb a mountain before a divorce is finalized doesn’t actually seem to help with the things this post is describing as important. This promise mainly just seems to be acknowledging that an escape clause (divorce) already exists, and adding in an extra step which perhaps is symbolically meaningful to the couple.
The partial sentence “I want people to build within themselves the machinery to be able to make strict pledges that mean things”. As if a pledge needs to be strict in order to be meaningful. There are plenty of meaningful marriages which didn’t specify in advance criteria for a divorce or social consequences of a divorce.
The complaints in the GWWC Pledge section also don’t seem that similar to the arguments in the section on marriage. Standards like ‘Don’t say false things’ (like “till death do we part”) and ‘make it possible to opt out later on, and acknowledge this possibility up front’ which seemed like central parts of the section on marriage are already covered by the current version of the GWWC Pledge.
Seeking PCK was a full (hour or longer) class at every mainline workshop since October 2016 (sometimes called “Seeking Sensibility” or “Seeking Sense”). After you left it was always a full hour+ class, almost always taught by Luke, and often on opening night.
The concept of PCK became part of the workshop content in April 2014 as a flash class (as a lead-in to the tutoring wheel, which was also introduced at that workshop). In October 2016 we added the full class, and then a couple workshops later we removed the flash class from the workshop. Something very close to this chapter made it into the first draft of the CFAR handbook in May 2016, when PCK was still just a flash class, and I guess the chapter didn’t ever get expanded or moved.
After the class was transferred from Val to Luke, Luke was involved in teaching it until the last pre-covid workshop in January 2020. I’m pretty sure he kept the subtraction exercise (that exercise wasn’t removed from the handbook, it just never made it in). A couple other people also taught the class at some point (including Duncan in April 2017), I’d guess at workshops where Val or Luke was absent.
At the January 2020 workshop a new instructor was learning the class & taught some of it along with Luke. I suspect that’s why it was part of the day 1 rotation that workshop rather than being opening night (since it’s helpful for a new instructor to have repetition & smaller groups, and a new instructor’s version of a class hasn’t necessarily cohered enough to be ready to set the tone for the workshop on opening night).
(This history mostly based on records I looked up, supplemented by memory.)