I think you may have read into this too far and/or protected a bit much onto it. How do you figure the OP is helping you attack an opposing position?
Instead, OP says "first find out how they got to that position in life" which you gotta understand does come across pretty smug since it implies superiority of opinion/belief and degenerates the disagreer as if they are merely using emotion in their logic.
I think ideally you first want to let the battle of logic fly then get into biography details if it's a very sharp disagreement. It may be worthwhile for both sides to hear each other's upbringing and catalyst -- though you might not take the other's lens as your own, it nevertheless will add a little wisdom
You're not going to be able to convince someone who is disagreeing with you from an emotional place, no matter how much logic you throw at them. In addition, you're making it worse each time you do this, because you're ignoring what they're saying, and what they're saying is really important to them.
Listening with empathy is how you bring people to the table. It's also how you understand when to walk away. When you try to forcefully convince someone out of their emotional beliefs without understanding how they got there (and you aren't coworkers or running out of air or something) they will think you are an asshole. The less emotional / more logical person is in the best position to open with empathy.
Truth often goes deeper than facts and logic.
Discussing things like mathematicians trying to solve a hard math problem would probably help our communications more if anything, compared to say, carrying out discourse like we're all Deepak Chopras...
[0] This idea is described pretty well by the whole "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" discussion:
https://plus.maths.org/content/unreasonable-effectiveness
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly not the case--computers are excellent at computing, but they are pretty dumb. Humans must be around to select, prioritize, assign values, interpret, and put it all together. Otherwise, computers only spit the most mundane truths out of facts plus logic, and that was precisely one of the decisive criticism of positivim.
Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture?
Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition.
And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues...
> The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out.
That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of.
The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.
It can't tell you what objectives are important nor what risks are acceptable. Those are both transitive properties: something is important to some people, something might be acceptable to some people.
There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Even if we try to limit discussion to "facts", things fall apart fairly rapidly once we start talking stochastic events and statistical morality. Controversial subjects get bogged down with duelling sets of statistics each making subtly different claims about causation.
One of the useful things about legal training is that it forces you to separate facts from law. Facts may be true or false but only law and ethics can make claims about what is right and wrong.
It should be noted that this is a controversial view, albeit one commonly held.
There are many people who believe, for example, that given only the laws of physics and the information describing the arrangement of particles making up a kitten, that they could in principle derive the conclusion that it is wrong to set the kitten on fire, without needing any further context. There are many ways to go about this.
Discerning which facts and therefore which course of action to take often involves a judgement call, a portion of which is attempting to know all applicable parties as individuals.
The portion in the original journal entry about filter bubbles and excising dissent from our daily experience speaks to this.
We cannot make wise decisions without knowing as much as possible about both those who disagree with us as well as those who agree with us. Because sometimes the "why" or "how" is as intellectually valuable as the "what".
(Not always, but more than none by a bunch!)