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Thats always been the problem with competetive debate - you're supposed to argue a position that often has significant culutural weight, meaning its unlikely an
by 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 agoBack 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 agoYou 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 agoit'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 agothat could mean they were taking advantage of upvote anonymity, and agreeing without having to put their name to it.
- rahimnathwani 3y agoPerhaps! But in this case it wasn't an opinion that could cause embarrassment or cancellation.
- burnished 3y agoPerhaps you were simply quite compelling? I upvote people I disagree with when they are courteous or when they change my mind. I don't imagine that practice is uncommon (maybe wishful thinking on my part)
- threatofrain 3y agoIf something is an interesting debate then most people don't have the expertise to engage meaningfully with the facts and arguments being put forward. Experts can bullshit you all day and no amount of critical thinking is going to pull you out of a deep well of ignorance.
- vacuity 3y agoFair, but I think critical thinking, even given the lack of domain-specific knowledge, would be quite valuable to some discussions on HN and beyond.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>Experts can bullshit you all day and no amount of critical thinking is going to pull you out of a deep well of ignorance. that would be a lovely problem to have in modern social media. Meanwhile, I wonder if it would even hit the top 100 these days.
- Pannoniae 3y agoThis website isn't even that bad compared to literally almost anywhere on the internet. From what I've observed with my comments, my "popular opinion" and "unpopular opinion" comments aren't that far apart in terms of comment karma. One-liner trivialisms and cheap baiting usually gets flagged here, not upvoted regardless of the topic, which is a very positive thing. I am very grateful to the site's admins and users for this lovely place, it's truly a unique thing.
- casefields 3y agoIt mostly isn’t, but it does make occasional appearances. Go back and read threads about the Google Memo or Gamergate.
- somedude895 3y agoOr any thread about Tesla Autopilot or cryptocurrency. But apart from those it is true that low effort comments and jokes do get downvoted and discussion is much more interesting than anywhere else on the internet imo
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johnnyanmac 3y ago> From what I've observed with my comments, my "popular opinion" and "unpopular opinion" comments aren't that far apart in terms of comment karma. I think that's because HN is smart and doesn't just allow a fresh account go on a downvoting spree. It seems so obvious in retrospect but so underutilized. There's a lot of debate over whether we should have dislikes/downvotes on modern social media, but it seems strange that the Slashdot mentality of "you need to earn the downvote" seems to have only spread to here and to the "answerHub" styles of forum (wikis, StackOverflow). I remember one interesting feature of Voat (back when that was making waves) on how it limited votes per day and was criticized for it, but I think simply applying that limit to downvotes would have fixed many issues there. It seems ideally you want to encourage as much positive feedback as possible, but require a little friction for negative feedback.
- jayd16 3y agoMaybe HN is in an endless September now but it used to be that a joke or repeated comment would get downvoted.
- pessimizer 3y agoDisagree. The best threads are the highly contentious ones where I'm upvoting everybody.
- iamthepieman 3y agoAbsolutely! If someone responds to me with any sort of meaningful reply, I always upvote. And my general heuristic for upvoting is 1. I learned something 2. I had an emotional reaction which means something intrinsic was challenged or affirmed 3. the person asked a question or is curious.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> 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. Winning seems like a low-value goal here. Classroom simulations exist so students can be exposed to the reality of consequences and outcomes. I feel better goals here would be how to immerse yourself in an unfamiliar/unwanted position and how to understand the dynamics of a scenario with competing, entrenched positions.
- RugnirViking 3y agoI agree! Which is why I think it's a shame that this is an activity where the best way to win is in fact to not do that at all :(
- ang_cire 3y agoWhat this article is leaving out is that you do need an extremely deep understanding of the opposing arguments to be a good K-debater. There are tons of tools to defeat Kritiks, and if all you can do as the K debater is say, "but thing bad", you won't actually win. On the contrary, there are a lot of non-K policy debaters who want to be able to parrot the same generics at each other each round, and they don't know how to engage with Ks precisely because they don't understand their own position well enough to argue why the basic assumptions it relies upon are the way they are (or aren't what the K is proposing they are).
- IshKebab 3y agoThe one time I've been to a debate they asked everyone's opinion on the topic before and after the debate, and then the winners were the ones who persuaded the most people to change their minds. So you can still win even if you're arguing for an unpopular opinion. It was such an elegant metric I assumed all competitive debates used it. From this article it sounds like they just have judges that vote for the winner though? Crazy.
- rqtwteye 3y agoIntelligence Squared does this but I think most debates suck anyways.
- CrazyPyroLinux 3y agoI think this is called an "Oxford style" debate. thesohoforum.org puts on a lot of good ones.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThis is in the tradition of the Oxford/Cambridge union, where you enter the hall using the door of the side you initially prefer, and sit on their side of the room during the debate, and then leave the hall through the door of your preferred side at the end of the debate. The winner of the debate is the side that shifts more people, as measured by the popularity of each door at the beginning and end of the night.
