What improvements should be made to improve EA discussion on heated topics?

I agree and to that end want to block the forum for a week. A problem I see with coming back in a few months and giving a cold take on something is that ~everyone is going to be sick of the topic due to all the hot takes that happened and won't want to talk in a way that will change anything. Emotionality seems needed to motivate change.

I brought up something similar in this thread, and appreciated people making the point that anger as a reaction is still informative and might feel appropriate to communicate in the moment.

I think you can have both by communicating your feelings and how you interpreted something while being careful not to jump to judgments on what should happen and who behaved wrongly. I'm basically thinking of the non-violent communication framework, where you're taught to carefully differentiate between observations, your feelings and needs, and requests,  while avoiding making judgements about others because it reliably undermines mutual understanding.

This seems worth an experiment.

Or just the ability to run polls on shortforms.

I think when CHSP investigated something similar in the past there wasn't a lot of value found. Can get more details if desired.

I'm interested at least.

Yeah, I think it's plausible that town halls or conversations between a small set of people should be more of a go-to move.

Yea. I like the idea of more/better moderation. I would note that it's a pretty thankless+exhausting job (many thanks to the current mods), so one big challenge is finding people  strong enough, trusted enough, and willing to do it.

I suspect a lot of people were thinking “well obviously it’s a terrible email, that goes without saying”

Some people seem to disagree even with that, while for others (or for me at least) it indeed seemed that almost everyone agreed, but the old email was never the point.

Thanks! I was planning on forwarding this to you, happy you saw it earlier :)

Did a pass at this: [Shortform here]
Features that contribute to heated discussion on the forum

Interpersonal and Emotional

• Fear, on all sides
  • Political backlash
  • What other EAs will think of you
  • Just sometimes the experience of being on the forum
• Trying to protect colleagues or friends
• Speed as a reaction to having strong opinions, or worrying that others will jump on you
• Frustration at having to rehash arguments / protect things that should go without saying
• Desire to gain approval / goodwill from people you’d like to hire/fund/etc you in the future
• Desire to sound smart
• Desire to gain approval / goodwill from your friends, or people you respect
• Pattern matching (correctly or not) to conversations you’ve had before and porting over the emotional baggage from them
  • Sometimes it helps to assume the people you’re talking to are still trying to win their last argument with someone else

Low trust environment

• Surprise that something is even a question
• I think there's a nasty feedback loop in tense situations with low trust. (This section by Ozzie Gooen)
  • People don't communicate openly their takes on things.
  • This leads to significant misunderstanding.
  • This leads to distrust of each other and assumptions of poor intent.
  • This leads to parties doing more zero-sum or adversarial actions to each other.
  • When any communication does happen, it's inspected with a magnifying glass (because of how rare it is). It's misunderstood (because of how little communication there has been).
  • The communicators then think, "What's the point? My communication is misunderstood and treated with hostility." So they communicate less.
• Not tracking being scrupulously truth-telling out of a desire to get less criticism
• Not feeling like part of the decision making process, opaqueness of the reasoning of EA leadership 
• Not understanding how and why decisions that affect you are made
• Feeling misunderstood by the public, sometimes feeling wilfully misunderstood
   

Something to protect / Politics

• Trying to protect a norm you think matters
• Trying to protect other people you think are being treated unfairly
• Trying to create the EA you want by fiat / speech actions
• Power / game theoretical desires to have power shift in EA towards preferred distribution  
• Speed - a sense that the conversation will get away from you otherwise

Organizational politics

• An interest in understanding the internals of organizations you’re not part of
• An interest in not-sharing the internals of organizations you are part of

Different comments sections or something?