> This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. Chief among the strategies exploiting this rule was “spreading” (a combination of “speed” and “reading”), where debaters would rattle off arguments at a blistering pace. Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.)
This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It'll happen as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended.
It's unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is hard if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (i.e. they're not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you've introduced role-playing elements, basically)
Yes, I think there is a real trade-off between an objective scoring system and making it resemble a real activity.
Something similar seems to have happened in sport fencing. The style of fencing in the 19th and early 20th century is now known as "classical fencing". It was practiced as a sport but also as a preparation for duels, so the techniques had to be useful in a fight with sharp weapons. Wikipedia[1] says
> Scoring was done by means of four judges who determined if a hit was made. Two side judges stood behind and to the side of each fencer, and watched for hits made by that fencer on the opponent's target. ... There also were problems with bias: well-known fencers were often given the benefit of mistakes (so-called "reputation touches"), and in some cases there was outright cheating.
Then in the 1930s, electrical scoring was introduced. This is objective, but it led a big change in style, because now you could score by just touching your opponent, even if such a light attack would be ineffective in a real fight.
By contrast, kendo never introduced electrical scoring, and still uses human judges. A judge can refuse to award a point if an attack connected but didn't have enough force behind it---this avoids rewarding techniques that would not work in combat. So kendo is maybe closer to actual sword fighting, but on the other hand e.g. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash makes fun of the subjectivity:
> As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the right amount of zanshin.
I guess the corresponding thing in debate club would be to give more discretion to the judges, so they wouldn't award a point if there was insufficient follow-through...
To me the interesting thing about debate is that everything is, well, up for debate. There are different judging styles, but if you have a truly "tabula rasa" judge and you can make a compelling case that spreading is bad for debate, harming the community/activity/etc., and it should be a voting issue that supersedes all voting issues that your opponent presented, you could potentially win the round on that argument alone, without ever having to directly address your opponent's arguments. Do this successfully a couple of times and word would get out, and other teams will either come up with a litany of arguments against your spreading critique or just talk slowly when they debate you. If other teams began to adopt this strategy you might start to see a community-wide change.
(On the other hand, you might get a judge who would laugh you out of the room for making such an argument, or on the other end of the spectrum a judge from somewhere in rural west Texas who will automatically vote against anyone who speaks >200 WPM. The judge is God first and foremost, but if your judge claims to be tabula rasa you can make and potentially win any argument you feel like.)
In debate styles (BP, Worlds) outside of America, "spreading" fails completely, even though dropped arguments are still considered conceded. The key is that inane arguments can be shot down with POIs (questions asked during the speech) or dismissed in batches. Also, if you speak too fast and the judge can't follow your arguments that's your fault.
When I was in high school, American teams usually did pretty poorly in international competitions because the Lincoln-Douglas style does not transfer well into World's style.
You are absolutely right in that this is all about the structure of the incentives.
Show me the incentives/disincentives people are exposed to, and I'll tell you how they'll behave... since most people are rational actors (even if "good" or "bad").
As someone who ran highly kritikal affs and Ks on neg - the rules aren't set, they are up to you to define in the round. Sure, you could get a judge that is super pro-policy and hates anything critical but those were fairly few and far between. If someone is trying to spread you or put an independent voting issue on something inane, critique that entire style of debate. Merely dropping an argument isn't enough to lose you the round - unless it was a fairly big IVI.
It's not a failure of the rules. I was a big debate nerd for three years, and the article is somewhat misrepresentative of how the game works.
To be clear, there are no "rules" in debate except that the judge gets to decide who wins, and perhaps the amounts of speaking and prep times allotted each team. There is no scorekeeping other than W or L on the final ballot. One might reasonably expect that the human element would force debaters to "keep it real", so to speak - speed-reading through a bunch of obviously-bullshit argumentation that a policy will lead to half a dozen different global nuclear wars is not something that most people would find convincing, after all.
What's actually happened is that debaters have built up an elaborate metagame, debating with their own terminology and conventions that have grown obnoxiously opaque to the uninformed viewer, and they've been enabled to do so by some unfortunate realities of the debate environment.
Since it's hard to find normal people willing to spend their Saturdays sitting in a high school classroom listening to teenagers role-play as politicians, debate judges are frequently sourced from within the community - they'll be former debaters, or debate coaches from a different school. Debating for a "flow judge" ("flowing", in debate jargon, is how argumentation is tracked on paper) is a very different thing than debating for a "lay judge", and the debate techniques described in the article are vastly less prevalent in the latter case. Most hardcore debaters, however, prefer to have a flow judge - it enables them to use their entire bag of tricks, and frankly is more fun.
This ends up allowing the craziness of the debate metagame to perpetuate by a couple means - for one, it means that schools hosting debate tournaments are pressured to supply flow judges for as many rounds as possible, especially for important finals rounds (if they don't, students won't want to come back, and tournament registration fees are important part of a debate team's funding). Secondly, it alienates lay judges, who often come out of a round feeling "unqualified" to render a decision, overwhelmed with anxiety about being forced to assign a winner and a loser among teams who might as well have been speaking a different language. Finding a layperson willing to judge policy debate more than once is really rare.
So the problem really isn't that the rules encourage degenerate behavior, it's that flow judges do by continuing to award wins to that bullshit. And in the context of policy debate, I don't even know if I'd call this a problem - we enjoyed our made up rules just fine, and if you wanted something more down to earth you could just move to LD or PF styles.
>This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to.
Right. In practice, if you want to engineer the rules to be good, (I think) you need both the rigid, pre-defined, unforgiving logical rules, and some inarticulable "I know it when I see it" rules.
I wonder, are there any theorems on the bounds of how far an optimizer can deviate from another's agent's desired outcome if the agent is limited to specifying the rules in n bits and can specify p arbitrary vetoes?
(Made another reply, but kept this separate for its unrelated point.)
