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Harvard university debate team loses to New York prison inmates (2015)
- rweba 9y agoShould say 2015
- pmoriarty 9y agoAnyone interested in this should check out Radiolab's episode on the state of collegiate debate: http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/
- 2_listerine_pls 9y agoI had no idea debates were a thing, quite interesting.
- fastball 9y ago... wait what?
- _0ffh 9y agoDebating is not on the usual school curriculum in many (most?) countries. You'll usually find private debating clubs, but they're also often not a big or even usual thing. Hence often not even known about.
- fastball 9y agoI understand not having a debate program at your school before a university level. What I do not understand is how you could be completely ignorant of the idea of "debates". There are thousands of videos on YouTube of debates. How can you understand the definition of the word debate and not realize that people have debates? To me, that's like saying "I didn't know science fairs were a thing". Sure, I can understand how many (most?) people have probably not participated in a science fair themselves, although I made my initial comment aware that this is Hacker News and it's a slightly different group of people than the population at large. I do not understand the level of myopia that would be required to not even realize they exist.
- _0ffh 9y agoThere's often not even at a university level. There are millions of videos on YouTube, easy to miss a few thousand, especially if it's not something you ever actively looked for to trigger YouTube's you-might-also-like algos. Also debating where a debate is necessary or natural is not the same as making a sport out of it!
- overlordalex 9y agoAll it takes is a non-american (non-western?) society. As a South African we don't have science fairs - at least not in the same way that I understand America does them. In school there are no science "competitions", and the closest that we ever got was doing an experiment as a class. The only reason I'm familiar with them is through American media, and to be honest they're still a bit of a weird concept that I'm not sure I fully understand. As to debates, I've come across several debating clubs and public speaking clubs, however when I think of "debate" I think of American elections with politicians on a stage with podiums - we don't really have that here, especially between parties.
- tossaway1 9y agoYour level of exposure to science fairs and debates sounds about the same as mine (an American). Yet we still know what they are from media portrayals, etc. I think that was fastball's point.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- consz 9y agoI don't think I've ever personally seen a science fair in real life, and I doubt any of my friends have, so it's at least a thing that's two degrees removed from my personal experience. I could easily see, once its thats far removed, thinking that even though I know what the word means, that it's not actually something that you'd encounter in real life -- that like e.g. bullies in school on TV, it's just something that is made up for story telling purposes in fiction.
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- aninhumer 9y agoI'd assume they mean the academic formalised competitive kind of debates, not debates in general. I wasn't really aware of then until I went to university.
- viraptor 9y agoSame. It seems to be a US thing. Coming from eastern Europe, I saw the school debate idea a few years ago in some movie and learned it's a serious sport thing only a month ago or so. (Where I also learned the competition level is pretty twisted / often relying on min/maxing rules) It's definitely not a common concept. I've heard of chess boxing before this.
- fastball 9y agoI replied to "I didn't know debates were a thing", not "I didn't realize universities had debate teams and that it was a competitive activity". All I was looking for was a clarification from the person who made the very general statement. All I got was a lot of people putting words in someone else's mouth.
- scbrg 9y agoWell, to be fair, to "be a thing" is not equivalent to "exist". In this context, I guess that "be a thing" means, "be something people do in their spare time, even when not strictly required to because its forced upon them in their role as politician/whatever."
- jacobolus 9y agoYour link is about an entirely different format of debate (“policy debate”) from the one under discussion in this thread (“parliamentary debate”). The two are unrecognizably different. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate
- mannykannot 9y agoCompetition seems to have turned the so-called "policy debate" into a highly stylized ritual that bears little resemblance to true debate, and having little relevance outside of its own domain. To my mind, rewarding arguments regardless of validity or relevance, and favoring the number of arguments over their cogency, has destroyed its value. https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corrosion-high-school-debate-and-how-it-mirrors-american-politics https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corr...
- smhost 9y agoMore relevant podcast episode, imho. This one is about inmates and Shakespeare: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/218/act-v https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/218/...
- esaym 9y agoAmazing what happens when you step out of the "group think" environment and into the real world. They should have expected the unexpected.
- drawnwren 9y agoThis comment is so bad that it has to be satire. You can't really string that many cliches together while simultaneously claiming to have an outside view of "group think" and be sincere ... can you?
- hackits 9y agoDoes anyone actually have the source to the actual debate? All i've found is clickbat articles.
- hkmurakami 9y agoYes, would love to watch some actual footage.
- sogen 9y agono, this seems to be all: https://www.facebook.com/harvardunion/posts/1498854990434255 https://www.facebook.com/harvardunion/posts/1498854990434255 and this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/07/harvard-debate-champs-lose-team-prisoners/73508520/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/07/harvar...