- IshKebab 3y agoYeah it was at the Cambridge Union. I guess the only downside is that you don't find out who wins until after everyone has left. Still you could do it using an app these days.
- lupire 3y agoCompetitive debate is a joke. It's verbal form of runaway selection like the evolution of the peacock.
- mbg721 3y agoOpponents of abortion would argue that the same "this isn't really a human" tactics that the Nazis used are still alive; if everyone is comfortable, it sounds like there's a lot of "at least we're not the baddies" going on.
- photonerd 3y agoI mean… they might try to, but that line of reasoning doesn’t hold up to even cursory examination. The position itself—about othering certain groups—would hold up by itself of course. Unfortunately for those you mention it’s most often employed by those on their side of the debate about groups they dislike (Muslims, gay, trans, etc).
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoGenuinely, in non academic competition often the best way to “beat” an opponent is to change the rules Examples of this that are well understood are regulatory capture, where group A convinces a more powerful group B to enforce a new constraint on all competitors to group A. Generally the constraint is a marginal impediment to group A and so “levels the playing field” *wink* So the idea that there’s some pure form of rhetoric that is actually worth practicing, given that human conflict (from the minor to the major) is rarely to never solved via this mechanism (even in formal legal proceedings) - it’s not clear what is actually being learned here Other than later in life realizing how formal debate has almost no application and it’s all about how you refine and evaluate your own arguments.
- gloryjulio 3y agoSo called competitive debate is really just a joke about who talk faster. There is no positive feedback loops where either side should take a moment to think and gives feedback. Sometimes agree to disagree is the best option. You learn nothing from the competitive debate. It's basically twitter debate before twitter exists where ppl talking over each other
- Retric 3y agoIt’s somewhat beneficial to lawyers etc simply because it exposes people to a different way of thinking. It’s roughly equivalent to science fairs, popsicle bridges, or math competitions for STEM students.
- tekla 3y agoCompletely wrong. The fast talking is worthless if you don't have good arguments and anyone worth their shit can see right through that. As it turns out the best debaters can talk fast AND make good arguments simultaneously. If you can't think fast on the fly about how to refute a position, that's on you.
- InvertedRhodium 3y agoRegarding the fast talkimg - as I understand it, points are deducted heavily if you fail to address the entirety of the oppositions position, so it often devolves into verbal diarrhea where one position will attempt to overwhelm the other with sheer volume. Am I misinformed on this topic?
- tekla 3y agoYes, you are misinformed. That kind of shit works with entry level debate since a) The debtors tend to suck since they are new. b) The judges tend to just be randoms or not high quality (ie some are just random parents who volunteer who may not have actually debated) so they don't have the ability to parse through what actually happened during the debate properly. When you get better, you have to learn what arguments matter and don't matter. The skill part of debate is knowing how to throw away as much useless arguments as possible and argume defensively and offensively against the parts that do matter. You do not have to bother with any of the opposing sides arguments if you have concluded they are pieces of trash. I myself have won debates just by proving in 10 seconds that 4 minutes of the opposing teams arguments was irrelevant and just moved on. Sheer volume is a valid tactic, since the opposing team COULD drop important arguments that actually matter, so that's part of the skill. I've watched plenty of top level debates where people talk both fast and slow. Nobody wins just by being fast.
- Animats 3y ago[flagged]
- CydeWeys 3y agoIt's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that. Much harder to willingly sign yourself up for a lifetime of the American slave experience.
- tekla 3y agoa) That actually isn't a refutation or a response of the parent argument. It's just some random point. b) The topic wasn't indicated to be about the American slave experience, it could have been about slavery in general, or about slavery in the Incan empire etc etc, so you could be making an argument against a point isn't even relevant. This is why debate is important. Its trivially easy to see through bad arguments.
- vacuity 3y agoOn the topic of bad arguments, is (b) supposed to suggest that any form of slavery was good to the slaves and not an unreasonable cruelty as US slavery was? Not sure how Mike Tyson is any more valid by describing a different instance of slavery. Not all slavery is equally bad per se, but I'd say it's all bad enough.
- tekla 3y agoNo. I said what I said. Slavery being good is not refuted by bringing up a single instance of slavery. The point is that if your response to "Slavery good" is that "US Slavery was really really bad" and spend a ton of time on this argument, the opposing team could easily stand up respond with "We concede US slavery was bad, here are the reasons why that doesn't really matter and why it doesn't even refute our generic arguments that slavery is good across the board except for this one time" So you've wasted a ton of time arguing something that can easily be made irrelevant with very little effort. You can't go up there and say Slavery is bad because I think Slavery is bad and expect to win.