If I had known there were role-playing elements to debate, me and my twelfth level fighter/mage would have checked out debate club back when I was in school. Looking at some of the other comments here, it looks like debate must have the rules complexity to be a proper RPG.
This is often referred to as "spewing." It is common for contestants to ask a judge about the judge's preferences before they actually begin the debate. Some will specifically ask about the judge's attitude regarding spewing.
It is also very common for debates to be judged by people who are very inexperienced in debate. A single weekend tournament can involve hundreds of rounds of debate, many dozens happening simultaneously. So a tournament can require several dozen judges. These judges are often volunteers recruited by the hosting school. They could be parents, teachers, janitors, the lunch lady, bus drivers, you name it. In such situations, the judges might get a 5 minute overview of what they are supposed to know, then they are handed a ballot that is "self-explanatory" (not).
If you spew to a judge like that, their eyes will glaze over and they will mark you down. But even if they don't, spewing won't help you because the judges don't know how to "flow" a debate to track all the arguments made, countered, etc. And they don't know they are supposed to reward non-rebutted arguments anyway.
So, spewing is really only a valuable technique when you are in front of a judge you know to be competent. This is a minority of all debates. So you have to be prepared to go at a normal speed, which requires a completely different strategy. And you will use those strategies so much more often that they become your bread and butter.
Unless you play on the national circuit. Then you can expect sharp judges.
I was actually not very good at debate but very good at reading fast, from rapping along to songs on the radio. I only did one year of debate but won several rounds by simply "spreading" so many arguments that the other team could not keep up. In one tournament, I read 7 "disads" in one speech (normal would be 2) and came very close to losing consciousness near the end, stopping 30 seconds early. In the next session, for my own health, I simply read at a conversational pace, and while we lost that round, the judge said he was sick of people reading fast and awarded me a perfect score on an individual basis.
I was overall terrible at debate but that was a bit of fun, even if it wasn't anything that should be called "debate."
I did a stint on the policy debate team at my university, and I agree, and it's why I quit soon thereafter, despite having a pretty good record.
It all depends on desired outcomes. If we consider dialogue/debate as a kind of dialectic where one argument serves to sharpen the other as both/all parties seek some kind of truth, however that may be construed, then the sport of debate creates a culture of essentially dishonest argumentation.
Debaters get so into winning that they very quickly fail to recognize the difference between battering their opponent into submission, and actually seeking answers in good faith. You can argue until you're blue in the face that the sport can be separated from the "reality," but it turns into a kind of cognitive capture for the debaters. If they can't take a step back, like the author of this article did, and see how fundamentally disingenuous the activity is, then they are going to be actively making society worse insofar as they use their abilities for anything at all (i.e., politics).
This might be a cheap shot, but Karl Rove seems like a pretty good case in point.
Disclaimer: I've never taken part in such debate organizations.
What if debates also had a word limit in addition to a time limit. Say, if each side has four minutes to talk, they need to keep it under 500 words, with 500 additional "flex" words throughout the night. Teams going over the word count regularly would be penalized.
Ideally it would force debaters to remain concise. Of course, what would probably happen is the game would devolve to one of memorizing the thesaurus, so it's a hard problem to tackle... But that's okay! Modern video games have balance changes when a certain "meta" becomes too overwhelming. Professional sports leagues modify their rules every year to combat teams giving themselves an edge that isn't within the spirit of the game >coughNewEnglandPatriotscough<. It's a constant battle that any "game" manager needs to address over time.
Especially in boardgames you often see what looks like a tiny hardly relevant rule tweak produce drastically different player behavior. That's why you playtest early and iterate often.
Your fundamental thesis -- that perverse incentives have created an activity that few would explicitly design or choose -- in not correct. People -- mostly adult human volunteers -- do choose this style, of their own free will, thousands of times every weekend.
BTW, the article's fundamental thesis is also factually incorrect. Speed only wins rounds at the lowest level of competition; you'll never win an important tournament by being faster than your opponents.
> This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is
Debate has never had a single, fixed purpose. Especially as an educational activity, debate is a victim of its own versatility. A debate activity optimized to teach logical analysis and research skills might be detrimental to the development of rhetoric and persuasion skills. And vice-versa.
When I go to debate tournaments, what I see are teenagers discussing "amicus briefs and economic analyses" "early on a Saturday morning", as the article puts it. Who the hell cares how fast they talk?
I mean, really, are America's political problems the result of too many people debating "amicus briefs and economic analyses"? Or is our problem too many used car salesman who prefer rhetoric to evidence? Because the latter is the common failure mode you get when debate is judged according to more subjective standards.
In fact, the article contains an exemplar of the sort of argument common in more rhetoric-oriented forms of debate. If you read the article, you get the sense that the author himself once excelled at the speed reading activity he's critiquing, and in fact even won a national championship in it (if you make it to the bio). Wow, if he was so good, he must really know what he's talking about and be making an honest, self-reflective critique (you can even find comments here stating exactly that!)
But in fact that national championship he won was in a very different type of debate that was imported to the US as a reaction to speed reading, among other practices that -- as far as I can tell -- the author never competed in (at least a varsity level). This sort of "technically true very clever" rhetorical bullshit is what turns me off on more persuasion-oriented debate styles. Technical debating styles -- even when slowed down -- emphasize evidence over this sort of rhetoric.
> until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to.
Debate is the way it is because the people judging the rounds do want it to be that way. Given the choice, they prefer an esoteric activity with substantive content over a vacuous duel between competing real estate salesmen. Every single round, someone chooses -- completely of their own free will -- a winner. And the state of the activity is a direct reflection of those choices.
Debate is not the way you want it to be because you and/or people who agree with you are not volunteering enough hours to provide the reward signals that would create the activity and environment that you want.
