22 ms·

Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate

• jasonhansel 3y ago
  [flagged]
• Nevermark 3y ago
  Imagine if debate involved a sequence of: (1) Show you understand your opponents arguments well enough to strengthen them first, before (2) your dismantling of their arguments are considered to have clear weight. I.e. include an element of arguing both sides as part of every debate. Winning would be based more on demonstrating mastering knowledge of all the best arguments involved, more than simply an ability to demolish the other's arguments based on weaknesses in how they were made. I think this would be harder to study for. I.e. it would require more thinking on one's feet, which would result in less talking point type arguments, and a greater ability to carefully process the thoughts of others.
• quattrofan 3y ago
  [dead]
• klooney 3y ago
  This was ubiquitous back when I was doing debate, around 20 years ago. The ship sailed long ago.
  • syndicatedjelly 3y ago
    [dead]
  • cushychicken 3y ago
    Same. The kritik and topicality argument forms were everywhere, and typically pretty fucking boring. It was rare that any negative team would take the time to present counterarguments to any discrete part of the affirmative plan. These, plus the shotgun, rapidfire delivery style, dominated policy debate, and made it pretty un-fun to participate in. I ended up switching to extemporaneous speaking and enjoying it a lot more.
  • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    I never debated, but it was explained to me that a key aspect was talking as fast as you can to introduce as much argumentation to your point as possible (newspaper scoring, kind of). "I guess misdirection from deconstructionistism would be an entertaining alternate tactic. Yes you have introduced 122 points in your favor, but alas the very foundation of your arguments is undermined by my simple deconstruction." The world/life is insane. It is far too large to understand, and even if you did, so unpredictable to be predicted anyway. Thus logical argumentation is subject to nihilistic nullification by a sufficiently skilled / pedantic debater?
    • klooney 3y ago
      I mean, debate is Calvinball, so you could go either way. I've seen people win arguing that a K is too generic/doesn't link to the affirmative team's case, and I've seen the affirmative's response get nailed the same way. There's also more performance than people admit to, if your responses seem more competent, that goes a long way. A slow talking K that gets responded to by a team speed reading their prebuilt, 20 point "Foucault was a wanker" folder is probably going to lose.
  • imbnwa 3y ago
    In the 00s alone, I can remember: Fort Hays State winning CEDA Nationals on engaging indigenous rather than Western thought; New York University winning CEDA Nationals on Zizek's 'letter of the law' paradox as a warrant to trying George W Bush at the International Criminal Court for war crimes; Kentucky-Louisville winning CEDA Nationals on the racial and class bias of policy debate. I can't recall if a Kritik ever won the NDT, but much like the TOC, the judging pool is much more a closed loop of the inside circle the competition.
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
      > I can't recall if a Kritik ever won the NDT Emporia SW won the NDT which was covered heavily in mainstream media
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
• syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  This has been going on for a long time. Im 15 years removed and made a hard U turn back to STEM after high school, but nihilism never left me. I blame some of it on debate, and some of it on doing salvia (with people from debate)
• Guvante 3y ago
  Isn't the entire point of debate to restrict how you can argue in order to provide a similar creative structure to artists using arbitrary rules? Doesn't allowing adhoc attacks on semi related structures effectively bypass that structure? Also given the notes in the article it sounds like the judges are too generous with blue sky proposals. "It would be neat if" does not make good policy and shouldn't make good debate. Policy and by extension debate should focus on changes small enough that the outcome of the change is predictable. "Capitalism is terrible" is easy to show but an off ramp to anything else requires more than an hour of explanation...
  • welshwelsh 3y ago
    Yes, but a more important function of debate in school is to expose people to new ideas and to question assumptions. Unfortunately, debates are often structured in a way that forces students to accept some ideas and prevents them from expressing others, which is a problem. For example, whether you argue to raise or lower the minimum wage, either way you are still implicitly accepting the wage system. By framing the debate in this way, the teachers prevent students who oppose the wage system from having an opportunity to express their views. Another example - as Noam Chomsky wrote about in "Manufacturing Consent", after the Vietnam War, the New York Times discussed many different theories for why the US didn't "win" the war. But it never considered the obvious - that the war itself was a mistake, and the US was wrong to be there in the first place. Framing the debate in this way is a way of silencing the opposition, by presenting two "sides" that are actually both on the same side and only disagree about trivial details. If you opposed the Vietnam war, then it would be against your interests to follow the rules of a "debate" about how to win the war. The correct course of action in this scenario is to take the opportunity to argue for what you believe and to undermine the debate itself, even if it results in you "losing" the debate.
    • morelisp 3y ago
      > Yes, but a more important function of debate in school is to expose people to new ideas and to question assumptions. While this is definitely the overall goal of teaching debate, it's not clear to me this is actually how policy debate in school should operate in order to teach that. For one thing, I think other events (congressional is more persuasive and iterative, group discussion more freeform and collaborative, L-D more moralistic) have the potential to do this better. Policy's structure is really meant to force you to defend an evidence-based position in depth. Basically inherent the format is that at least 50% of the time you won't agree with it.
• prohobo 3y ago
  There was a period where people were claiming that critical theory is being pushed in schools, while school board members refuted the claim as nonsense. Then it became clear that the students aren't being taught critical theory at all, but are being subjected to critical pedagogy - ie. teaching methods influenced by critical theory. So, the school board was correct!
  • morelisp 3y ago
    What? Especially ca. 2005 all the coaches I knew hated Ks. The influence was often from the judges who were not teachers, but former policy debate kids now at university.
• bratgpttamer 3y ago
  [flagged]
• api 3y ago
  It reminds me a bit of when a new class of exploit is discovered, like in the early Internet when buffer overflows became popular. You have a period where the exploit gets abused widely until countermeasures are developed and deployed. In this case it seems to be out of context use of cultural critique as a way to throw off the opponent and change the subject. If the debate were actually about these topics that would be another story. This one must be more popular in academic settings. Online the most popular exploit I see is the “Gish gallop.” I only regard debate as having much value when both sides are debating in good faith. Use of thought stopping tactics reduces the whole thing to a mere sophistry contest with no value beyond testing how powerful the LLM is between each debater’s ears.
  • whimsicalism 3y ago
    These arguments have been around for a while and there are effective generic counter-arguments commonly used.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    > If the debate were actually about these topics that would be another story. It is. Kritiks are not new, they've been around forever, and they're incredibly important. They have to directly "link" to the Aff plan or speech, or to the Topic. There are plenty of generic shells to run about "K-Aff that links to squo is unfair/cannot solve/abusive/etc". This article is pushing a political agenda, and using just enough cherry-picked and misrepresented jargon to bamboozle non-policy debaters.
• onychomys 3y ago
  My partner and I went 36-4 in our senior year* in policy debate because we continually argued that the federal government was inefficient and corrupt and we should instead just give block grants to the states. In the mid 1990s in Montana, that was a nearly unbeatable strategy. It's always been about finding the one argument that the judge will be unable to ignore instead of about the actual evidence you have for all the rest of it. *we lost the state championship to a team from Hardin, MT, population about 4000 and guess where the state championship was held that year?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • philsnow 3y ago
    > In the mid 1990s in Montana, that was a nearly unbeatable strategy. We won a lot because we knew the judges > we lost [...] to a team from Hardin [...] and guess where the state championship was held that year? We lost because the judges knew them
• tekla 3y ago
  These alt debates were well around 20 years ago. It was incredibly rare that they succeeded because: a) most judges didn't really like it when the debate becomes some weird meta thing. b) most teams that ran this were NOT good at debate. What seems new is Judges completely throwing out the substance of the debate and relying on their own political views for the round.
