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> 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 matt

by ashark 9y ago

> 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)

linuxps2 9y ago
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.
- nunez 9y ago
  Awww man the rounds with folks that ran Policy k’s were fun. Many didn’t do a good job of it, but those that did, oh man.
- dlubarov 9y ago
  If anyone unfamiliar is interested to see what LD critiques look like, here are a few of my old cases: AC normativity K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RTv2KtA_XBhkRQeHmC69BfTiK9X7etnHOTc9mbVTYN0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RTv2KtA_XBhkRQeHmC69BfTi... NC analytic philosophy K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zoPxDoFEu7-paUsK5GhTKyW6mfn-27P21upnipP5ZOo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zoPxDoFEu7-paUsK5GhTKyW6... NC speed K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXKYu8K4DX5DoVVnLlPxmPMfKRxJXUWAOFcwCogKZBc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXKYu8K4DX5DoVVnLlPxmPMf...
  - mathperson 9y ago
    lol the mountain represent /\
    - RSchaeffer 9y ago
      yee
  - RSchaeffer 9y ago
    Do you still have your replies to the speed K? I can't find them in my backfiles
    - dlubarov 9y ago
      I do! I uploaded it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b9lWFHuUf4FfCRZ51mAOSuzzdF6hqFTnlF28GTAscvg/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b9lWFHuUf4FfCRZ51mAOSuzz...
      - RSchaeffer 9y ago
        Thanks Lubarov :)
  - mplewis 9y ago
    Thanks for sharing! These brought back memories.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > If someone is trying to spread you or put an independent voting issue on something inane, critique that entire style of debate. Doing this in LD might fly, but in CX it's basically an obnoxious way to throw the round. (Which I did back in high school, repeatedly, with as much success as you'd expect.)
  - linuxps2 9y ago
    By CX I assume you mean policy and no, it's really effective. I did it for 4 years and it was rare if my partner and I didn't place and one of us nearly always won a speaker award. Nuke War impacts? yeah, I'm running Compassion Fatigue K. On AFF you better believe I'm running a kritikal case with 'dismantling patriarchy through discussion' as my primary voting issue against the ridiculous Mead cards the neg was going to bring out. All I'm saying is that it certainly can be effective as this is what I did and found great success both locally and in the national circuit
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      I guess I was a much shittier debater than I thought, and I absolutely was not a good debater. I don't think I ever saw this type of thing work - maybe our schools were just in completely different skill tiers.
      - Gaelan 9y ago
        Also judges in different circuits are probably more tolerant of different things.
      - ngoldbaum 9y ago
        It totally depends on what the judging pool looks like. In a different state your strategy would have worked fine.
        linuxps2 9y ago
        Yeah my experience was mostly limited to the national circuit and GA where the judges were typically WestGA, Emory, or UGA debaters (or debate coaches) trying to make extra money on weekends when they didn't have a college tournament
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  As someone who ran highly kritikal affs and Ks on neg If debate is meant to be preparation for participation in a polity, why would you adhere to exclusionary jargon and obscure proceduralism? Of course it's fun to be an insider, as in any other sphere of nerd endeavor, but this is the rhetorical equivalent of bodybuilding with the help of steroids. Yes, it is satisfying to the competitors, but at the expense of comprehensibility to everyone else. As a non-American who loved debate growing up (but in a more old-fashioned and qualitative policy forum style), the first time I saw policy debate on TV I almost threw up in disgust. This kind of thing is why voter participation rates are so low and people hate politicians (sweeping assertions that I have no intention of substantiating today, by the way). The research and critical thinking aspects of this are absolutely valuable skills to learn. But the more technical it becomes, the more you're applying the logic of industrial production to qualitative argument, to the point of losing your audience completely. I suggest that this emphasis on point-scoring reduces the incidence of critical thinking in the population as a whole, and offer as an analogy the Selectorate Theory model of Bueno de Mesquita & Smith in The logic of political survival. In brief, this theory argues that per-capita rewards for members of a selectorate (group which chooses political leaders) diminish as the size of the group initially expands but gradually increase again and exceed the original limit as the selectorate comes to comprise a greater portion of the electorate. As far as debate is concerned, it is thus more fun at first to win the approval of a small number of insiders through gamesmanship than to please a larger general audience, but as you are able to successfully appeal to larger audiences the fun factor increases again and will eventually exceed the original maximum.