--
(It's also worth noting that 99% of high school debate rounds are terrible, and that this has more to do with the "high school" part of the sentence and less to do with the particular style of debate -- or even debate itself. 99% of high school football is also crap.)
I always felt I would have done a lot better in tournaments if my opponents talked at a pace I could comprehend. In retrospect, I should have probably pursued another branch of forensics instead.
> as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors
Senator McCain called Congress’s bluff about technicalities replacing substance in reforming health care. High School Debate isnt the the only institution with this problem.
There’s also an asymmetry in that rebutting even a trivially wrong argument takes much longer than it did for the other side to make in the first place.
I disagree, although I found debate obnoxious and inane.
Like many things, debate is a specialist practice in its own right. When the argument itself is the focus of competition, you have to go down the rabbit hole and compete over who is the best lawyer of the debate rules.
When you become a practitioner of many specialist topics, the nuance of the rules and exploiting them is part of the mechanics of what you do.
>the more Machiavellian debaters attempted to gain an edge by overwhelming their opponents with as many arguments and as much supporting evidence as possible. This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was.
So in high school debate I didn't do so well. I think primarily because I didn't have enough information prepared before going in to respond to an opponents case.
I had routinely been smacked down by judges who felt I didn't attack a point sufficiently to avoid conceding it.
So for one tournament, the proposition at hand was whether global concerns ought to be held above local ones. I stated case that aliens had infiltrated most, if not all, national governments, and they had a goal of putting the human race into slavery, or worse. Clearly global concerns for survival trump local government concerns that may be based on ulterior motives. Hey, it was the mid 1990s, and X Files was all the rage among nerds.
My opponents would say they wouldn't even dignify that stuff with an answer. I responded that they conceded my point, then, and judges agreed.
Out of 4 matches that tournament I won three. The fourth time, I got an opponent who actually called my bluff since I obviously had no evidence to back up my assertion.
My debate coach got the scores back and wondered what happened, because I was otherwise the losingest member of the debate team. She congratulated me on winning and hacking the rules, and then told me she never wanted to hear about me composing a case like that again.
I was a high school debater. The topic that year, if I recall, was "Resolved: the United States should embark on a campaign to restore political stability to Latin America".
The last competition I was at, some of my school's teammates went up against what I thought of as "The Superweapon".
The debate starts out with the normal political, social and military arguments related to your side of the proposition, and then moves on to phase 2: even so, none of it matters because Jesus Christ's return to Earth is imminent. "Expert" after "expert" weighing in on Christ's return and its implication for Latin America.
I had a very large briefcase -- a case full of briefs -- but, uh, none of those briefs really addressed that particular line of attack.
"Corrosion"? It sounds like high school debate started relatively recently, in the 70s, and basically went downhill within a few years. So it's always been a sewer.
I enjoy "intellectual discussion", so I went to a college debate team practice once to see if I wanted to join (back in 2003 or so) - I walked out of there with my mind blown. There was absolutely nothing intellectual about college debate team. The entire point was just to see who could say the most words per minute. When I explicitly asked, I was told that content doesn't really matter, just fast talking.
Huge surprise that this article ignores the most important movement in policy debate (and LD) over the last 20-30 years: a shift from policy to critical debate, which is focused less on abstract notions of 'nuke war' and more on critically discussing and analyzing social issues.
Another poster posted (as a dog-whistle) a link to Towson JR, the first team of black women to win the national debate championship. Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent. The author of this article went to a "pr-Ivy" with a $70 million endowment. That's some privilege to complain about - he even humblebrags about it: "From winter to spring, in settings as grand as a Harvard lecture hall and as cramped as a boiler room in a Salt Lake City public school, [...]". Flying to Alta (so sorry their campus isn't as nice as yours) isn't cheap or something everyone can do!
Also, since everybody rants about spreading - many critical teams do not spread, or are at least under 300 words per minute. There is a growing recognition and acceptance of the privilege it takes to spend an hour each night doing speaking drills.
I'm genuinely curious what people think about this:
"On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.
In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!” he yelled."
> Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent.
LOL nah.
Have you ever heard of the Urban Debate League? This is a debate league that is entirely comprised of debate programs from inner city schools. Any school can create a debate program and join the UDL, and they will give you money to become a traveling team if you do well enough. Many schools sent their students to stupid expensive debate camps, too.
While our school was part of the NFL, my family was relatively broke compared to the families that you describe. They still did their damnest to keep me in debate. Very few of my team members were “privileged.”
There were plenty of scholarships that gave us the ability to attend debate camps at significant discounts, and many took advantage of them. There were plenty of kids who were able to pay outright, but it certainly wasn’t exclusive.
That still falls far short of allaying the concern in my opinion. I hope people rant about spreading and continue to do so for as long as necessary until it's changed. At least take the practice where this behavior constitutes "winning" and categorize it as something other than debate.
These articles pop up once in a while, and it always makes me grateful for my high school debate experience. New England private schools don't compete in NFL, they have their own league that's federated with some other private school leagues from around the world. Spreading is banned, essentially on the good, old-fashioned, "we know it when we see it" standard.
I readily admit that for most people, it's not so simple as, "you want good high school debate? Simple! Just go to Hotchkiss or Exeter." (schools that cost $50k/year) In theory, there's no reason why other leagues and schools could not ban spreading and put down a rhetoric-forward, comprehensive debate format. The catch, it seems, is that none of them have successfully done so. It's probably a culture thing-- the New England prep schools have a fairly large community of teachers and students who know how their debate format works, who know how to practice and judge for a less formulaic format. It's not obvious how you would create such a culture out of nowhere, and you'll get little help from New Englanders, especially the prep set, who are famously provincial about education.
This reminds me of a phenomenal Radiolab episode, on how a team of black students managed to turn the tables on teams that were effective at "spreading" [1]. I think the author alludes to this:
> Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.