  • projektfu 3y ago
    Now that you say that, it reminds me that there was a term for it at least 25 years ago. Something like "dark policy"...
  • kurthr 3y ago
    If, by political views, you mean boredom with a well worn artificial meta argument that makes a farce of whatever rules do exist in debate. It was funny/interesting once.
  • morelisp 3y ago
    > b) most teams that ran this were NOT good at debate. Yep. Everyone on my team who ran Ks, especially neg, were the people too lazy to do actual research against multiple plans.
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • morelisp 3y ago
        The people running Ks usually had trollish neocon or objectivist personal politics. When you use phrases like “the economic debate” it sounds like you know nothing about policy debate structure, and just want to dump on critical theory for your own personal politics here.
        • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
• projektfu 3y ago
  I debated in the Lincoln-Douglas format (policy wasn't big in my area) and would sometimes try arguments from deconstructionist points of view. The judges never really understood them and without their understanding, the arguments couldn't remain strong. In L-D having better analogies often was a stronger method than being clever. I suppose that's something that was different in policy debate, where as I understand it, nonsense can be debated so long as the other side responds to it? Also, which approach leads to nuclear war? Calling the frame of the debate legitimate or illegitimate?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• RugnirViking 3y ago
  Thats always been the problem with competetive debate - you're supposed to argue a position that often has significant culutural weight, meaning its unlikely anything you say will change anyones mind. I was once asked to debate a pro slavery stance in debate class despite obviously everyone being against it. I felt our team did pretty well and the other team did barely anything and yet everyone voted for the other side. Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.
  • mythrwy 3y ago
    Back when they had corporal punishment (i.e. "spanking") in US schools I had to debate against it in high-school. One teacher, who used the punishment frequently, was the judge and simply awarded the debate to the pro paddling side and all my (sourced and referenced) arguments were ignored. I always knew it was BS. Then they banned the practice. And I quit the debate team in anger. So, I guess I really kind of won the debate, it just took a couple more decades.
  • mikepurvis 3y ago
    You see that even on sites like this one (or reddit), where the etiquette page beseeches everyone to vote for comments that are useful, insightful, or well-argued, rather than just what they agree with (especially already agree with). But it never really seems to play out that way; it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour.
    • rahimnathwani 3y ago
      it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour Interestingly, my most upvoted recent comment was one stating a position that was opposed to ~all of the existing comments on a thread.
      • AlbertCory 3y ago
• motohagiography 3y ago
  The problem with this type of theory is that you have to accept that everything is x-ist first, and then the speaker iterates on logic that seems internally consistent, after you have accepted that the axioms (and conclusions) of their system of reasoning are true. The problem is that since the axioms and conclusions are negatively defined, any statement within it can seem internally consistent, so it doesn't matter they just run down the clock and rope in the credulous. The legitimacy of these critical theories seems to rest on Kripke's invention of so-called "modal logics," which I understand were initially presented as a progressive reaction in philosophy departments to the positive logics derived from maths. The criteria for logic is that it "adds up," or more accurately, our rules about logic and consistency (from Gödel, Russell, and others) were only deemed to represent reality if the logical system could represent arithmetic. Kripke seemed to propose that if you revisit and start with logics that cannot represent arithmetic, you still get consistent logical forms, which are sufficient for expressing a much larger range of phenomena. Because sure, if you produce nonsense, nonsense can represent anything. It's the definition of magical thinking, but within a couple of decades, it was being presented as the "formal" logical underpinnings for a variety of essentially marxist ideologies of different intersectional flavours, where they produce the same circular bullshit with only a few words changed, and with the same object in mind: dissolution of meaning and the destruction (neutralization) of discourse as a means to create chaos and to seize power. It is a rhetorical system for protagonizing antagonists. We can sythesize these ideologies pretty trivially and inject them into naive minds that turn them into either activists, or neutralize any resistance to them because they're just baffling gibberish with the threat of political consequences. Nobody wants to admit they have been fooled or taken, and its easier to attack the people who point it out than to admit that you have been bullied and hustled by highly trained pros. High school teachers judging middle school debate clubs aren't equipped to handle this, but theory is teaching kids to rhyme out ideologies that are entertaining, and even charismatic, but they're nothing but the same old tropes of the 20th century and its grisly consequences.
  • User23 3y ago
    To me it sounds like you're just describing enthymemes[1]. You don't need modal logic for that, just plain old Aristotelian rhetoric. And rhetorically you can fly a whole lot of ridiculous premise under the radar in the unstated leg so it's a powerful technique. It works somewhat similarly to the technique of "assuming the sale." I don't have much to say about CRT or whatever you want to call that rhetorical program today, but it doesn't take any great analytical ability to suss out the unstated premises. And if you do it becomes pretty clear that the whole enterprise isn't exactly intellectually honest. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme
• runpommel 3y ago
  [flagged]
• dgs_sgd 3y ago
  To question the premises of the debate topic rather than support a side seems like a huge cop-out. You don't have to do your research to support evidence based arguments and your opponent who may have done their research to support their arguments now has to argue against a completely different position for which their evidence is useless. What is going to happen when these people wield actual power in politics and public policy and the conclusion policy debates is "society is rotten to the core" (example Kritik from the article).
  • cratermoon 3y ago
    > To question the premises of the debate rather than support a side seems like a huge cop-out No, in fact it is the beginning of wisdom. Contrary to your assertion that you don't have to do research, the ability to question the premises begins with understanding not only your argument but many other arguments as well.
    • zdragnar 3y ago
      In my experience, it was a cop-out. In my day, it was usually centered on some grammatical error that turned into a game of semantics. The whole point is to catch your opponent off guard and reframe the topic into an arena they hadn't prepared for. Debate rounds don't really allow time for thoughtful contemplation; you typically have at most a minute of prep time between speeches within the round.
      • cratermoon 3y ago
        Well, nobody ever accused high school debate teams as being founts of wisdom.
    • oofta-boofta 3y ago
      [dead]
    • sixo 3y ago
      It's the beginning of wisdom when you do it on your own, in your own time, and at whatever length it asks of you. But another aspect of wisdom is to think intelligently about the problem at hand by choice. To refuse to do so, or not to be able to, is to not be wise.
• dgb23 3y ago
  This article reads like satire. The prerogative of the young is to question the status quo in fundamental ways. They aren’t yet restricted by responsibility and dependents. They haven’t become numb yet. Let them be sharp and radical. Does the author prefer control and indoctrination? Positive cultural change can’t happen if we force the young and the free into a box. All of the freedoms we have have been fought against the mainstream and against established power. We will always need radical and critical ideas to move forward. We need young people to be able to say that our questions and subjects are fundamentally wrong.
  • scarmig 3y ago
    One of the points Yglesias makes is that judges prejudge certain arguments to be wrong. For instance, one judge says > Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist... I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments... Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc. At this point, the status quo (at least in debate, but also more broadly) is simply mouthing liberal pieties. Repeating "Black Lives Matter" a thousand times is neither sharp nor radical, and it's funny to see people whose ideas are incredibly conventional think of themselves as a rebel.