  - URSpider94 9y ago
    If well-formed and well-delivered argumentation is what you are looking for, then your sport is extemporaneous speaking (extemp, for short). You get 30 minutes to prepare a 7-minute speech on a topic provided on the spot. There’s no real benefit to speaking quickly and you are judged on both the quality of your arguments and your presentation style. A lot of debaters cross over and do extemp on off weekends.
labster 9y ago
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.
- Gaelan 9y ago
  Us debaters are jealous of your nicely-defined rulebooks.
- zipwitch 9y ago
  The part tabletop RPGs it models really well is where the players and GM spend three hours arguing about the rules applicable to a single sword swing.
SilasX 9y ago
>Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.) 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=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=conversational+wpm+speed&ie=...
- Retric 9y ago
  Conversations are back and forth which reduces average speeds unless you ignore these pauses.
- mikestew 9y ago
  In the U. S., it is common to count off one second of time with "one million one" (usually in sequence: "1 MM 1, 1 MM 2,..."). And if one desires to be accurate in the counting of time, one will say that at about a conversational pace. IOW, a commonly used method of estimating time says that conversational pace is closer to 180 wpm. Even considering the two monosyllabic words in this example, it sure as hell ain't 60 wpm. EDIT: a quick DDG search on "conversational english words per minute" indicates an almost universal agreement of somewhere in the range of 140-180 wpm, as with parent's Google search.
  - erik_seaberg 9y ago
    That's 240 syllables per minute. Is speaking really so skew towards short words?
    - ezrast 9y ago
      Your post averages 1.69 syllables per word; this one is 1.86. There's no way the conversational average is higher than two.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      The average number of syllables per English word is ~1.4. For an alternative perspective, 71.5% of all English words are monosyllabic, and 19.4% are bisyllabic.
pmarreck 9y ago
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"). Lastly, how is the debate behavior these flawed rules resulted in, not just a "gish gallop"? (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- DubiousPusher 9y ago
  It's precisely a gish gallop. Unfortunately, in this format of debate, busting out a well known logical fallacy or poor form of argument is not necessarily penalized.
- bbatha 9y ago
  In some senses yes, but the other team is a) given equal speaking time, b) can argue that it’s nothing but a gish gallop and most importantly, the other team’s arguments still have to rise to he level of “argument” as in the have a claim, at least one warrant for that claim and can explain why that wins them the round. It’s. While dumb dropped argument certainly do win rounds no body really winning on “we win because we said so”. Judges will also generally give the opposing team a lot of leeway in giving shorter or grouped responses to low quality arguments.
throwaway287391 9y ago
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.)
- eduren 9y ago
  Agree. In my experience (LD) there are no real rules in debate, only what would convince the judge to vote for you. If that shakes up the "meta" then that's a plus. The way to make debate about truth seeking is to find the right judges who prioritize that.
  - drostie 9y ago