I do pretty much agree with the author though. Everything has become a game and we've completely lost sight of the fact that we're ultimately trying to build a better society. It's a big part of why I stopped identifying with political labels. Although, as always, I'm suspicious of the concept that there ever were "good old days".
Unfortunately, this is even more true in college. Policy debate teams are well funded at universities (the policy team at mine has a 6 figure budget) because they essentially conduct research writing cases on gun control, drug policy, healthcare, etc. I compete in British Parliamentary Debate in which no evidence packets are allowed in the round and the resolution is only revealed 15 minutes before the start. The consequence is that argumentation and persuasion take precedence over pretentious motermouthed screaming comparisons of Harvard studies vs Yale studies that only exclude minorities and women from the activity.
I agree with the article that debate competitions get gamed very quickly with age. I competed in Parli in both high school, where it was a new event in our circuit, and in college, where there was an established scene. The difference was night and day.
High school Parli was similar to what you described and was a joy to compete in; a more "pure" debate where clever argumentation and thinking on your feet really mattered. College Parli was a nightmare morass of arguments over rules technicalities in attempts to define the topic as something obviously favorable to your side - my team had a stock "farm subsidies are bad" speech we would try to guide every possible round towards. On average, 60% of each speech was spent on arguing over what the debate round should be about rather than anything of substance.
> I compete in British Parliamentary Debate in which no evidence packets are allowed in the round and the resolution is only revealed 15 minutes before the start. The consequence is that argumentation and persuasion take precedence over pretentious motermouthed screaming comparisons of Harvard studies vs Yale studies that only exclude minorities and women from the activity.
It's counter-intuitive to me that more preparation leads to worse discussion on the topic.
Debate teaches you how to think. Teaches you how to respond to arguments efficiently and concisely and how to organize information.
I regard HS Debate as the best times of my life. The insane amount of stuff you learn is just crazy. What other activities are there that exposes you non stop to political critique, current events, history, energy policy and puts you in contact with some extremely smart people?
And if you really hate it, there is nothing stopping you from running K's and stuff. Most were really stupid, but at the very least it teaches how to argue against irrational/stupid arguments in a practical manner.
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.
I was also on my high school debate team, Student Congress to be specific (though Lincoln-Douglas was an option).
I joined because I loved policy and imagining the impact of legislative changes. The fact that most of our debates were on mock legislation that other students had written made it even better, because we argued topics that the real congress would never touch. I learned so much about researching and building arguments, even if my record didn't show it (never placed once in 2 years). I learned that being right was not as important as being aware of the tone of the room and making yourself heard and tailoring your arguments appropriately. I was not naturally gifted for on-the-fly speaking, but I did improve even so. And importantly, I learned things about myself and avoided pursuing a career I might have hated.
I regret nothing even though I have no dusty trophies to show. The friendship and experience I gained from traveling around the state with other politics nerds was, and always will be, the best part.
I have a hard time agreeing that there's much of a parallel between "[what's wrong with] American politics" and a 15 year old "spending many long nights holed up poring over amicus briefs or economic analyses".
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the backlash against highly technical forms of debate is most indicative of the current political moment. From my perspective, the backlash is basically just lots of people with at-best marginal interest and basically no skin in the game loudly condescending legions of volunteer educators.
More-over, the politicians who most typify the current political moment more resemble the under-prepared student sweet-talking their way out of a substantive debate than the over-prepared egg head presenting an 15-point analysis of an amicus brief at break-neck speed.
Critiques of overly-technical, jargon-filled, evidence-heavy debate styles aren't exactly difficult to sell. And there's a lot to be said for slowing things down (I insist on quality over quantity when I judge).
But it's worth pointing out that the proposed alternative styles devolve into "dueling used car salesmen" at least as often as the former devolve into "speed competitions". I'd rather watch a bad speed match than a bad duel between clueless care salesmen, but that's certainly a personal preference between two objectively bad choices.
In other words, most high school students aren't particularly good at making arguments and will settle for style when they can't win on substance. That's true regardless of the style you choose to emphasize.
The important thing is that tens of thousands of kids learn how to present a speech in front of an audience and also get some practice reading "amicus briefs and economic analyses".
I see the parallels that are being drawn to politics, but debate IS a scorable game. There's a winner and a judge. Of course game tactics are going to play a major role, and of course more arguments are going to be advantageous compared to fewer arguments. You might want debate to a Socratic exercise in truth-seeking, but if you wanted that, you wouldn't declare one team the winner. None of this is related to the current political climate, which has a much stranger problem around the rejection of facts and evidence and logic entirely.
If you want make debate about convincing an audience of laymen, the judgement needs to be done by an audience of laymen. Do that, and the pace of the debate will slow significantly, since there's no benefit to making an argument that the audience can't hear or understand. But then your complaint will become "these people are dumbing down their arguments and winning, how can we fix this?!"
Yeah, it's a game - is someone surprised by this? - and a really fun one. I played it for 4 years and sucked at it. Still fun as hell and really intense, even if you are mediocre. Kinda like PUBG... :P
I'm sorry, did someone really think that a high school extra curricular was going to act as some kind of deep and wisened meditation for teens on rhetoric?
More than anything else, debate forces you to think quick on your feet - really, /really/ quick. Tantamount to an e-sport, but WAY more open ended, since the aff and neg can run just about anything under the sun, or even go meta (which seems more common since the early 90's when I debated).
Yes debate is a terrible model for useful rhetoric. It's also a hellishly fun boxing match for brains/mouths.
Why do they even teach debate, while most high school student probably have never even heard of dialectic. Debate is useful in competitive environments of power, where you have your self interest as a goal. It doesn't seem very healthy for society to be teaching such self centered tactics to high schoolers without at least also teaching about truth centered tactics like dialectics.
The people that make it to the UK parliament got their education in debating chambers. This is taken seriously at the posh schools, e.g. Eton, and the posh universities, e.g. Oxford. It is not important in most state comprehensive schools or those universities that have access courses.
