ThinkCritical

Inspiration

We're living in a time of incredible political divisiveness and polarization. As social media and the modern information ecosystem—based off filtered feeds, sensational headlines, and algorithmic outrage—drives more and more people into echo chambers, breeding polarization, humanity is losing the ability to think critically. This is incredibly dangerous as hate around the world rises and people lose the ability to be tolerant. Democracy, scientific progress, and social cohesion all depend on our collective ability to reason together.

We built ThinkCritical to revive constructive dialogue by coaching users to examine issues from multiple perspectives and identify strong, evidence‑based reasoning so that we can reverse the spiral of polarization.

What it does

ThinkCritical is more than a debate simulator—it is a personal Socratic mentor. Choose a topic, state your position, and the platform responds with rigorously sourced counterarguments, identifies hidden assumptions, and surfaces data you may have missed.

You can comprehensively evaluate your past conversations with history, export it to any other platform for comprehensive information. All information is stored locally in a secure manner so that the users are comfortable with sharing their data. Data is persisted across sessions on localhost. You are able to either use example prompts from a library of templates or use a custom chat

How we built it

The application was built with bolt.new using a single prompt. We utilized the gemini api for inferencing, the local storage apis for saving the conversation history and reactJS + tailwind for the frontend. We built with vite js and deployed using netlify.

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

The biggest thing we learned, and were glad to learn was the coachability of critical discourse. Through testing, we were very much able to challenge our own beliefs and become more knowledgeable individuals at the same time.