    I never participated in debate as a student, only as a judge. In this experience I have noticed that (a) debate judges are culled from the general populace, (b) given little to no guidance, (c) potentially given extraordinary latitude in their judgment but not necessarily made aware of that, (d) they generally have some personal connection to the school or the debate teams. (Of course, they should register a conflict of interest so that they don't judge their own school/team.) After the first few times, and after I got a much better grip on my latitude and what was expected of me, I started to make it clear before I judged, "I find it somewhat hard to follow spreading and I have noticed that I tend to consider plausibility when evaluating arguments, please keep those in mind" and usually there is a flurry of quiet re-strategizing before the debate, followed by a somewhat more meaningful exchange. However it has never quite gotten to the level where anything really felt resolved and it indeed always feels like a bizarre "game".
Spooky23 9y ago
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.
- peterlk 9y ago
  If we focus only on high school debate for a minute (I have participated in and coached high school teams), the point is to teach kids critical thinking. When freshmen show up to debate for the first time, it might surprise you how bad they are at putting together coherent arguments. You don't get to make it to the top of the league in debate without learning critical thinking. In order to get to the "obnoxious and inane" parts of debate, you must first succeed at the point of debate (to teach critical thinking and argument). So, I'd say high school debate does a great job at what it is meant for. Edit: Moving from a long-form rant about something that a freshman barely understands to philosophical minutia that lead to nuclear war takes a significant amount of learning. And that learning is worthwhile.
  - throwawayknecht 9y ago
    On the other hand, focusing intensely on "critical thinking and argument" is detrimental to the purported goal of debate as a civic institution - rather than a high school sport - which to educate, seek truth, and ideally come to common ground either via persuasion or compromise. K-heavy policy is kind of the extreme opposite of that, increasingly meta arguments where no one ever has to concede even a basic model of reality to the other side. I didn't like it as a debater, and I had a dim view of it as a judge, especially from aff side. (These frustrations had me drift towards group disco and student congress after 2.5 years in policy.)
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      Yes, the civic and educational goals of debate are often at odds. I'm comfortable emphasizing the educational goals over the civic goals because I've yet to see a high school debate round weigh in on the balance of national (or even state) policy...
ebola1717 9y ago
> 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 Also relevant to codes of conduct unfortunately.
tmaly 9y ago
this reminds me of the way Tim Ferris won the kickboxing championship as he outlined in the 4 hour work week.
ezrast 9y ago
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.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
SilasX 9y ago
>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.)
- xamuel 9y ago
  Not a mathematical theorem, and not quantitative, but Campbell's Law is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
  - SilasX 9y ago
    Yeah, I'd be interested if there are rigorous bounds on how badly Goodhart/Campell's Law can screw you in theory (or better, in practice).
- pizza 9y ago
  Maybe this is worth examining: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0410076.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0410076.pdf
vilhelm_s 9y ago
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... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing
- Pxtl 9y ago
  To be fair, modern fencing does have pressure requirements in Foil and Epee categeories. It is not enough to simply make a circuit. While the game has obviously drifted from its sources, the "light attack" problem was solved outside of the Sabre form of the sport.
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    At least when I fenced foil in high school in the late 90s there was a move called the flick that involved whipping the foil over the opponents shoulder and having it bend sufficiently to depress the tip on his back. Fencers that mastered this technique dominated our level (perhaps Olympians could counter it, I don't know) but I don't think it has any analog in terms of real dueling. It seems like the flick is a quite good analogy for the debate 'spreading' the article talks about.
KVFinn 9y ago
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.
lasfter 9y ago
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.
- pnmahoney 9y ago
