A former WUDC champion is building an app to provide the best answers to fallacious and bigoted arguments.

That's good and all, but often bigoted opinions and comments are based more on emotions and less on facts. While I am glad it mentions this, I don't think this will sway many, thus making a person win the debate or change that person's bigoted views. It may be good for the ones that will listen to reason and logic, but emotions are well known to ignore them.

What needs to be done, although hard sometimes, is to decipher where this individual got the bigoted idea from and why they believe what they do. This not only allows them to believe you actually care what they think, it provides a basis for you to qualitatively gather data that can be used to prove them wrong with facts. The bigoted belief may come from a personal experience that facts do not cover, and without asking, you afford to miss this and allow them to ignore what you are saying. This App may be able to help you with getting more facts, but alone it will not be as effective.

That's also the problem. I found this with myself in debates too. I often hear someone talking about something and spewing off things that are lies or treating correlations as causation, so naturally I go in trying to provide objective facts. I then assume all of these other facts because they have this one stance, that very well may not be true. I could be alienating a possible ally because I believe I can generalize their opinion on one matter as the same for many others. This App appears to possibly generalize arguments and takes away the subjective element that may be needed in debating. Or maybe not. I haven't seen this App yet.

/r/Debate Thread