5 ms·

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 si

by 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.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > 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. This is not correct; for an argument to be valid, the conclusion must follow from the premises. That judge is saying he will vote based on the conclusion regardless of the premises.
  - js2 3y ago
    Apropos, This American Life, Episode 402, Act Two: I'd Like To Spank The Academy > For the last 13 years, the University of Montevallo in Alabama has held an event called "The Life Raft Debate," where several professors take the stage and each tries to convince the students that his or her discipline—chemistry, say, or communications—is the most essential field of study. But in 2007, a professor named Jon Smith decided that the debate itself needed saving. Producer Nancy Updike tells the story. (14 minutes) https://www.thisamericanlife.org/402/save-the-day/act-two-22 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/402/save-the-day/act-two-22
  - nrfulton 3y ago
    > But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge? Debate tournaments happen after school or on weekends. So you need about one adult volunteer for every two to four students. The adult needs to be willing to show up to a school for an entire evening or an entire weekend and listen to 5+ hours of high schoolers debating one another. You can sometimes make do with fewer volunteers by using coaches as judges. But coaches also need to run the tournament, help organize volunteers, not burn out, and... well... coach. By and large, outside of the most elite tournaments, organizers don't have the luxury of choosing judges. It's far more common to have 7 judges for 10 rounds than to have 10 judges for 7 rounds.
vorpalhex 3y ago
Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior. It's not a universal solution - debating about string theory being true or not is sort of goofy, it's a "get more data" problem. However lots of problems exist that have sufficient data. Debate, pedagogically, also forces students to take data and form coherent arguments, use logic and persuasion and even learn how to have stage presence. A tool can be imperfect and useful.
- csours 3y ago
  > Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior. Arguing is a form of correctness defending behavior. I have found the most correct position, and I will now defend it. I challenge you to prove that I am not doing this. ---- I have a t-shirt from a media organization that says "I stand with the facts". I like the shirt and the saying. I think facts are very important; but people experience the world in narrative format. Debate is a way to tell a story. It's a story where you're supposed to keep more than one point of view in mind. I do think that's very useful. However, when it comes to solving problems, I do not think it is very useful. The debater who uses half truths and shifts the subject before they can be pinned down can be very convincing to the audience, even while the judges see through the tricks.
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    > I have found the most correct position, and I will now defend it. I challenge you to prove that I am not doing this. What evidence could I provide that would change your mind? If you can point to some kind of evidence (group study above X p value, double blind study, expert opinion, etc) then we are having a proper debate. If one of the candidates can't list some criteria that would make them update their position, then we are not debating we are proslytizing. Tools only work when you don't abuse them. That they can be gamed doesn't make them not effective, it just means you need to realize that they can be gamed.
    - csours 3y ago
      I agree. > proper debate. Unfortunately, only True Scotsmen can have Proper Debates. > Tools only work when you don't abuse them. I agree. The point of the parent article is that debate is being abused by kritik. My point is that debate has many weaknesses besides kritik. > it just means you need to realize that they can be gamed. I have to expand on this - you, me, and the rest of the audience need to realize that it can be gamed, and how, and we need to notice when it is being gamed.
pmarreck 3y ago
And yet every single courtroom trial is essentially a debate, and is the foundation of the US justice system.
- csours 3y ago
  Really makes you think, doesn't it.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  With an arbiter that’ll hopefully call bullshit on empty rhetorical tricks and even do their own research occasionally, but otherwise yes. It’s the difference between a cooperative system and an adversarial one: science would grind to a halt if cherry-picking evidence were accepted as the norm; but you could never trust the other side of a lawsuit enough to assume they’re not cherry-picking, so you have to settle for not lying, which is hopefully easier to check (thus rules on hearsay etc). Now that I’m thinking about it, another point of view might be that scientists, in addition to having less to lose from an unfavourable result, are engaged in a recurring game and thus generally cooperate[1], whereas the parties of a legal case are in a one-shot situation and thus have little choice but to defect. See also: conflict vs mistake[2]. Left for future work: how do we make (a) advertising, (b) politics more cooperative? [1] https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/ [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  Having been in a jury this debate format is a big problem. If one of the sides is not good at presenting their case, there is a problem. In one of my cases the prosecution had an expert witness that stated some totally wrong facts about visibility during sunset. Due to photography I know a lot about lighting conditions so if I hadn’t spoken up during deliberation the prosecution would have gotten away with a falsehood.