I was lucky enough to go to a comprehensive school where the debating chamber was important. The school does not have a debating chamber now. A few key teachers retired and momentum was lost. Strange how the must attend event no longer matters.
Having spent roughly a year doing Parliamentary style debate at the college level and various forms of speech/debate all through high school (admittedly I ended up doing mostly student-congress which is somewhat removed from direct adversarial debate but introduces other challenges), I find this article quite accurate about the state of HS debate. I wonder why at the college level (where the same kinds of "dropped argument" rules apply) the debate hasn't turned to 300 word-per-minute screeds (at least while I was competing).
On a related note, I explicitly avoided policy debate in HS because of its non-sensical verbal vomit style, and by few experiences with Lincoln-Douglass (LD) just seemed too abstract. One of the things I liked at the college level was that teams would present cases that were a little more practical than LD without the "I need to memorize wikipedia and 3 years of the Economist then recite it all" aspects of Policy Debate (PD). Judges also had some discretion on judging whether the case was a fair case (the affirmative team presented a case of their invention usually), which helped curb abuse. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that flexibility at the HS level.
The Attic Greeks prized debate – rhetoric – but seemed not to suffer from these problems to quite the same degree. (Their problems were different and retained their interest, I suspect, rather longer than those of North America will. Read Plato's Phaedrus for a contemporary critique.)
We're a long way from vanished Hellas, but we do know a few tricks they didn't. For instance, we know that the elderly, while suffering a certain decline in the fluid intelligence necessary to react rapidly to novelty, can do well in crystallized intelligence – that factor which employs skills, knowledge, life experience, and, in short, wisdom.
I therefore propose a "Legacy" debate category, to be judged only by those above the age of, say, 70. A pace of 300 words per minute, while impressive, will not be much good when assessed by those whose brains are no longer physically capable of processing that hypersyllabification.
I guess what I don't get is how even LD debates were able to be compromised by technicality, "spreading" and increasing velocity. As other commenters mentioned, spreading can be judged on a know it when you see it basis. Velocity could be similarly judged, or stopped with an explicit limit on rate of speech. Technicality is more difficult but probably becomes less of a problem if the other two are sorted out.
It sounds like the real failure is the failure to meaningfully regulate the offending behaviors. Maybe there is difficulty regulating it, but the "gee, we'll never be able to fix it regardless of how we regulate" is more likely an attitude of lethargic helplessness rather than a meditation on the nature of competitive debate itself.
[+] [-] ashark|8 years ago|reply
This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It'll happen as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended.
It's unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is hard if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (i.e. they're not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you've introduced role-playing elements, basically)
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|8 years ago|reply
Something similar seems to have happened in sport fencing. The style of fencing in the 19th and early 20th century is now known as "classical fencing". It was practiced as a sport but also as a preparation for duels, so the techniques had to be useful in a fight with sharp weapons. Wikipedia[1] says
> Scoring was done by means of four judges who determined if a hit was made. Two side judges stood behind and to the side of each fencer, and watched for hits made by that fencer on the opponent's target. ... There also were problems with bias: well-known fencers were often given the benefit of mistakes (so-called "reputation touches"), and in some cases there was outright cheating.
Then in the 1930s, electrical scoring was introduced. This is objective, but it led a big change in style, because now you could score by just touching your opponent, even if such a light attack would be ineffective in a real fight.
By contrast, kendo never introduced electrical scoring, and still uses human judges. A judge can refuse to award a point if an attack connected but didn't have enough force behind it---this avoids rewarding techniques that would not work in combat. So kendo is maybe closer to actual sword fighting, but on the other hand e.g. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash makes fun of the subjectivity:
> As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the right amount of zanshin.
I guess the corresponding thing in debate club would be to give more discretion to the judges, so they wouldn't award a point if there was insufficient follow-through...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing
[+] [-] throwaway287391|8 years ago|reply
(On the other hand, you might get a judge who would laugh you out of the room for making such an argument, or on the other end of the spectrum a judge from somewhere in rural west Texas who will automatically vote against anyone who speaks >200 WPM. The judge is God first and foremost, but if your judge claims to be tabula rasa you can make and potentially win any argument you feel like.)
[+] [-] lasfter|8 years ago|reply
When I was in high school, American teams usually did pretty poorly in international competitions because the Lincoln-Douglas style does not transfer well into World's style.
[+] [-] pmarreck|8 years ago|reply
Show me the incentives/disincentives people are exposed to, and I'll tell you how they'll behave... since most people are rational actors (even if "good" or "bad").
Lastly, how is the debate behavior these flawed rules resulted in, not just a "gish gallop"? (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop)
[+] [-] linuxps2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezrast|8 years ago|reply
To be clear, there are no "rules" in debate except that the judge gets to decide who wins, and perhaps the amounts of speaking and prep times allotted each team. There is no scorekeeping other than W or L on the final ballot. One might reasonably expect that the human element would force debaters to "keep it real", so to speak - speed-reading through a bunch of obviously-bullshit argumentation that a policy will lead to half a dozen different global nuclear wars is not something that most people would find convincing, after all.
What's actually happened is that debaters have built up an elaborate metagame, debating with their own terminology and conventions that have grown obnoxiously opaque to the uninformed viewer, and they've been enabled to do so by some unfortunate realities of the debate environment.
Since it's hard to find normal people willing to spend their Saturdays sitting in a high school classroom listening to teenagers role-play as politicians, debate judges are frequently sourced from within the community - they'll be former debaters, or debate coaches from a different school. Debating for a "flow judge" ("flowing", in debate jargon, is how argumentation is tracked on paper) is a very different thing than debating for a "lay judge", and the debate techniques described in the article are vastly less prevalent in the latter case. Most hardcore debaters, however, prefer to have a flow judge - it enables them to use their entire bag of tricks, and frankly is more fun.
