It's not surprising. If the goal is to engage in a true dialectic and come to either a shared truth or an exploration of how our different axiomatic values can

It's not surprising. If the goal is to engage in a true dialectic and come to either a shared truth or an exploration of how our different axiomatic values can arrive at different well-reasoned conclusions, then - surprise - it turns out we don't even have a communication medium that is well-suited for this. Debates, televised or on stage? They have time limits. Free-wheeling verbal exchanges? They still have time pressure, in that they are synchronous. And like debates, there's also a linear aspect, where it is easy to forget about tangents or branches of thought. Essays? They lack interactivity; form and presentation is prioritized over the true content of the argument. Discussion boards? They are largely immutable, and worse, they are hierarchical - it is still vulnerable to "spreading" since you cannot collapse branches together. What is needed is a communication medium that is asynchronous, that prioritizes argument content over form or presentation, and that follows a graph-structure form. We don't have that. It doesn't yet exist, outside of mathematical proofs. A system that loosened and adapted those principles for non-specialists to comfortably use could change the world. (A lot of people have tried working on this, me included - there are plenty of examples of "argument graphing" and the like out there, but none have really proved workable yet.) Excellent critical thinking takes time, the willingness to revise, and the ability to track. Focusing on speed in the short term just slows things down in the long term.