  This is because American high school LDers are competing against each other, seeking out the most competitive circuit/format possible. Your reasoning goes a bit like this: > the American rugby national team is really bad, probably because American football players (e.g. gridiron football) aren't good either. From my understanding, including one person I know who represented the US two years ago and now does parli for Yale, high school worlds is not a venue for people (edit: people= American high school students) who do it because they are otherwise competitive. That said: in college worlds and parli ... worlds, former LDers have done really well (e.g. when that is the competitive venue they go after).
  - lasfter 9y ago
    Oh no! Sorry I didn't mean to disparage American debaters. I was saying exactly what you are: that LD doesn't transfer well to Worlds style. My point being that penalising dropped points didn't lead to spreading in other styles, so there has been a form of evolutionary divergence in the metas of different styles. Also, American rugby is probably not as good because the good football players are, well, playing football ;) The "that's your fault" comment was from the perspective of the judges. As in, in LD the judges can follow the breakneck speed whereas in worlds they don't bother to.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      It's worth noting that even among debate activities with very similar (even identical) styles, things sometimes "don't transfer well". Knowing and understanding the nuances of the the judging pool and the competition are just as important as anything else, so teams that "transfer" between activities are always at a bit of a structural disadvantage. Especially at the elite level where the differences in raw ability and background knowledge start to become imperceptible.
samirillian 9y ago
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.
walshemj 9y ago
Are there no time limits? the debates (real ones) I am familiar with are normally say 4 minuets to propose 3 to second and 3 mins as a right of reply.
throwawayjava 9y ago
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.)
antispew 9y ago
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.
- Bluestrike2 9y ago
  Most every debater will prepare multiple versions of their cases and other arguments to give them the flexibility to deal with widely varying judge paradigms. It can be as simple as not presenting certain cards (evidence) and arguments to accommodate slower speeds or avoiding entire types of arguments (that's especially common when you're the negative with a wide variety of positions prepared). For major tournaments, you'll either know about a judge ahead of time or will hear them lay out their paradigms and preferences at the beginning of the round. And even then, different things ("tabula rasa," or a tab paradigm being a great example) can mean very different things to different people. You can't really avoid lay judges (those with no exposure to the debate community, who tend to default to a more appearance-oriented paradigm), but you can adapt to a degree. The big reason why most debaters tend to dislike debating in front of lay judges is that their ballot decisions can often seem arbitrary. You may ask about their judging philosophy, but even if they provide one, there's no guarantee that they'll actually stick to it. Not because they're "dumb" or "don't understand," but because it's actually a really hard question to answer. It involves a lot of very specific self-reflection that's radically different than what most are used to. Even experienced judges tend to get it wrong, or fall victim to self-delusion. Experience is what helps a judge learn to know themselves (as a judge).
rhinoceraptor 9y ago
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.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  You might think so. But in practice, the opposite is true. Teams that present lots of wrong arguments tend to make a lot of arguments that are wrong in the same way. So you can respond to 2+ minutes of bad arguments in 20 seconds by identifying these common threads. As lukasschwab points out in his top-level comment, the narrative that fast presentation results in "quantity over quality" is nearly always not true -- "arguments are still evaluated at speed", and it's more typically "more arguments of greater quality" rather than "more arguments of lesser quality (although the "greater quality" part is, as lukasschwab notes, "a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment".)
qq66 9y ago
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."
heurist 9y ago
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.
peter303 9y ago
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.
anthony_romeo 9y ago
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.