This ends up allowing the craziness of the debate metagame to perpetuate by a couple means - for one, it means that schools hosting debate tournaments are pressured to supply flow judges for as many rounds as possible, especially for important finals rounds (if they don't, students won't want to come back, and tournament registration fees are important part of a debate team's funding). Secondly, it alienates lay judges, who often come out of a round feeling "unqualified" to render a decision, overwhelmed with anxiety about being forced to assign a winner and a loser among teams who might as well have been speaking a different language. Finding a layperson willing to judge policy debate more than once is really rare.
So the problem really isn't that the rules encourage degenerate behavior, it's that flow judges do by continuing to award wins to that bullshit. And in the context of policy debate, I don't even know if I'd call this a problem - we enjoyed our made up rules just fine, and if you wanted something more down to earth you could just move to LD or PF styles.
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
Right. In practice, if you want to engineer the rules to be good, (I think) you need both the rigid, pre-defined, unforgiving logical rules, and some inarticulable "I know it when I see it" rules.
I wonder, are there any theorems on the bounds of how far an optimizer can deviate from another's agent's desired outcome if the agent is limited to specifying the rules in n bits and can specify p arbitrary vetoes?
(Made another reply, but kept this separate for its unrelated point.)
[+] [-] labster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antispew|8 years ago|reply
It is also very common for debates to be judged by people who are very inexperienced in debate. A single weekend tournament can involve hundreds of rounds of debate, many dozens happening simultaneously. So a tournament can require several dozen judges. These judges are often volunteers recruited by the hosting school. They could be parents, teachers, janitors, the lunch lady, bus drivers, you name it. In such situations, the judges might get a 5 minute overview of what they are supposed to know, then they are handed a ballot that is "self-explanatory" (not).
If you spew to a judge like that, their eyes will glaze over and they will mark you down. But even if they don't, spewing won't help you because the judges don't know how to "flow" a debate to track all the arguments made, countered, etc. And they don't know they are supposed to reward non-rebutted arguments anyway.
So, spewing is really only a valuable technique when you are in front of a judge you know to be competent. This is a minority of all debates. So you have to be prepared to go at a normal speed, which requires a completely different strategy. And you will use those strategies so much more often that they become your bread and butter.
Unless you play on the national circuit. Then you can expect sharp judges.
[+] [-] qq66|8 years ago|reply
I was overall terrible at debate but that was a bit of fun, even if it wasn't anything that should be called "debate."
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
Hm, that seems off to me. One word per second is slow! Just from eyeballing this Google search, I'm getting 110-200 WPM as conversational pace:
https://www.google.com/search?q=conversational+wpm+speed&ie=...
[+] [-] samirillian|8 years ago|reply
It all depends on desired outcomes. If we consider dialogue/debate as a kind of dialectic where one argument serves to sharpen the other as both/all parties seek some kind of truth, however that may be construed, then the sport of debate creates a culture of essentially dishonest argumentation.
Debaters get so into winning that they very quickly fail to recognize the difference between battering their opponent into submission, and actually seeking answers in good faith. You can argue until you're blue in the face that the sport can be separated from the "reality," but it turns into a kind of cognitive capture for the debaters. If they can't take a step back, like the author of this article did, and see how fundamentally disingenuous the activity is, then they are going to be actively making society worse insofar as they use their abilities for anything at all (i.e., politics).
This might be a cheap shot, but Karl Rove seems like a pretty good case in point.
[+] [-] anthony_romeo|8 years ago|reply
What if debates also had a word limit in addition to a time limit. Say, if each side has four minutes to talk, they need to keep it under 500 words, with 500 additional "flex" words throughout the night. Teams going over the word count regularly would be penalized.
Ideally it would force debaters to remain concise. Of course, what would probably happen is the game would devolve to one of memorizing the thesaurus, so it's a hard problem to tackle... But that's okay! Modern video games have balance changes when a certain "meta" becomes too overwhelming. Professional sports leagues modify their rules every year to combat teams giving themselves an edge that isn't within the spirit of the game >coughNewEnglandPatriotscough<. It's a constant battle that any "game" manager needs to address over time.
[+] [-] KVFinn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayjava|8 years ago|reply
BTW, the article's fundamental thesis is also factually incorrect. Speed only wins rounds at the lowest level of competition; you'll never win an important tournament by being faster than your opponents.
> This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is
Debate has never had a single, fixed purpose. Especially as an educational activity, debate is a victim of its own versatility. A debate activity optimized to teach logical analysis and research skills might be detrimental to the development of rhetoric and persuasion skills. And vice-versa.
When I go to debate tournaments, what I see are teenagers discussing "amicus briefs and economic analyses" "early on a Saturday morning", as the article puts it. Who the hell cares how fast they talk?
I mean, really, are America's political problems the result of too many people debating "amicus briefs and economic analyses"? Or is our problem too many used car salesman who prefer rhetoric to evidence? Because the latter is the common failure mode you get when debate is judged according to more subjective standards.
In fact, the article contains an exemplar of the sort of argument common in more rhetoric-oriented forms of debate. If you read the article, you get the sense that the author himself once excelled at the speed reading activity he's critiquing, and in fact even won a national championship in it (if you make it to the bio). Wow, if he was so good, he must really know what he's talking about and be making an honest, self-reflective critique (you can even find comments here stating exactly that!)
But in fact that national championship he won was in a very different type of debate that was imported to the US as a reaction to speed reading, among other practices that -- as far as I can tell -- the author never competed in (at least a varsity level). This sort of "technically true very clever" rhetorical bullshit is what turns me off on more persuasion-oriented debate styles. Technical debating styles -- even when slowed down -- emphasize evidence over this sort of rhetoric.
> until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to.