    • cdtwigg 3y ago
      FYI this post was actually written by Maya the intern (Matt only writes the weekday posts).
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      > At this point, the status quo (at least in debate, but also more broadly) is simply mouthing liberal pieties A single example chosen specifically because it is extreme isn’t the status quo, and Maoism isn’t (and is opposed to) liberalism.
• RajT88 3y ago
  This seems much better than the last article I read about trends in high school debate, which basically was talking over the other person and using the gish-gallop maneuver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
  • morelisp 3y ago
    I can see why speed debate can seem like a gish gallop, but it's not. And the way policy is structured it's definitely not talking over anyone (except I suppose in some of the absolutely radical Ks that attempt to destroy the policy format, and even K-friendly judges hate those).
    • RajT88 3y ago
      Trying to find the article now. I am pretty sure that they were not misunderstanding the dynamics of speed debate, and kids were actually using the gish gallop.
  • tekla 3y ago
    A big point in debate is learning how to deal with gish-gallop. That shit only works if you don't know how to deal with it.
    • AYBABTME 3y ago
      How do you deal with it?
      • zbentley 3y ago
        Careful note taking, keeping your head and identifying contingent and similar arguments such that you don't have to spend tons of time on each counterpoint, prioritizing offensive ("your claim X actually supports my side, not yours, because Y", aka. turns) rebuttals over defensive ones, and not spending undue time on weaker claims that the judge is likely to doubt as well. There's a lot more you can do, but those are some pretty uncontentious strategies. Source: debated for 8 years in school.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  I think this is a useful form of thinking, while exhausting for actually attending a debate competition. Much of the world doesn't operate in affirmation and negations. And even most of American's political divisions only masquerade as opposites, but if you listen - which neither 'side' does - you'll see they aren't opposites except in result. While other results are possible that do possibly bridge consensus.
• guerrilla 3y ago
  I can't stand the actual examples here (which reek of low quality Continental philosophy and dogmatic nonsense) but rejecting and questioning premises is definitely something I support, especially for young people.
• ivraatiems 3y ago
  This article smacks of a classic bad-debater behavior: "I can't win rhetorically on the power of my own argument so I'll attack the people and techniques that are beating me instead of addressing them substantively." The correct response to "the whole world is broken and we can't debate X because it's stoppered by Y" is "the world is not broken (enough) to not debate X because there are practical things we can do about X." If that's a unpersuasive argument, well, then it's unpersuasive and you ought to ask yourself why. It's always possible the judges are biased in favor of one argument or another, but that's how the game has always worked. There are lots of arguments against critical theory that have merit and are useful in debate. "Boo hoo I don't like critical theory" isn't one of them.
  • ink_13 3y ago
    Formalized debating like this bears about as much resemblance to persuasion as fencing does to actual sword fighting. That is, the broad strokes are similar but ultimately it's highly stylized and not actually the other thing.
• rutierut 3y ago
  The whole debate format has been broken forever. Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea. This stage seems like a marginal improvement, with the biggest con being that it's more anti-rationalist. Rationalism isn't a panacea, but one needs to master it in order to effectively argue post-modern critical theories. Competitive debate has always sucked and apparently still sucks.
  • rahimnathwani 3y ago
    "Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea." Why? One consequence might be to improve your ability to steelman an argument with which you disagree.
    • rutierut 3y ago
      Fair point that is useful, but the majority of people never steelman anything, a significant amount of people will even refuse to steelman anything on moral grounds. Strawmanning on the other hand…
    • goodpoint 3y ago
      Pushing for competition instead of rational thinking is bad. Learning steelmanning is just one minor benefit.
  • tekla 3y ago
    > Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea. If you can't argue in the affirmative of the other side, you probably don't actually understand the topic to being with, and are probably not very good at critical thinking.
    • rutierut 3y ago
      I completely agree with this. If you’re arguing against trickle-down economics you should know where people arguing for it are coming from and be able to phrase it in a manner that its proponents agree with. This also happens to be one of the most (holistically) effective techniques irl when “debating” with someone.
• JHorse 3y ago
  Good. This country has been in desperate need of revolutionaries for far too long. Respecting the structures and rules of polite society let the Climate Change "Debate" feed denialism that's literally burning the world down around these kids right now. They're going to need to make some radical moves quickly once they get to positions of influence, and it's heartening to know that they're preparing for that.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• jsmcgd 3y ago
  Why do the debate organisers tolerate this? If the debate is X versus Y, why allow someone to say we should really be discussing Z? Imagine this in any other competitive arena like sport where during a match some team starts playing another sport entirely. There's nothing wrong with debating critical theory but not if that's not what's being debated. It should be an automatic fail, just as it would be if you're supposed to debating in a certain language and you refuse to do so. This just seems like deliberate sabotage/propaganda masquerading as sincere communication. As much fault lies with the organisers as with those who wish to deliberately pervert the debate.
  • aabhay 3y ago
    As a debate student that goes to dozens of tournaments a year, arguing about the same policy topic over and over can get very dry. When I was in high school debate, I found these diverse literatures exciting and stimulating, which made my passion for debate much stronger.
    • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > As a debate student that goes to dozens of tournaments a year, arguing about the same policy topic over and over can get very dry. That brings up a good point. We probably need to differentiate between a student debate as part of a class vs extracurricular debating. Students participating in a classroom debate only get so many minutes of exposure; each is valuable. Tighter boundaries would seem to be called for there.
      • whimsicalism 3y ago
        Yes :) As someone very familiar with high school debate, this article is exclusively talking about the extracurricular variety.
    • jmye 3y ago
      It seems like there should be a place for both: one where diverse literature and meta-debate is both accepted and maybe even the point (e.g. make the premise actual critical to the Ks), and another where you are expected to argue for or against a position you don’t agree with. I think there’s tremendous value in having to steelman positions you think are fundamentally bad/incorrect, but I think you’re also right that there’s potential growth value in looking into deeper and different theory systems entirely. But I think it’s generally a bad thing all around for the Ks to infiltrate literally all debate and crowd out anything else (in the same way the speed-talking phenomenon was [is?] a fundamentally bad thing for debate).
• drewrv 3y ago
  “Kids are doing something differently from how we used to do it” is always a red flag for me. The fact that traditional high school debate produced leaders such as Nixon, Pelosi, and Larry Summers is not the ringing endorsement of the process that the author seems to think. I think this a compelling argument: “minimum wage is an irrelevant debate in a country where basic necessities such as housing, healthcare, and education are increasingly out of reach. Structural reforms are needed, not minor adjustments to regulations that often go ignored.” If people don’t think that’s compelling, I’d love to hear that argument! But the author’s complaint is framed as “kids today are doing it wrong” and it doesn’t really counter the points the kids are making.
  • whimsicalism 3y ago
    Cheers - the point is that it is up for debate! "I don't think this is how debate should be!" Okay? If it is so obvious why this is bad, win the argument in the round.
    • vacuity 3y ago
      If things were so obvious, we wouldn't need the debates. Your first line is most correct, in that many things are up to debate because even if the general tack is right, nuances matter.