by ashark 9y ago

linuxps2 9y ago

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.

nunez 9y ago
Awww man the rounds with folks that ran Policy k’s were fun. Many didn’t do a good job of it, but those that did, oh man.
dlubarov 9y ago
If anyone unfamiliar is interested to see what LD critiques look like, here are a few of my old cases: AC normativity K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RTv2KtA_XBhkRQeHmC69BfTiK9X7etnHOTc9mbVTYN0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RTv2KtA_XBhkRQeHmC69BfTi... NC analytic philosophy K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zoPxDoFEu7-paUsK5GhTKyW6mfn-27P21upnipP5ZOo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zoPxDoFEu7-paUsK5GhTKyW6... NC speed K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXKYu8K4DX5DoVVnLlPxmPMfKRxJXUWAOFcwCogKZBc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXKYu8K4DX5DoVVnLlPxmPMf...
- mathperson 9y ago
  lol the mountain represent /\
  - RSchaeffer 9y ago
    yee
- RSchaeffer 9y ago
  Do you still have your replies to the speed K? I can't find them in my backfiles
  - dlubarov 9y ago
    I do! I uploaded it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b9lWFHuUf4FfCRZ51mAOSuzzdF6hqFTnlF28GTAscvg/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b9lWFHuUf4FfCRZ51mAOSuzz...
    - RSchaeffer 9y ago
      Thanks Lubarov :)
- mplewis 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing! These brought back memories.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> If someone is trying to spread you or put an independent voting issue on something inane, critique that entire style of debate. Doing this in LD might fly, but in CX it's basically an obnoxious way to throw the round. (Which I did back in high school, repeatedly, with as much success as you'd expect.)
- linuxps2 9y ago
  By CX I assume you mean policy and no, it's really effective. I did it for 4 years and it was rare if my partner and I didn't place and one of us nearly always won a speaker award. Nuke War impacts? yeah, I'm running Compassion Fatigue K. On AFF you better believe I'm running a kritikal case with 'dismantling patriarchy through discussion' as my primary voting issue against the ridiculous Mead cards the neg was going to bring out. All I'm saying is that it certainly can be effective as this is what I did and found great success both locally and in the national circuit
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I guess I was a much shittier debater than I thought, and I absolutely was not a good debater. I don't think I ever saw this type of thing work - maybe our schools were just in completely different skill tiers.
    - Gaelan 9y ago
      Also judges in different circuits are probably more tolerant of different things.
    - ngoldbaum 9y ago
      It totally depends on what the judging pool looks like. In a different state your strategy would have worked fine.
      - linuxps2 9y ago
        Yeah my experience was mostly limited to the national circuit and GA where the judges were typically WestGA, Emory, or UGA debaters (or debate coaches) trying to make extra money on weekends when they didn't have a college tournament
anigbrowl 9y ago
As someone who ran highly kritikal affs and Ks on neg If debate is meant to be preparation for participation in a polity, why would you adhere to exclusionary jargon and obscure proceduralism? Of course it's fun to be an insider, as in any other sphere of nerd endeavor, but this is the rhetorical equivalent of bodybuilding with the help of steroids. Yes, it is satisfying to the competitors, but at the expense of comprehensibility to everyone else. As a non-American who loved debate growing up (but in a more old-fashioned and qualitative policy forum style), the first time I saw policy debate on TV I almost threw up in disgust. This kind of thing is why voter participation rates are so low and people hate politicians (sweeping assertions that I have no intention of substantiating today, by the way). The research and critical thinking aspects of this are absolutely valuable skills to learn. But the more technical it becomes, the more you're applying the logic of industrial production to qualitative argument, to the point of losing your audience completely. I suggest that this emphasis on point-scoring reduces the incidence of critical thinking in the population as a whole, and offer as an analogy the Selectorate Theory model of Bueno de Mesquita & Smith in The logic of political survival. In brief, this theory argues that per-capita rewards for members of a selectorate (group which chooses political leaders) diminish as the size of the group initially expands but gradually increase again and exceed the original limit as the selectorate comes to comprise a greater portion of the electorate. As far as debate is concerned, it is thus more fun at first to win the approval of a small number of insiders through gamesmanship than to please a larger general audience, but as you are able to successfully appeal to larger audiences the fun factor increases again and will eventually exceed the original maximum.
- URSpider94 9y ago
  If well-formed and well-delivered argumentation is what you are looking for, then your sport is extemporaneous speaking (extemp, for short). You get 30 minutes to prepare a 7-minute speech on a topic provided on the spot. There’s no real benefit to speaking quickly and you are judged on both the quality of your arguments and your presentation style. A lot of debaters cross over and do extemp on off weekends.

labster 9y ago

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.

Gaelan 9y ago
Us debaters are jealous of your nicely-defined rulebooks.
zipwitch 9y ago
The part tabletop RPGs it models really well is where the players and GM spend three hours arguing about the rules applicable to a single sword swing.

SilasX 9y ago

>Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.) 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=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=conversational+wpm+speed&ie=...

Retric 9y ago
Conversations are back and forth which reduces average speeds unless you ignore these pauses.
mikestew 9y ago
In the U. S., it is common to count off one second of time with "one million one" (usually in sequence: "1 MM 1, 1 MM 2,..."). And if one desires to be accurate in the counting of time, one will say that at about a conversational pace. IOW, a commonly used method of estimating time says that conversational pace is closer to 180 wpm. Even considering the two monosyllabic words in this example, it sure as hell ain't 60 wpm. EDIT: a quick DDG search on "conversational english words per minute" indicates an almost universal agreement of somewhere in the range of 140-180 wpm, as with parent's Google search.
- erik_seaberg 9y ago
  That's 240 syllables per minute. Is speaking really so skew towards short words?
  - ezrast 9y ago
    Your post averages 1.69 syllables per word; this one is 1.86. There's no way the conversational average is higher than two.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    The average number of syllables per English word is ~1.4. For an alternative perspective, 71.5% of all English words are monosyllabic, and 19.4% are bisyllabic.