Debate is the way it is because the people judging the rounds do want it to be that way. Given the choice, they prefer an esoteric activity with substantive content over a vacuous duel between competing real estate salesmen. Every single round, someone chooses -- completely of their own free will -- a winner. And the state of the activity is a direct reflection of those choices.
Debate is not the way you want it to be because you and/or people who agree with you are not volunteering enough hours to provide the reward signals that would create the activity and environment that you want.
--
(It's also worth noting that 99% of high school debate rounds are terrible, and that this has more to do with the "high school" part of the sentence and less to do with the particular style of debate -- or even debate itself. 99% of high school football is also crap.)
[+] [-] heurist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebola1717|8 years ago|reply
Also relevant to codes of conduct unfortunately.
[+] [-] peter303|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhinoceraptor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
Like many things, debate is a specialist practice in its own right. When the argument itself is the focus of competition, you have to go down the rabbit hole and compete over who is the best lawyer of the debate rules.
When you become a practitioner of many specialist topics, the nuance of the rules and exploiting them is part of the mechanics of what you do.
[+] [-] tmaly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben1040|8 years ago|reply
So in high school debate I didn't do so well. I think primarily because I didn't have enough information prepared before going in to respond to an opponents case.
I had routinely been smacked down by judges who felt I didn't attack a point sufficiently to avoid conceding it.
So for one tournament, the proposition at hand was whether global concerns ought to be held above local ones. I stated case that aliens had infiltrated most, if not all, national governments, and they had a goal of putting the human race into slavery, or worse. Clearly global concerns for survival trump local government concerns that may be based on ulterior motives. Hey, it was the mid 1990s, and X Files was all the rage among nerds.
My opponents would say they wouldn't even dignify that stuff with an answer. I responded that they conceded my point, then, and judges agreed.
Out of 4 matches that tournament I won three. The fourth time, I got an opponent who actually called my bluff since I obviously had no evidence to back up my assertion.
My debate coach got the scores back and wondered what happened, because I was otherwise the losingest member of the debate team. She congratulated me on winning and hacking the rules, and then told me she never wanted to hear about me composing a case like that again.
[+] [-] ipsin|8 years ago|reply
The last competition I was at, some of my school's teammates went up against what I thought of as "The Superweapon".
The debate starts out with the normal political, social and military arguments related to your side of the proposition, and then moves on to phase 2: even so, none of it matters because Jesus Christ's return to Earth is imminent. "Expert" after "expert" weighing in on Christ's return and its implication for Latin America.
I had a very large briefcase -- a case full of briefs -- but, uh, none of those briefs really addressed that particular line of attack.
[+] [-] kevmo|8 years ago|reply
I enjoy "intellectual discussion", so I went to a college debate team practice once to see if I wanted to join (back in 2003 or so) - I walked out of there with my mind blown. There was absolutely nothing intellectual about college debate team. The entire point was just to see who could say the most words per minute. When I explicitly asked, I was told that content doesn't really matter, just fast talking.
[+] [-] huac|8 years ago|reply
Another poster posted (as a dog-whistle) a link to Towson JR, the first team of black women to win the national debate championship. Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent. The author of this article went to a "pr-Ivy" with a $70 million endowment. That's some privilege to complain about - he even humblebrags about it: "From winter to spring, in settings as grand as a Harvard lecture hall and as cramped as a boiler room in a Salt Lake City public school, [...]". Flying to Alta (so sorry their campus isn't as nice as yours) isn't cheap or something everyone can do!
Also, since everybody rants about spreading - many critical teams do not spread, or are at least under 300 words per minute. There is a growing recognition and acceptance of the privilege it takes to spend an hour each night doing speaking drills.
This is a much better article about the state of debate: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9...
[+] [-] int_19h|8 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/tradit...
I'm genuinely curious what people think about this:
"On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.
In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!” he yelled."
[+] [-] nunez|8 years ago|reply
LOL nah.
Have you ever heard of the Urban Debate League? This is a debate league that is entirely comprised of debate programs from inner city schools. Any school can create a debate program and join the UDL, and they will give you money to become a traveling team if you do well enough. Many schools sent their students to stupid expensive debate camps, too.
While our school was part of the NFL, my family was relatively broke compared to the families that you describe. They still did their damnest to keep me in debate. Very few of my team members were “privileged.”
There were plenty of scholarships that gave us the ability to attend debate camps at significant discounts, and many took advantage of them. There were plenty of kids who were able to pay outright, but it certainly wasn’t exclusive.
[+] [-] glenstein|8 years ago|reply
>under 300 words per minute
That still falls far short of allaying the concern in my opinion. I hope people rant about spreading and continue to do so for as long as necessary until it's changed. At least take the practice where this behavior constitutes "winning" and categorize it as something other than debate.
[+] [-] mitchellst|8 years ago|reply
I readily admit that for most people, it's not so simple as, "you want good high school debate? Simple! Just go to Hotchkiss or Exeter." (schools that cost $50k/year) In theory, there's no reason why other leagues and schools could not ban spreading and put down a rhetoric-forward, comprehensive debate format. The catch, it seems, is that none of them have successfully done so. It's probably a culture thing-- the New England prep schools have a fairly large community of teachers and students who know how their debate format works, who know how to practice and judge for a less formulaic format. It's not obvious how you would create such a culture out of nowhere, and you'll get little help from New Englanders, especially the prep set, who are famously provincial about education.
[+] [-] acjohnson55|8 years ago|reply
> Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.
I do pretty much agree with the author though. Everything has become a game and we've completely lost sight of the fact that we're ultimately trying to build a better society. It's a big part of why I stopped identifying with political labels. Although, as always, I'm suspicious of the concept that there ever were "good old days".