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    > so if I hadn’t spoken up during deliberation You are not allowed to use your own expertise that is not presented in the trial to inform your decisions. That is by law. Or at least, it was in Massachusetts when I last served on a jury. Which brought me to actual tears, btw, because the eyewitness testimony was being weighed too heavily.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time. I would posit that it's actually a very useful tool in that context. Everyone who argues on the internet is trying to convince the other side, but that's actually the only person you aren't trying to persuade in a properly-structured debate. There is a good reason why pretty much every court proceeding in a democratic country is structured as a debate in front of an impartial party.
- c_crank 3y ago
  From what I've seen of high school debates, it provides very little for the observers and encourages the students to cram as many nice sounding words in a limited amount of time as possible. Maximum slogans, minimal substance.
  - wredue 3y ago
    Are you sure you watched high school debates? That sounds suspiciously like presidential debates.
    - c_crank 3y ago
      High school debates are remarkable for managing to put in 5 slogans in the same amount of time a president would manage one.
      - esafak 3y ago
        Like so? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 What a waste.
  - ajolly 3y ago
    That's policy/Lincoln Douglas, parliamentary debate is wildly different. From the article it sounds like having prepared topics and critics is starting to seep even into parliamentary debate. :/
- 3y ago
Zak 3y ago
This article is about competitive debate, which is no more for learning about the world than bicycle racing is for transportation. Aside from maintaining a calm attitude, those points are irrelevant to the goal of winning the competition.
- vacuity 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure parent recognizes that and is criticizing competitive debate as "debate".
- graeme 3y ago
  The difference is you actually move from point A to point B in a bicycle race, and retain the skills of doing so in non-race conditions.
  - ang_cire 3y ago
    If you don't think you learn that from competitive debate, you don't know many debaters. One of the biggest skills it teaches is argument-analysis, and you'd better believe that sticks around outside the debate round.
    - graeme 3y ago
      Did you mean to reply to the person above me? My point was that is you are biking no matter how distorted it is from real world cycling you still train in movement. Whereas if debate gets corrupted you don’t necessarily learn wider skills. Whereas you would if the debate remains convincing to people who aren’t debate judges.
evrydayhustling 3y ago
My first reaction reading this article was that this is indeed disturbing, but so was the format of debate I was exposed to in (turn of millennia) high school. The format basically embodies an idea that every opinion is equally valid, and what matters is how strong their advocates are. Model UN, a close cousin, emphasized multipolar perspectives but in a context of research, creativity and cooperation. I think the ethos of Debate is one of the drivers of today's polarization, long before Kritiks arrived.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  IMHO the traditions of debate are more analogous to boxing than say, philosophy - a competitive endeavour, emphasising technique and effectiveness rather than a truth-seeking activity per se. I think this is a legimate point of view despite the underlying hint of nihilism. Some traditions emphasise restrictions on the kinds of tactics you're allowed to use (e.g. pure demagogy or deliberate use of convincing fallacies are frowned upon) and I can't help but think of these as like queensberry rules vs mma...
  - evrydayhustling 3y ago
    I like the analogy but I think there is an important difference: the issue settled in a boxing or MMA match starts and ends in the ring, but the issues covered in debate are social policies that depend on external truths and impact participants. TFA gets into this in its last section about debate's impact on politics. Is it great to train a class of leaders based on competitive technique and effectiveness rather than external reality or support?
    - morelisp 3y ago
      In reality very few elected leaders participated in policy debate. They mostly end up policy wonks, software developers, or bloggers.
nrfulton 3y ago