  • Aunche 3y ago
    >I think this a compelling argument: “minimum wage is an irrelevant debate in a country where basic necessities such as housing, healthcare, and education are increasingly out of reach. Structural reforms are needed, not minor adjustments to regulations that often go ignored.” If your argument is that the minimum wage distracts is from systemic reforms, then that's still a policy argument, albeit one that likely wouldn't get far. A kritik is basically saying minimum wage assumes the existence of capitalism and capitalism is bad. A socialist policy maker isn't going to use that as an excuse to vote against a higher minimum wage.
    • whimsicalism 3y ago
• binary132 3y ago
  this is bait.
  • dang 3y ago
    It does contain ideological flamebait but the details around high school debating are interesting and uncorrelated with any common topic here. That makes it a good candidate for an HN thread. As many commenters have been adding their own interesting experience with high school debates, I think HN is 'winning' this one so far (i.e. there are more thoughtful comments than flamewars).
• agg23 3y ago
  My high school Policy league (2010+) did not allow kritiks essentially at all. It was an extremely rare occurrence to run a negative plan (I'm not sure I ever saw it myself). An aff kritik would absolutely not have been tolerated as we would ding them significantly on Topicality (sticking to the required resolution), which is voted on halfway through the round (so if aff loses, the round is over). I was one of the most resolution bending debators, with most of my aff plans going outside the bounds of what everyone else thought of for that topic. I think my league was very abnormal however as we had a lot of layman, parent judges that we had to teach rules to (and sometimes the teams had conflicting interpretations), and we didn't allow more abusive techniques such as speed and spread (a common technique in Policy or Parli to present arguments as quickly as possible to prevent the opposite team from being able to address all of them, resulting in a de facto win). We would never have allowed someone to judge with a bio of "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for ... fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism", and it's insane to me that this was allowed at a top end tournament. There were certainly judges that brought their own priors (and we tried to keep track of them to help the rest of our club out), but they generally didn't announce it in such a damaging way.
  • whimsicalism 3y ago
    Your league sounds typical of debate leagues, it is the national circuit that is abnormal.
    • Paul-Craft 3y ago
      I agree. The GP post describes the HS policy league I participated in fairly well, except that we didn't have parent judges. We were a small, county league in a league that had all of 4 or 5 schools participating, so we were able to get by using coaches as judges. And, lest you ask the question, no, the coaches were not overtly biased toward their own teams. My partner and I definitely beat a few teams in front of their own coach as the judge, and we definitely lost a few rounds with our own coach judging. There were no explicit position statements by any judges, either. They only "position" was that the affirmative must advocate for the plan in order to win topicality.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• AYBABTME 3y ago
  As a foreigner with kids growing up in the US, this crazy bias toward critical-everything in the US education system makes me worried that my kids will be indoctrinated in some weird speculative theory instead of educated in normal fields in a focused and rational manner. It leaves me wondering if I shouldn't send them abroad to some school system that has remained sane.
  • knewter 3y ago
    Homeschool your kids. No one else cares about them
    • mbg721 3y ago
      In my area of the forgotten flyover country, the options are: 1) Public school for free for middle-of-the-road (in our district) results, and be at the mercy of school-board politics, 2) Do Catholic school, and we agree with the religious particulars of the Catholic school near us, but it's expensive and they may be weak in STEM and global social studies, 3) Join a home-school co-op, and use the flexibility and extra time to get it all right and fill in any gaps. I don't know what the right answer is, but 3 is looking increasingly good.
      • secondcoming 3y ago
        Are US Catholic schools really that religious? I went to a Catholic school in Ireland and religion had a very minor role in day to day activities or the curriculum. Any religious activities that did occur were entirely optional; nobody cared if you participated or not. They're really called Catholic schools because they used to be run by people from religious orders, but they're all dead now and have been replaced by lay people.
        • daemoens 3y ago
          Ireland does have a very different relationship with the Catholic faith than the US does, especially over the last couple of decades.
• aabhay 3y ago
  Interesting to hear that the high school debate world is just like it was when I went to high school 20 years ago. I became somewhat radical and left wing through my debate experience and then took action on it in college (participated in lots of illegal/anti-cap collective actions at Berkeley) and ultimately found that the entire revolutionary cause and “movement” are intellectually bankrupt. It all certainly sounds and feels very different when you can flit around the intellectual landscape in a debate versus having to settle on a real vindication and make your life out of it.
  • erulabs 3y ago
    Had a similar experience - I was exceedingly excited after reading the communist manifesto, some Jorge Luis Borges, and a number of other revolutionary texts as a kid. I searched high and low for people to talk seriously about this with. It wasn’t until well into my late twenties I finally realized all the pleasant, satisfying, productive conversations I’d had had been with moderates or what I may have once foolishly called “imperialists”. I do love talking to bright young communists tho. It’s amazingly pleasing to introduce an ounce of doubt, or conversely an ounce of appreciation for the world we inhabit.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      The problem is that people get sucked into communism due to its success and the fact that Capital is crucial reading. Capital is also difficult reading that requires pre-Marx prerequisites, and The Communist Manifesto is really short. So people read The Communist Manifesto, which is really all Engels, and pretend to have read or understood Capital. No need to get hung up on Communism. We have wonderful traditions of class politics in the US, pre- and early-Soviet Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, India. You can almost entirely avoid that century of cargo-culted Bolshevik word salad.
    • vbsd 3y ago
      What texts by Jorge Luis Borges are you thinking of? Wikipedia quotes him calling himself a conservative, and none of the short stories I’ve read strike me as revolutionary. Perhaps something from his youth?
• throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  Did i read it correctly? The main problem is the lack of good responses? The debate landscape wouldn't change with good rebuttals.
• popilewiz 3y ago
  [dead]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• proxiful-wash 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ryuhhnn 3y ago
  Is critical theory a rhetorical dead-end if you want to seriously debate something? Sure, but framing a debate and constricting it to a dichotomy is no less radicalising than a critical theory argument. I think people dislike critical theory so much because they know that it shifts focus to the structures everyone knows control society but nobody wants to acknowledge. Sure, it’s lazy to blindly advocate for revolution for the sake of revolution, but it’s also lazy to reject a line of philosophical inquiry just because you don’t like how it was presented. What should high school debate even be for? Should we restrict it to rhetorical sandboxes, or should we allow it to be a forum where ideas can be put forth and debated?
  • taeric 3y ago
    I think the point is some view debate as a way to force folks to consider views they might not fully agree with. The search for common ground was the lesson. As this story is presented, a lot of these feel like non-sequiturs. Not wrong, and not not worth discussing, but not in the spirit of the debate.
  • sixo 3y ago
    Mmm, it's a dead-end without a philosophical framework powerful enough to contain it. It's like trying to decide how to build a system/business while also trying to work out what to build/what problem you're solving. At some point, to actually do anything, you have to pinch off the space of all possible problem requirements/business objective/etc.—not permanently, but long enough to start building! You certainly can't coordinate a large team to do it when the goal itself is changing. You have to draw a line around something and saying "we're doing this", and then focus on how to do it. In ML terms: If you don't commit to a goal for a while, then every time you encounter uncertainty in whether you're accomplishing your current goal, it will "backpropagate" to increase uncertainty in the goal itself. This can easily become unmanageable. To make any progress, you need a series of forward passes (attempting to do things) and backward passes (revising your idea of what you're trying to do.) Balancing these is a skill, and is highly contingent on what you're doing, runway, etc. Applied to debating with critical theory, this means: if you constantly cast doubt on the entire framework of modernity, you can never come up with a useful answer about any particular thing in the immediate present. Every potential harm or pain backpropagates to indict the entire system. These harms are rightly considered indictments of the system—but in the real world, unlike in a debate, you still have to act. I haven't done debate myself, but these same problems come up in internet discourse all the time, and it seems clear that you need to some equipment to handle this tendency to make any progress. What's necessary is the ability to designate "responsibility", i.e. leadership.