pmarreck 9y ago

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"). Lastly, how is the debate behavior these flawed rules resulted in, not just a "gish gallop"? (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DubiousPusher 9y ago
It's precisely a gish gallop. Unfortunately, in this format of debate, busting out a well known logical fallacy or poor form of argument is not necessarily penalized.
bbatha 9y ago
In some senses yes, but the other team is a) given equal speaking time, b) can argue that it’s nothing but a gish gallop and most importantly, the other team’s arguments still have to rise to he level of “argument” as in the have a claim, at least one warrant for that claim and can explain why that wins them the round. It’s. While dumb dropped argument certainly do win rounds no body really winning on “we win because we said so”. Judges will also generally give the opposing team a lot of leeway in giving shorter or grouped responses to low quality arguments.

throwaway287391 9y ago

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.)

eduren 9y ago
Agree. In my experience (LD) there are no real rules in debate, only what would convince the judge to vote for you. If that shakes up the "meta" then that's a plus. The way to make debate about truth seeking is to find the right judges who prioritize that.
- drostie 9y ago
  I never participated in debate as a student, only as a judge. In this experience I have noticed that (a) debate judges are culled from the general populace, (b) given little to no guidance, (c) potentially given extraordinary latitude in their judgment but not necessarily made aware of that, (d) they generally have some personal connection to the school or the debate teams. (Of course, they should register a conflict of interest so that they don't judge their own school/team.) After the first few times, and after I got a much better grip on my latitude and what was expected of me, I started to make it clear before I judged, "I find it somewhat hard to follow spreading and I have noticed that I tend to consider plausibility when evaluating arguments, please keep those in mind" and usually there is a flurry of quiet re-strategizing before the debate, followed by a somewhat more meaningful exchange. However it has never quite gotten to the level where anything really felt resolved and it indeed always feels like a bizarre "game".

Spooky23 9y ago

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.

peterlk 9y ago
If we focus only on high school debate for a minute (I have participated in and coached high school teams), the point is to teach kids critical thinking. When freshmen show up to debate for the first time, it might surprise you how bad they are at putting together coherent arguments. You don't get to make it to the top of the league in debate without learning critical thinking. In order to get to the "obnoxious and inane" parts of debate, you must first succeed at the point of debate (to teach critical thinking and argument). So, I'd say high school debate does a great job at what it is meant for. Edit: Moving from a long-form rant about something that a freshman barely understands to philosophical minutia that lead to nuclear war takes a significant amount of learning. And that learning is worthwhile.
- throwawayknecht 9y ago
  On the other hand, focusing intensely on "critical thinking and argument" is detrimental to the purported goal of debate as a civic institution - rather than a high school sport - which to educate, seek truth, and ideally come to common ground either via persuasion or compromise. K-heavy policy is kind of the extreme opposite of that, increasingly meta arguments where no one ever has to concede even a basic model of reality to the other side. I didn't like it as a debater, and I had a dim view of it as a judge, especially from aff side. (These frustrations had me drift towards group disco and student congress after 2.5 years in policy.)
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    Yes, the civic and educational goals of debate are often at odds. I'm comfortable emphasizing the educational goals over the civic goals because I've yet to see a high school debate round weigh in on the balance of national (or even state) policy...

ebola1717 9y ago

> 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 Also relevant to codes of conduct unfortunately.

tmaly 9y ago

this reminds me of the way Tim Ferris won the kickboxing championship as he outlined in the 4 hour work week.

ezrast 9y ago

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.

throwawayjava 9y ago

SilasX 9y ago

>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.)

xamuel 9y ago
Not a mathematical theorem, and not quantitative, but Campbell's Law is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
- SilasX 9y ago
  Yeah, I'd be interested if there are rigorous bounds on how badly Goodhart/Campell's Law can screw you in theory (or better, in practice).
pizza 9y ago
Maybe this is worth examining: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0410076.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0410076.pdf

vilhelm_s 9y ago

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... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing

Pxtl 9y ago
To be fair, modern fencing does have pressure requirements in Foil and Epee categeories. It is not enough to simply make a circuit. While the game has obviously drifted from its sources, the "light attack" problem was solved outside of the Sabre form of the sport.
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  At least when I fenced foil in high school in the late 90s there was a move called the flick that involved whipping the foil over the opponents shoulder and having it bend sufficiently to depress the tip on his back. Fencers that mastered this technique dominated our level (perhaps Olympians could counter it, I don't know) but I don't think it has any analog in terms of real dueling. It seems like the flick is a quite good analogy for the debate 'spreading' the article talks about.