In retrospect, I found the actual debate part of debate to be mostly a chore. But the research and learning parts were a lot of fun. Some things I learned about in high school because of debate: 1. A lot of stuff about the actual topics that we debated. Both in substance, and also in the relevant components of federal policy tools. Eg, I still know a lot of useless facts about US agricultural policy, US foreign aid policy c. mid-2000s, statistics on realistic offshore wind production capacity c mid-2000s, etc. Contra the narrative here: the actual policy topic stuff doesn't tend to age very well... 2. How the Federal Reserve works: its history, its basic structure and mandates, the reason for its mandates, how decisions get made, how it interacts with other components of the federal government, etc. Also weekly deep dives into quantitative easing as it was being invented. Consequently, also quite a bit about the BOJ (I graduated in 2009, so my peak debate participation years were 2007-2009.) It's very important to note here: fiscal policy was NOT the debate topic that year! The topic was alternative energy. But we could link into fiscal policy via alternative energy by arguing that green energy investments were in essence stimulative fiscal policy and would trigger inflation when combined with QE and interest rate policy. And then we could benefit from having the most up-to-date evidence about what Bernanke would do (see #6). Again, in 2008-2009. As high schoolers. Without much or any adult direction. What other extra-curriculars let kids play these types of games? 3. Some really useful law and policy specific research skills. How to find and read proposed legislation. How the legislature actually works. How to find and read court opinions. I know this stuff sounds trivial, but I still regularly have conversations with 30-70 year olds who have never actually read a bill or SCOTUS opinions, so it's apparently not something that people learn how to do in high school, or college, or graduate school. 4. Yes, also quite a lot of critical theory. (It's part of the game and I don't get why people get so fussy about it. If the argument is bad, win. If you get an unfair judge and lose anyways, oh well. It happens and winning actually isn't the point anyways.) 5. But most importantly, lots and lots of research skills. 6. Quite a lot of natural language processing to help with 1-4, which became surprisingly relevant lately. Policy debate has its flaws. But, at least at my high school, there was no other activity that came remotely close to providing the pedagogical opportunities available in debate. Perhaps at elite private schools or schools in the wealthiest suburbs there are good alternatives. IME, that's still true now. This year's topic includes AI. I judged some debates this year and learned some stuff about AI by judging rounds. I'm not an expert or anything, but my PhD was at least AI-adjacent and I've been in AI labs for a good half decade now, so it was kind of surprising to learn new stuff from high school debate kids. Anyways. I'm more convinced than ever that the kids are okay. Let them play their word games.
csharpminor 3y ago
I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this opinion, as it doesn’t match my experience as a competitive debater in college. Have you ever been on a debate team or is this from observing? I’m genuinely curious! To refute your points a bit :) -> 1. Debate itself is highly stressful, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My time in debate made defending my honors thesis much less stressful and I’m a very calm presenter as a result. 2. This is exactly what debate research forces you to do. You may not get to choose your side, but you’ve done your best to prep in either direction. You get very good at understanding if the evidence provided has any gaps, and if it supports the impacts claimed. 3. Debaters do read judge profiles to understand the audience and determine strategy. 4. This is a major part of prep, as naturally you need to prepare both sides and understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep. 5. This occurs often, as mentioned in the article linked above. Ks and counter plans allow debaters to reframe the topic in many ways. On your last paragraph: I experienced the opposite. Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced. I will say that for my part, debate had a profound impact on my life. It taught me how to research, consider unintuitive perspectives, and articulate a point. My research in debate directly led to a fellowship, honors thesis, and mentorship - all outside of debate. I leveraged my academic success into a great career and owe a lot to the skills I picked up on my college debate team.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  > Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced This reminds me of an observation that I made far too late in life, though I'm not sure how I could have discovered when it would have been most useful, in high school or thereabouts. That is that although I enjoy getting into debates where I am confident I am prepared to push for my own side in the best of faith, I find that in practice what I what I always end up driving toward is to push for a draw, even when I feel my own position is the stronger. Even when I feel like if I have "won", it's muffled under a vaguely anticlimactic suspicion that due to limited time or poorly managed tangential sidetracks that the matter is still unsettled, that I didnt do my best to exhaust all of the reasonable avenues of discourse.
- starkparker 3y ago
zug_zug 3y ago
Right, how highschool debate should be structured is like this: Two parties are given sets of random "belief statements" (e.g. "All zugs are wogs", "Some wogs aren't clogs"), and then both parties exchange statements over a limited amount of time, and they either both win, or both lose, depending on whether they can both find the logically inconsistent belief statement. Because this is how we should mentally understand real-world debate.
raincole 3y ago
Debate is "abstract art".