• livinginfear 3y ago
  I remember seeing this video a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 Is this actually indicative of the kind of structured debate that happens in colleges?
• csours 3y ago
  Debate doesn't do any of the thing that I consider critical to learning about the world. 1. Maintain a calm attitude 2. Evaluate facts BEFORE taking sides, and evaluate if you have enough facts to make a conclusion 3. Consider the deeply held beliefs of the primary people involved 4. Honestly evaluate "How could I gather evidence that I'm wrong about this" 5. Consider that the solution may lie outside the area of discussion The human brain REALLY loves to have a satisfying answer. Debate provides that for some people, but satisfying is not the same as true or useful.
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    That's not a problem with debate. It's a problem with the judges. They are apparently quite willing to be open about the fact that they won't actually do their jobs: > Below are quotes from written judge preferences from the 2023 Tournament of Champions across all four formats > Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist... I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments...
    • lupire 3y ago
      Debate has always been corrupted by the practice of last winners driving the contest to ridiculousness, such as the focus on talking quickly over quality content. But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge?
      • thaumasiotes 3y ago
        Presumably because the wrong people might win.
      • penneallagricia 3y ago
        Winning a debate doesnt make your argument truer. It just means your opponent was weaker than you at making his argument. Agree or not with that judge but he makes a good point about favouring the validity of an argument over the ability of the debater.
• Cypher 3y ago
  It's not even critical, it's deconstructive.
• jefftk 3y ago
  > Here’s a brief timeline of the development of the different high school debate formats: ... 2009: Parliamentary debate is founded I was doing parliamentary debate in high school around 2002 in Boston; where does 2009 come from?
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    You're expecting WAAAY too much if you think this right-wing rage-bait piece is going to get their facts right.
• modeless 3y ago
  Oral debate is the lowest form of argument.
• yk 3y ago
  Just whining about the meta. > When debaters reject the topic and advocate for these critical theories, they choose not to engage in pragmatic policy discussions. Well, they choose some strategy to generate debate entries, namely theoretical sophistication, instead of whatever pragmatic means. (Usually it just means "My position is really great and I don't want to think about alternatives," but perhaps there is a specific technical meaning here.) > Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles. That is just saying, to compete on a high level people have to play the game well.
  • agentgumshoe 3y ago
    I would struggle with the game. Not because of the topics, but because of the sesquipedalian nature of the responses (e.g. the example responses in the article). My response would be "can you please ELI5 that so you stop wasting our time unnecessarily.
    • ang_cire 3y ago
      You wouldn't struggle if you did policy debate, though, because part of it is preparing for these arguments. There are literally tons of arguments in policy debate to run against Ks which (mis)use Critical Literature terms to create an Alt that doesn't actually solve for the K.
• bhouston 3y ago
  I loved debate in university and I benefits from the skills I learnt. That said I am not sure the handwringing in this article is justified. So what if someone uses critical theory as a response to a topic? Criticizing and understanding the world is important. I think young people who care about the world is important. And us older people will always view what the younger generation does as too wild and weird as we become more conservative with age. Young people experimenting and trying new ways of working with the world and ideas is important to the vitality of society. Shutting them down because they are changing things will ossify us.
  • vacuity 3y ago
    I'm a young person myself and I sometimes find myself thinking like a stereotypical conservative curmudgeon. Not really in terms of typical "US conservative values" but rather "I'm stubborn about my opinions". I think some of the more recent discourse is valuable but a lot is radical to the point of absurdity. I like the phrase "have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out". I think I'm better at this balancing act than a lot of "young people". Based the article, the usage of these kritiks seems to sometimes be quite damaging to productive debate: > For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good. Instead, debaters have to concede that capitalism is a bad system and make other leftist arguments like, “it’s capitalistic to fail to argue for the topic” and “Marxism isn’t the most effective response to capitalism; instead we need to look to other critical theories" > Kritiks are often (although not always) strategically employed by students from big, well-funded debate programs. Their opponents—who often attend schools with fewer coaches and resources—may not be familiar with the dense philosophical arguments. Also, I disagree with the premise that "reform is hopeless and the only solution is to burn it all down", so I guess I won't quite see eye to eye with these people.
    • ang_cire 3y ago
      The article is straight lying about judges, though. They're cherry-picking ones (which they know, so they specifically claim otherwise without then explaining how they're not) that they can use as left-wing bogeymen. > Based the article, the usage of these kritiks seems to sometimes be quite damaging to productive debate There is a very valid discussion that the community itself is having about K-Aff *solvency thresholds*, but that is not what this bad-faith author is talking about. I live in the Bay Area, and no one in even the hyper-liberal debate circuits here would blank and eye, much less automatically vote against you, if you ran Cap-good. Most people outside of the debate community are probably unaware of the specific round that sparked off all these right-wing "debate is indoctrinating kids with leftist ideas!" articles, but this reaction is hilariously proving the point of many Critical arguments.
• shanusmagnus 3y ago
  This strikes me as a similar technique to trying to jailbreak an LLM to answer your questions without all the safety neutering -- you're trying to convince the judges to eval your new rules of debate, and then interpret your utterances in that new context.
• schoen 3y ago
  I've repeatedly wondered whether the causality might run in the other direction. The first time I heard of people saying "you should lose this argument because you have a harmful mindset / hold harmful presuppositions / are using harmful language", they were policy debaters practicing kritiks around 2000. (I did high school and college debate, but never policy debate, always the much less formal Lincoln-Douglas style with, at least at that time, no spreading, evidence, or kritiks -- and topics that were a surprise rather than given ahead of time.) Some of them started winning debates that way, and I keep wondering if they started to think of it as a useful or effective approach more generally.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    That's an odd angle that is worth investigating. edit: The real question is how all of this stuff took over politics, nonprofit boards, corporate boards, etc.; basically Robert's Rules debate style deliberative environments. Changing trends in literally high-school and college debate would feed into that, because they ultimately feed people onto boards and into politics.
    • morelisp 3y ago
      But the formats using Robert's Rules or similar structures are least affected by this. I assure you these people are way more likely to feed into, y'know, policy institutes like CATO, Hoover, or Brookings. Nonprofit boards have little use for the kind of manic nihilism policy debate breeds in its most dedicated adherents. (A lot also go into Big Law or lobbying.)
• lupire 3y ago
  I'm sympathetic to the concerns, but the article rambles on in a way that doesn't make me trust the author as guide to good debating.
