[cvoss]

"Overheated" and "chilled" aren't antonyms here, at least not in the sense I think you're using them.

Overheated: the discourse has too much anger or vitriol, or is too personal and emotionally charged.

Chilled: people have given up on discoursing at all.

If this is what you mean, I don't think we want less discourse as a solution to bad discourse. We want to maintain but temper the discourse.

[aero-deck]

We want an an appropriate degree of emotional engagement with discourse, which is 1-1 with how much discourse is happening. People being too angry is caused by people discoursing too much and vice-versa. There are opposite problems associated w/ too little discourse, but we don't suffer from those.

Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.

[cvoss]

Personally, that's not been my experience at all. I often find that when I have two friends with highly disparate and deeply held beliefs, the intense emotions they associate to these ideas are due to them not actually engaging each other but, instead, taking their emotional cues from their respective ideological silos (where no real discourse is occurring), and then proceeding to talk past each other.

Learning how to actually talk to one another in good faith with humility and charity is a skill that comes with practice. Deciding to engage each other less can worsen the situation by allowing one camp's preconceived notions about another camp to go unchallenged by reality. This allows each camp to tell an increasingly vilifying story about the other, which increases, rather than decreases, the emotional charge between the two.

[aero-deck]

engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with them. "engagement" is what social media companies say they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".

[cvoss]

Fair, but what does that distinction do to illuminate your or my arguments?