KVFinn 9y ago

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.

lasfter 9y ago

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.

pnmahoney 9y ago
This is because American high school LDers are competing against each other, seeking out the most competitive circuit/format possible. Your reasoning goes a bit like this: > the American rugby national team is really bad, probably because American football players (e.g. gridiron football) aren't good either. From my understanding, including one person I know who represented the US two years ago and now does parli for Yale, high school worlds is not a venue for people (edit: people= American high school students) who do it because they are otherwise competitive. That said: in college worlds and parli ... worlds, former LDers have done really well (e.g. when that is the competitive venue they go after).
- lasfter 9y ago
  Oh no! Sorry I didn't mean to disparage American debaters. I was saying exactly what you are: that LD doesn't transfer well to Worlds style. My point being that penalising dropped points didn't lead to spreading in other styles, so there has been a form of evolutionary divergence in the metas of different styles. Also, American rugby is probably not as good because the good football players are, well, playing football ;) The "that's your fault" comment was from the perspective of the judges. As in, in LD the judges can follow the breakneck speed whereas in worlds they don't bother to.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    It's worth noting that even among debate activities with very similar (even identical) styles, things sometimes "don't transfer well". Knowing and understanding the nuances of the the judging pool and the competition are just as important as anything else, so teams that "transfer" between activities are always at a bit of a structural disadvantage. Especially at the elite level where the differences in raw ability and background knowledge start to become imperceptible.

samirillian 9y ago

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.

walshemj 9y ago

Are there no time limits? the debates (real ones) I am familiar with are normally say 4 minuets to propose 3 to second and 3 mins as a right of reply.

throwawayjava 9y ago

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.)

antispew 9y ago

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.

Bluestrike2 9y ago
Most every debater will prepare multiple versions of their cases and other arguments to give them the flexibility to deal with widely varying judge paradigms. It can be as simple as not presenting certain cards (evidence) and arguments to accommodate slower speeds or avoiding entire types of arguments (that's especially common when you're the negative with a wide variety of positions prepared). For major tournaments, you'll either know about a judge ahead of time or will hear them lay out their paradigms and preferences at the beginning of the round. And even then, different things ("tabula rasa," or a tab paradigm being a great example) can mean very different things to different people. You can't really avoid lay judges (those with no exposure to the debate community, who tend to default to a more appearance-oriented paradigm), but you can adapt to a degree. The big reason why most debaters tend to dislike debating in front of lay judges is that their ballot decisions can often seem arbitrary. You may ask about their judging philosophy, but even if they provide one, there's no guarantee that they'll actually stick to it. Not because they're "dumb" or "don't understand," but because it's actually a really hard question to answer. It involves a lot of very specific self-reflection that's radically different than what most are used to. Even experienced judges tend to get it wrong, or fall victim to self-delusion. Experience is what helps a judge learn to know themselves (as a judge).

rhinoceraptor 9y ago

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.

throwawayjava 9y ago
You might think so. But in practice, the opposite is true. Teams that present lots of wrong arguments tend to make a lot of arguments that are wrong in the same way. So you can respond to 2+ minutes of bad arguments in 20 seconds by identifying these common threads. As lukasschwab points out in his top-level comment, the narrative that fast presentation results in "quantity over quality" is nearly always not true -- "arguments are still evaluated at speed", and it's more typically "more arguments of greater quality" rather than "more arguments of lesser quality (although the "greater quality" part is, as lukasschwab notes, "a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment".)

qq66 9y ago

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."

heurist 9y ago

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.

peter303 9y ago

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.

anthony_romeo 9y ago

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.