  • eiiot 3y ago
    The author (Maya Bodnick) was ranked #1 in the country in the 2019-2020 season. https://www.parliamentarydebate.org/rankings-2019-20 https://www.parliamentarydebate.org/rankings-2019-20
    • ang_cire 3y ago
      She's doing a lot of talking about Policy for someone who does such a kneecapped debate format (Parli). In Parli, the topic changes every round, and they have 20 minutes to prep, so there's no real depth to their research. They're not even allowed to bring up things they researched beforehand.
      • eiiot 3y ago
        I'm a Parli debater who went to quarters at TOC this year -- our format may be handicapped, but in terms of Ks, pretty much everything Maya discussed applies directly to Parli. You may be thinking of east-coast ("lay") Parli where internet prep & files aren't allowed, as on most of the west coast pre-written Ks are run pretty regularly.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    She did Parlimentary (Parli), which is an incredibly abridged format in which you only learn the topic of debate 20 minutes before the round, and it changes every round. It's in literally no way comparable to Policy, where you are debating the same thing all year, and put in literally tens or hundreds of hours of preparation. She's talking about a format she has no clue about, because it's just a right-wing rage-bait article. There have been a bunch since NDT finals, and everyone who knows about that round knows exactly why these *particular* people are so mad...
• skipkey 3y ago
  Arguing something only tangentially related to the debate topic is a decades-old strategy, at a minimum. We called them squirrel plans, or something like that. When I was in high school in the late eighties, one semester the tournament topic was something like, “Resolved, that the USA should decrease the non-military consumption of fossil fuels”. A fairly straightforward topic. In one tournament we ran into a team whose affirmative plan was, “ban oil-eating microbes”. Basically they ran with “evidence” from some articles written by crackpots who postulated that these microbes used to clean up oil spills could mutate into something that would essentially eat all life on the earth. You had to be ready to handle things like this so you would have a number of generic negatives that you would try to tie in. In this case, we ran with our “humans are bad, so killing them off is a net good” negative. We called that one Malthus.
• LeroyRaz 3y ago
  To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc... The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks). The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)
  • imtringued 3y ago
    >It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • tekla 3y ago
    K's are not new. People have runs K's since at least the 2000's. I myself ran a Zizek K that was quite a lot of fun to run with back then. I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.
    • atypicaluser 3y ago
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  What?! High-schoolers, given access to the infinite debate medium of the internet, no longer want to score brownie points from their teachers by debating narrow, safe, softball "debate topics" that are carefully-constructed to keep people from discussing interesting things like capitalism vs marxism, which might put the school in hot water with government and big industry, who are very comfortable with the status quo? What...
  • techno_tsar 3y ago
    This is what the author and some commenters are missing out on: entertainment value. If you're a young adult doing extracurricular debating, you're going to get very very bored doing things by the book and sticking to the narrow confines of 'policy making'. Running a kritik is probably really fun for those students. The author makes it explicitly clear where her biases are, and even reiterates cliched conservative fears of critical theory.
• shove 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • smabie 3y ago
    Because someone submitted the link and then it got some up votes
• ecshafer 3y ago
  This isn't really surprising. I thought Debate seemed really interesting, my high school didn't have debate. So I went to the debate club in college, and it was literally the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my life. Its not well reasoned and well researched arguments, its people speed talking and hyper ventilating as they cram as many points in as they can. The point system just doesn't work and debate doesn't come close to a real debate. I am not sure what the fix is, make it entirely subjective? crowd appeal? Or what, but the reality of debate clubs vs the movie version, the movie version is much better.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    > The point system just doesn't work There is no point system in Policy Debate.
• ducharmdev 3y ago
  I know this is just an example, but is this an accurate representation of what these arguments are like? > Western societies are structured on Enlightenment-era philosophy that fundamentally does not value Black people as people, and defines them as slaves. Even though documents like the Constitution have been amended to end slavery, it created a society that is rotten to the core, and the only way to fix it is to burn down civil society. I found this particular one strange because it sounds like essentialism, which is both a hallmark of Western philosophy and a common target of critiques by critical theorists and poststructuralists.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    There's not any one sentence that represents what Kritiks on the whole are like, because they can literally be about anything. This author is cherry-picking stuff to rile up right-wingers about schools indoctrinating kids. In fact, this sentence wouldn't really work as the basis of a Kritik in most cases, because it's explicitly arguing that those things are true in the status quo (so nothing that the Aff plan would do specifically caused that, which means it loses on "uniqueness"; i.e. it's not the Aff's fault, it's just how the world is.) As a K-Aff, they would probably be pushing for some kind of well-tread Alt (alternative action) like De-col. Afro-pessimism is something that all experienced policy debaters are familiar with, and familiar with answering.
    • ducharmdev 3y ago
      Thank you for the context - I thought that sounded off.
• Ericson2314 3y ago
  I dunno, debate previously promoted a sort of detached both-siderism that matched an e.g. Clintonian "winning is more important than using wins to enact good policy" politics. Now the pendulum has swung to the other side. Whatever. All this stuff is stupid college application padding and we should not think so hard about it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• iamthepieman 3y ago
  In the debates I've been involved with as a parent to a high schooler, The students have always argued both sides. They'll typically spend the morning arguing on the affirmative and negative teams respectively, break for lunch and then switch. How would the teams arguing K's handle that??
  • ajolly 3y ago
    K's are more common on the negative side, however there's nothing stopping you from trying to redefine terms on the affirmative. Of course the counter is to point out topicality but as the article is saying it's really going to start boiling down to who your judges are.
• skinpop 3y ago
  Can't have the kids learning critical thinking.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• noduerme 3y ago
  I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I have a soft spot for this. My grandfather, before he fled Belarus, was trained at a yeshiva and on his way to becoming a rabbi. His explanation of the training was ... Jedi-like, to my young mind. Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. Any shortcuts to rhetorical passion might be allowed, but learning to parry them and see through them was what was truly valued... well and beyond the ability to convince others (and certainly beyond obedience or conformity). Not surprising that my family in the US became lawyers. This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. That being said, failing to take the unlikeable part of a debate is read as cheating - if not to the judges, who may share your bias, then to the audience who you've alienated and failed to convince. And so it can and should fail in the long run, as an impurity in the art.
  • shagie 3y ago
    > This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. This is a current topic of debate in debate... https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205 https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205 > Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate. > This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• plaidfuji 3y ago
  > For example, if the topic was “The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage,” the affirmation side might provide some arguments supporting this policy. But then the negation side, instead of arguing that the government shouldn’t raise the minimum wage, might reject spending any time on the original resolution and counter-propose a Marxist kritik Honestly, if this is what debate is all about - “here is a political policy proposal, argue either for or against it” - this sounds like a waste of time. Good for the negation side. What is the minimum wage trying to solve? To get meta on this article, maybe debate itself should be reimagined. Pose a problem, like “too many jobs don’t provide a living wage for their locale”. Then ask for policy proposals. Find two teams with strongly differing approaches, things that they have researched and believe in, and then have them debate.
  • starkparker 3y ago
    From a student perspective, this was the Model UN/mock legislative assembly model, and I loved it waaaaaaaay more than I ever loved the debate model that was more popular and pushed harder the last 3-4 decades.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      Seconded, and this is why it has kept increasing. These kinds of arguments are fun to make.
