I think you’re generally right about your approach, but the problem is that unless the kind of back-and-forth you’re talking about is broadcast in a soundbyte-type format or written up as a single conversation, people other than you and your interlocutor won’t have the patience to stick with it to the end of the process. I’ve had fascinating back-and-forth discussions with people on Medium in response to something I wrote, and those discussions have resulted in both of us getting to a point of greater clarity and agreement, but when I look at Medium’s stats for such dialogue, most other readers fall off somewhere along the way, and influencing one stranger at a time is probably not a productive use of our time. This is why I tend to present my principal arguments as punchy explanations rather than back-and-forth discussions, and my approach has been to avoid crossing over into conservative or liberal talking points (which is easy for me, because I don’t identity with either of those ideologies), and as soon as people get that they’re not just dealing with some doctrinaire liberal or conservative who’s going to be making all the usual arguments they’ve heard before, they tend to soften up and realize that they can have a more open-minded discussion. At least the people who are themselves open-minded tend to realize that. As for those who are closed-minded, I think we just have to wait for them to die off.