- greygatch 9y agoThis is two years old, and still can't find anything on YouTube. Smells like bullshit to me.
- StanislavPetrov 9y agoFear not, the Harvard team was more diverse!
- aj7 9y agoWhy am I reading about this in an Oct 15 UK publication?
- sigi45 9y agoIvy League people are people, prision inmates are people.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Aenyn 9y agoTherefore, Socrates is a cat. But I see your point ;)
- tmp777889 9y agoWhy should this surprise anyone. There are Harvard graduates in prison. There are geniuses in prison.
- oliwarner 9y agoIt shouldn't... But it does because people assume that every one of the the 2.3 million Americans in prison today are uneducated thugs. It's not a comforting prospect to think of them as our peers, or worse yet, having been in a better position than us before their incarceration.
- xxxdarrenxxx 9y agoSchool systems and prisons are constructs of society. Intelligence (which is not the same as knowledgeable, though strongly related) is a design by nature. There will be nice dumb people there will be nice smart people there will be not-so-nice dumb people there will be not-so-nice smart people Shades of gray is the name off the game that is the human race. Black and white thinking, assumptions, lack of objectiveness are brain traps. Anyone who is surprised by this, should take the surprise as a learning moment. People doing bad things to other people has often to do with a shortcoming of the part of the brain that handles empathy . In geek-speak: graphics still work, if your sound card is dead; It's a different part off the system. Active cognitive reasoning is largely done by the prefrontal cortex. Having one brain function operating less than ideal does not mean other functions automatically fail... On the contrary, blind people often develop better hearing skills, people with some forms off autism might lack social cue abilities, but own the average by a bit in systemic thinking. That said, I do welcome these things. Interpretations in general are a dangerous thing, and can lead to many misunderstandings and even bloodshed and war. Break the stigma, yes please. If one really wants to dissect this objectively: -age difference -underdog mentality -debating experience between teams -subject(s) at hand (do both teams have equal knowledge or interest in the specific matters for example) tldr; these things, when viewed objectively are not really complicated or weird.
- superflit 9y agoGenius does not equal honesty or good character.
- ratsimihah 9y agomaybe the lost but they made it into Hype League!
- jhiska 9y ago>The three inmates, Carl Snyder, Dyjuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco, were tasked with arguing that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose parents entered the US illegally. >The inmates impressed the judges by suggesting that if public schools turned the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could step in and provide better education to the children in any case. That's a weak argument, in my view. The illegal immigrants wouldn't be able to afford private education as it is too expensive even for Americans. Non-gov orgs wouldn't be able to reach to illegal immigrants. Home- and Internet-schooling would be better arguments, but still bad. Integrating the children of illegal immigrants into public schooling would bring greater benefits not only to them and their parents but to society as a whole. One can argue that, in the US, European cultural values predominate ("white" is not a synonym for the Caucasian ethnicity but simply an identity that means "holds European cultural values"), and that African-Americans don't have significantly different cultural values from European culture, (ie, they are "white" save for superficial differences like music, food and places of worship, and so on), and that a Syrian Caucasian is not "white" (because they don't hold European cultural values) but an African-American descendant of the people from the Sahara region is a dark-skinned "white". And therefore African-Americans being dark-skinned "whites" (even if they try to superficially distinguish themselves with the US "black" cultural identity) is an example of the power of assimilation of our public schooling. It would convert, say, a child of Syrian parents with Middle-Eastern values into someone who holds European cultural values and who would work, or rebel, within the cultural rules of the European system. The children of illegal immigrants should be allowed into public schools not just to neutralize the threat of cultural invaders, but to give us more soft power over a wider portion of the world. Discuss? ;)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoI would say it is counterproductive to base your re-education camp argument around loaded terms like white/black-american culture. > ;) But you know that. Nobody uses "white" the way you did and even if that matches your observations in the US that term was only very recently inclusive of so many origin countries on the European continent. The UK version of "white" still isn't nearly as inclusive as the American construct. It is fine to merely say American culture has predominantly European roots. The underlying argument around re-education camps may have more merit. The primary argument is about who pays for it. You need to convince Congress and education secretaries and I don't think you're soft power argument would sway anyone.
- mrcactu5 9y agoI think you underestimate the type of "spin" (for lack of better term) that goes on in the street? At least here in the Bronx, some of these people find ingenious arguments to get out of situations. Who is going to be better than understanding argument and the law, than someone who personally went through the process? These people find ingenious short-term "quick-fix" arguments, a lot of that advantage can go away in the long term.
- trisimix 9y agoYes I love this shit fuck ivy leagues