• nrfulton 3y ago
  This piece is not about the vast majority of high school debate and is probably going to create some real headaches for people just trying to run an after-school activity. All of the statistics in this piece are about the "Tournament of Champions". As its name implies, the Tournament of Champions is an invite-only tournament. In order to get an invitation, students need to do very well at several elite tournaments that make up a "national circuit". As the name of the circuit implies, doing well at these tournaments typically requires traveling long distances throughout the year or living in places with a large concentration of "national circuit" tournaments (ie, coasts and huge cities). Almost all high school debaters compete close to home in regional or local circuits. "Kritiks" are far less common on these circuits, usually ineffective, and almost always used because some kid is excited about them for one reason or another. In 15 years of judging I've judged maybe a half dozen rounds in local tournaments where an actual kritik was read, despite being one of the few judges who would be at all receptive (I don't have strong feelings either way; I just want the kids to be able to exercise their brains and explore their interests). These facts are going to have to be explained to some irate school board member who read this piece. The explanation will come from some stressed and over-worked coach/volunteer in order to make sure their rural midwestern debate program doesn't get cut or micro-managed out of existence. Anyways, I'll let the Harvard kids carry on with their elite infighting about how there's too much critical theory at the invite-only championship of a largely inaccessible national circuit.
  • shortrounddev2 3y ago
    > This piece is not about the vast majority of high school debate and is probably going to create some real headaches for people just trying to run an after-school activity. My experience is that these kind of politics are universal in policy debate, not so much LD or PF
    • nrfulton 3y ago
      I think your experience is atypical. In most circuits, the typical judge is a parent with no particular knowledge about debate and certainly not a tabroom.com paradigm.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Humans and their mind viruses.
• shortrounddev2 3y ago
  It has been like this for at least a decade; Policy debaters were all about far left kritikal debates when I was in high school. LD and PF were normal but policy was super left wing. Anyways, high school debate is a stupid activity and I don't recommend anyone do it. It teaches no useful hard or soft skills, only encourages talking extremely quickly to win on rule technicalities rather than the weight of your arguments and speaking ability
• breakyerself 3y ago
  Sounds good to me. It's impossible to make a good argument for keeping the minimum wage low so they instead up the ante.
• rezonant 3y ago
  Do you think that a factor in why Ks are becoming more prevalent and desirable amongst participants (judges and contestants) might be because of the increased audience that their debate positions have, since they are all put up on YouTube? I would imagine the incentive changes quite a lot when your effective arguments for (what you perceive to be) an odious policy position could help to make that policy a reality.
• onetimeusename 3y ago
  Securitization is a political decision that discursively constructs certain phenomena as threats to justify their management and extermination. The practice of security erases alternate perspectives through the dominance of Western rationalism, permitting unchecked violence against alterity. We should use this round to create space for an epistemological multiplicity that breaks down dominant discourses of North Korea. Does this actually have a meaning? It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry.
  • nrfulton 3y ago
    > It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry. It is mind numbing. IMO it's also a fair bit of sophistry, but it's at least sophistry that involves some amount of concept compression. Ie, you can't quite unpack those concepts into a single paragraph of similar size. Also: please remember, in these conversations, that we are talking about things written by teenagers. > Does this actually have a meaning? Yes. Here's a much better but slightly lossy way of saying this: If you talk about North Korea only as a threat to be contained, then you can fall into the trap of forgetting that it's a country of humans. That could be a bad trap to fall into for a number of reasons. One reason: if you forget about your adversary's humanity then it becomes easier to commit atrocities. It's easier to "contain the communist threat" than to "fire bomb a village". Instead of rushing ahead with policy decisions that manage North Korea as an abstract security threat, we should first try to understand the various perspectives of people within North Korea. Hopefully easier to understand. The reason it's not pure sophistry is that there are some details I left out -- the second sentence of the original, in particular, has a fair bit of additional stuff packed into it. And the last sentence of my version is a bit over-simplified. Fully expanding everything might take a page or so; idk, I'm too exhausted to try :) But that's the basic idea. And, more to the point, that's the level of detail at which this idea that would actually matter in 99+% of debates. So that's probably how it should be stated. You can't learn without making mistakes, and these types of things are great teaching opportunities. On that note: this type of writing also happens in Mathematics and especially in documentation of complicated software. We have a sequence of long sentences relating fairly abstract concepts. If the reader already understands each of those concepts and how they typically interact, then the reader can piece together the meaning of the sentences quite quickly. But for a reader without that context the paragraph is utterly inscrutable, appears to be nonsense, and takes hours to unpack. The key observation here is about technical writing in general. Describe the basic idea without too much jargon. It's okay to remove some details and over-simplify! Then, if the reader needs more details, give the more precise statement. The expert can safely skim to the precise statement. Everyone wins. What a useful teaching tool! Aside: I've always found public reaction to these think pieces off-putting. I think of debaters as kids learning how to engage with ideas. The incredibly public and harsh critiques of their failures seems... mean spirited. People will actually project all the ills of American politics onto something written by a kid who is making his first attempt at packing a lot of concepts into a small space. I tend to be a bit more sympathetic, since I see highly practiced professionals fail at this task all the time.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  >It’s an activity that selects for kids who often go on to have important careers in politics. I actually like the "Kritik meta" because it just reveals what debate culture is, a posh hobby. I think the real frustration about this just stems from the fact that the kritiks have sort of hacked the game and revealed the silliness and stilted character of debate (unintentionally or not) by taking it to the next level. >High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds. Nolen Gertz in his book on Nihilism points out that the reason people dislike nihilists is because nihilists have the tendency to reveal the nihilism of others when they are being confronted. The author seems to dislike the Kritiks simply for revealing what debate was already about, "winning rounds" by playing the game the best way possible, an activity for affluent kids who are supposed to go on and make a career out of rhetoric.
• phoenixreader 3y ago
  fun fact: an average "policy debate" speaker speaks 350 words per minute and is completely unintelligible to an average person. They speak faster than auctioneers. A "policy debate" is not your average debate and is more like its own sport. The goal is to cram so many arguments into the limited time that your opponents cannot address them all. Watch these and you definitely cannot understand them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrTYHn1Am0c&list=PLHaG-zIzA-QFVlMUHD2LO30Lz1R2kt1hn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrTYHn1Am0c&list=PLHaG-zIzA-... Even the Onion could not have written a better skit.
• chdean 3y ago
  The author's take is a little confusing in an activity where the validity of certain types of argumentation, including kritiks, is routinely debated and playing to judge's preferences is a (often underutilized) part of the game. I recognize it's probably changed a bit in the last decade or so since I participated, but at that time it was about as common to have judges refuse to consider kritiks as embrace them. Arguments that they undermined debate (using many of the same points as this article) often won. Part of the activity is arguing over the rules, which makes it much more interesting, I think, than one as narrowly defined as the author seems to be advocating.
• ajolly 3y ago
  Wild to read about this shift, and I'm glad this wasn't the meta when I was competing. (Won bronze at nationals for Parliamentary debate) One of the aspects I loved most about parli was specifically that you weren't going in there with prepared arguments, father would have to think through the implications of a topic on the fly.
• galkk 3y ago
  What a shit show it must be. Immediately throw away any proposed topic and start arguing about your favorite theme. If this isn't kind of cheating, I don't know what it should be. They need some cough.. adult in the room.. strong person to show the door at any attempt to steer away from the declared debate topic.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    Looks like you fell for the rage-bait! K's are not a free-pass to "start arguing about your favorite theme". If you run a K that doesn't link, you'll immediately lose. If you run a K that links only loosely, you'll lose. If you run a K whose Alt doesn't solve for the K, you'll lose. Ks are literally dependent on being related to the thing which they are run against. When it's a K-Aff, they must link to the Topic itself.
