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

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.