i think there may be a further issue here. i’m trying to locate where the bottleneck is. even tho the weaker signal lane existed, the setup around you may have made that lane weaker than ordinary informal discussion would be for most people. if someone sees you as unusually rational or intellectually high status, it seems easy for that to create exactly the kind of self-doubt you mentioned earlier. things like he probably already thought of this, if i can’t explain it well i’m probably just confused, etc.
that would mean the weaker signal lane was not just less structured than the debate lane, it was also socially weaker than it looked. that looks like the real bottleneck to me… not just that it lacked formal guarantees.