[1] https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
[+] [-] Puer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HanayamaTriplet|8 years ago|reply
High school Parli was similar to what you described and was a joy to compete in; a more "pure" debate where clever argumentation and thinking on your feet really mattered. College Parli was a nightmare morass of arguments over rules technicalities in attempts to define the topic as something obviously favorable to your side - my team had a stock "farm subsidies are bad" speech we would try to guide every possible round towards. On average, 60% of each speech was spent on arguing over what the debate round should be about rather than anything of substance.
[+] [-] jogjayr|8 years ago|reply
It's counter-intuitive to me that more preparation leads to worse discussion on the topic.
[+] [-] NikolaeVarius|8 years ago|reply
Debate teaches you how to think. Teaches you how to respond to arguments efficiently and concisely and how to organize information.
I regard HS Debate as the best times of my life. The insane amount of stuff you learn is just crazy. What other activities are there that exposes you non stop to political critique, current events, history, energy policy and puts you in contact with some extremely smart people?
And if you really hate it, there is nothing stopping you from running K's and stuff. Most were really stupid, but at the very least it teaches how to argue against irrational/stupid arguments in a practical manner.
[+] [-] mathperson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunesmith|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sudosteph|8 years ago|reply
I was also on my high school debate team, Student Congress to be specific (though Lincoln-Douglas was an option).
I joined because I loved policy and imagining the impact of legislative changes. The fact that most of our debates were on mock legislation that other students had written made it even better, because we argued topics that the real congress would never touch. I learned so much about researching and building arguments, even if my record didn't show it (never placed once in 2 years). I learned that being right was not as important as being aware of the tone of the room and making yourself heard and tailoring your arguments appropriately. I was not naturally gifted for on-the-fly speaking, but I did improve even so. And importantly, I learned things about myself and avoided pursuing a career I might have hated.
I regret nothing even though I have no dusty trophies to show. The friendship and experience I gained from traveling around the state with other politics nerds was, and always will be, the best part.
[+] [-] throwawayjava|8 years ago|reply
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the backlash against highly technical forms of debate is most indicative of the current political moment. From my perspective, the backlash is basically just lots of people with at-best marginal interest and basically no skin in the game loudly condescending legions of volunteer educators.
More-over, the politicians who most typify the current political moment more resemble the under-prepared student sweet-talking their way out of a substantive debate than the over-prepared egg head presenting an 15-point analysis of an amicus brief at break-neck speed.
Critiques of overly-technical, jargon-filled, evidence-heavy debate styles aren't exactly difficult to sell. And there's a lot to be said for slowing things down (I insist on quality over quantity when I judge).
But it's worth pointing out that the proposed alternative styles devolve into "dueling used car salesmen" at least as often as the former devolve into "speed competitions". I'd rather watch a bad speed match than a bad duel between clueless care salesmen, but that's certainly a personal preference between two objectively bad choices.
In other words, most high school students aren't particularly good at making arguments and will settle for style when they can't win on substance. That's true regardless of the style you choose to emphasize.
The important thing is that tens of thousands of kids learn how to present a speech in front of an audience and also get some practice reading "amicus briefs and economic analyses".
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|8 years ago|reply
If you want make debate about convincing an audience of laymen, the judgement needs to be done by an audience of laymen. Do that, and the pace of the debate will slow significantly, since there's no benefit to making an argument that the audience can't hear or understand. But then your complaint will become "these people are dumbing down their arguments and winning, how can we fix this?!"
[+] [-] creaghpatr|8 years ago|reply
The comments section of the episode page gives you an idea of people's opinion of the state of high school debate.
[+] [-] newobj|8 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, did someone really think that a high school extra curricular was going to act as some kind of deep and wisened meditation for teens on rhetoric?
More than anything else, debate forces you to think quick on your feet - really, /really/ quick. Tantamount to an e-sport, but WAY more open ended, since the aff and neg can run just about anything under the sun, or even go meta (which seems more common since the early 90's when I debated).
Yes debate is a terrible model for useful rhetoric. It's also a hellishly fun boxing match for brains/mouths.
[+] [-] didibus|8 years ago|reply
Why do they even teach debate, while most high school student probably have never even heard of dialectic. Debate is useful in competitive environments of power, where you have your self interest as a goal. It doesn't seem very healthy for society to be teaching such self centered tactics to high schoolers without at least also teaching about truth centered tactics like dialectics.
[+] [-] Theodores|8 years ago|reply
I was lucky enough to go to a comprehensive school where the debating chamber was important. The school does not have a debating chamber now. A few key teachers retired and momentum was lost. Strange how the must attend event no longer matters.
[+] [-] entee|8 years ago|reply
On a related note, I explicitly avoided policy debate in HS because of its non-sensical verbal vomit style, and by few experiences with Lincoln-Douglass (LD) just seemed too abstract. One of the things I liked at the college level was that teams would present cases that were a little more practical than LD without the "I need to memorize wikipedia and 3 years of the Economist then recite it all" aspects of Policy Debate (PD). Judges also had some discretion on judging whether the case was a fair case (the affirmative team presented a case of their invention usually), which helped curb abuse. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that flexibility at the HS level.
[+] [-] topynate|8 years ago|reply
We're a long way from vanished Hellas, but we do know a few tricks they didn't. For instance, we know that the elderly, while suffering a certain decline in the fluid intelligence necessary to react rapidly to novelty, can do well in crystallized intelligence – that factor which employs skills, knowledge, life experience, and, in short, wisdom.
I therefore propose a "Legacy" debate category, to be judged only by those above the age of, say, 70. A pace of 300 words per minute, while impressive, will not be much good when assessed by those whose brains are no longer physically capable of processing that hypersyllabification.
[+] [-] glenstein|8 years ago|reply
It sounds like the real failure is the failure to meaningfully regulate the offending behaviors. Maybe there is difficulty regulating it, but the "gee, we'll never be able to fix it regardless of how we regulate" is more likely an attitude of lethargic helplessness rather than a meditation on the nature of competitive debate itself.
[+] [-] mattmcknight|8 years ago|reply