    • galkk 3y ago
      This is not how it is presented in the article, with examples like > Additionally, sometimes the affirmation side kicks off the debate by proposing a kritik — they don’t even bother advocating for the original resolution! And examples of the judges openly demonstrating their preference to kritiks and their arguments and way to present them.
      • ang_cire 3y ago
        Yes, because the article is, as I said, rage bait. It completely misrepresents how kritiks operate, and cherry-picks judge paradigms. There is nothing wrong with liking kirtiks anymore than liking any other type of argumentation, but the author doesn't like them, so they're trying to make it seem like they're bad, and thus so is liking them. There are FAR more paradigms out there where judges will say they don't want to hear Kritiks, especially K-Affs. > they don’t even bother advocating for the original resolution! There is no requirement that the debaters advocate for the resolution in most forms of debate; the author is trying to make it sound unusual, but that's extremely normal, and always has been.
• somsak2 3y ago
  Always so funny to see these videos where the debaters have such hugely audible inhales and an obscene cadence of argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXpCLs7I4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXpCLs7I4Q
• dmvdoug 3y ago
  > What happens in debate matters for American politics Honestly, it really, really, really does not, and the earnest dead-seriousness of the hand-wringing over it made me look away out of embarrassment. Lord. Hopefully the writer gets involved in sone other activities that will induce a bit of perspective and humility.
• peanutcrisis 3y ago
  Related reporting: [0] https://www.thefp.com/p/judges-ruin-high-school-debate-tournaments https://www.thefp.com/p/judges-ruin-high-school-debate-tourn... [1] https://www.thefp.com/p/personal-tweets-lose-high-school-debates https://www.thefp.com/p/personal-tweets-lose-high-school-deb...
• dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Seems to me that the rules of debate should be that any time a debater brings up one of these 'kritik' arguments they should be instantly disqualified for being non-germane to the topic. Further, I thought debate judges were supposed to leave their personal biases at the door and judge the quality of the arguments. Just as judges in a courtroom are supposed to do. (But yeah, I get that real judges seem to often let personal bias influence their decisions, and justice suffers as a result.)
• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  I'm glad this politics student managed to escape the trap of STEM thinking that her upbringing was forcing on her and learn via debate club that the true way to power was via politics and blaming everything on "critical theory". She'll go far.
• morelisp 3y ago
  In addition the many weak points of the article's main topic that have already been addressed, this sentence: > Growing up in Silicon Valley—a place full of scorn for politics—and attending a STEM-focused high school, debate was how I learned about public policy and economics. Is absolutely insane to write for someone with her educational background. This is a school for kids of VCs during the height of SV openly playing political kingmakers. (Isn't Sheryl Sandberg her aunt?)
• iandanforth 3y ago
  High school debate has always been broken. It has only very rarely been about the contest of ideas, and always been about how to win. For example there is a concept called 'spreading' in policy debate. This is where you speak as fast as humanly possible to lay out as many points as possible and if the opposing team fails to address or mention any of them you claim victory. For some reason this strategy, which makes the debaters all but unintelligible is allowed and leads to victory. In Lincoln Douglas debate it was common to construct what is called a 'collapsing tautology'. Your argument is constructed to look like a series of logical steps with which there can be argument, but in fact all it is is a tautology that ultimately can't be refuted. It's a trap and if the opponent engages at all they lose. More generally HS debate is politics and persuasion. Know the judges, build charisma, learn what works regardless of the content. The introduction of a new noxious debating strategy might be noteworthy, but it is no more ruining debate than all the others, and the students don't actually care about the strategy or its tenants any more than they care about the validity of Rawlsian justice.
  • jeffrallen 3y ago
    Despite everything odious about Malcolm Gladwell, he recently did something nice: got himself his ass handed to him in a debate and then went to find out why he lost so badly. Made for a pretty fun podcast, if you are the sort of person who takes joy in Malcolm Gladwell getting knocked down a notch or two. :)
    • lukifer 3y ago
      Are you referring to the Munk debate with Taibbi or something else?
      • jeffrallen 3y ago
        That and this follow up: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/malcolm-goes-to-debate-school https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/malcolm-...
  • kalkin 3y ago
• jacooper 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • ecrapsnud 3y ago
    It does strike me as a subtly radfem way of positioning things. "Trans women are encroaching on real women's space in feminism" is a pretty TERFy stance to even implicitly argue.
    • typooh 3y ago
      [flagged]
• user6723 3y ago
  Look into R/K selection theory talked about on https://www.anonymous https://www.anonymous conservative.com/blog and you'll see why Frankfurt caca is popular today.
• nilslindemann 3y ago
  A very interesting text, and the pop-up hovering it, hiding the text, shows that indeed there is a fundamental flaw in our system.
• AndyMcConachie 3y ago
  I have next to no sympathy for this article. These kids sound awesome. Actually thinking about the world and engaging with it as opposed to playing a debate game by the rules. These kids sound awesome. If debate club was this interesting when I was in high school I might have gone. Instead it was exactly how this guy described it. Brainless recitation of prepared arguments trapped inside of a box.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    It's not even against the rules, kritiks are literally a standard part of debate. Right-wingers just don't like it because it allows people to attack the choices of arguments and sources. So with kritiks, if someone walks in and runs an "immigrants are eating babies in secret demonic rituals" argument and cites Alex Jones, you can say, "That's xenophobic, and Alex Jones is xenophobic, here are my sources that support those assertions, and you shouldn't vote for them, judge, if they're perpetuating that, especially in a space where there are debaters who are themselves- or who have family who are- immigrants." Without Kritiks, you have to either find a source that *specifically* says "Immigrants are not eating babies in demonic rituals" (and unfortunately, there are far more nutjobs out there putting out garbage than there are people spending time to individually refute each and every stupid statement), or you have to try to attack the negative impacts they're claiming - OR - you have to run an ethical violation argument, which is accusing the other team itself of being intentionally malicious, which is a much higher threshold than saying, "they should have known better", which is not making assertions about their intentions. Kritiks are a normal part of all debate, both competitive and informal.
• jrflowers 3y ago
  I love this article about bad faith arguments in formalized debate that’s actually a very vague culture war complaint
• Der_Einzige 3y ago
  I really missed out on this thread despite being likely one of the most important folks to post on it (I turned my time in Policy Debate into an NLP career - see DebateSum: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Hellisotherpeople/DebateSum https://huggingface.co/datasets/Hellisotherpeople/DebateSum and CX_DB8: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8 https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8) For those who are interested in the intersection of AI and Debate Evidence, there's a lot more work being done right now. We have a follow-up dataset to DebateSum on its way to a paper at some conference called OpenCaseList: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist which is basically DebateSum but 40x better in every way. This is also likely the largest and best quality argument mining dataset ever gathered. Fun anecdote, when I tried to introduce automatic extractive summarization tools to the debate community, I had parent/judge/teacher groups who were FLIPPING out about this. They were not happy at the idea of automatic debating or computer assisted debating systems.