by csours 3y ago

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.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > 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. This is not correct; for an argument to be valid, the conclusion must follow from the premises. That judge is saying he will vote based on the conclusion regardless of the premises.
- js2 3y ago
  Apropos, This American Life, Episode 402, Act Two: I'd Like To Spank The Academy > For the last 13 years, the University of Montevallo in Alabama has held an event called "The Life Raft Debate," where several professors take the stage and each tries to convince the students that his or her discipline—chemistry, say, or communications—is the most essential field of study. But in 2007, a professor named Jon Smith decided that the debate itself needed saving. Producer Nancy Updike tells the story. (14 minutes) https://www.thisamericanlife.org/402/save-the-day/act-two-22 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/402/save-the-day/act-two-22
- nrfulton 3y ago
  > But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge? Debate tournaments happen after school or on weekends. So you need about one adult volunteer for every two to four students. The adult needs to be willing to show up to a school for an entire evening or an entire weekend and listen to 5+ hours of high schoolers debating one another. You can sometimes make do with fewer volunteers by using coaches as judges. But coaches also need to run the tournament, help organize volunteers, not burn out, and... well... coach. By and large, outside of the most elite tournaments, organizers don't have the luxury of choosing judges. It's far more common to have 7 judges for 10 rounds than to have 10 judges for 7 rounds.

vorpalhex 3y ago

Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior. It's not a universal solution - debating about string theory being true or not is sort of goofy, it's a "get more data" problem. However lots of problems exist that have sufficient data. Debate, pedagogically, also forces students to take data and form coherent arguments, use logic and persuasion and even learn how to have stage presence. A tool can be imperfect and useful.

csours 3y ago
> Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior. Arguing is a form of correctness defending behavior. I have found the most correct position, and I will now defend it. I challenge you to prove that I am not doing this. ---- I have a t-shirt from a media organization that says "I stand with the facts". I like the shirt and the saying. I think facts are very important; but people experience the world in narrative format. Debate is a way to tell a story. It's a story where you're supposed to keep more than one point of view in mind. I do think that's very useful. However, when it comes to solving problems, I do not think it is very useful. The debater who uses half truths and shifts the subject before they can be pinned down can be very convincing to the audience, even while the judges see through the tricks.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  > I have found the most correct position, and I will now defend it. I challenge you to prove that I am not doing this. What evidence could I provide that would change your mind? If you can point to some kind of evidence (group study above X p value, double blind study, expert opinion, etc) then we are having a proper debate. If one of the candidates can't list some criteria that would make them update their position, then we are not debating we are proslytizing. Tools only work when you don't abuse them. That they can be gamed doesn't make them not effective, it just means you need to realize that they can be gamed.
  - csours 3y ago
    I agree. > proper debate. Unfortunately, only True Scotsmen can have Proper Debates. > Tools only work when you don't abuse them. I agree. The point of the parent article is that debate is being abused by kritik. My point is that debate has many weaknesses besides kritik. > it just means you need to realize that they can be gamed. I have to expand on this - you, me, and the rest of the audience need to realize that it can be gamed, and how, and we need to notice when it is being gamed.

pmarreck 3y ago

And yet every single courtroom trial is essentially a debate, and is the foundation of the US justice system.

csours 3y ago
Really makes you think, doesn't it.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
With an arbiter that’ll hopefully call bullshit on empty rhetorical tricks and even do their own research occasionally, but otherwise yes. It’s the difference between a cooperative system and an adversarial one: science would grind to a halt if cherry-picking evidence were accepted as the norm; but you could never trust the other side of a lawsuit enough to assume they’re not cherry-picking, so you have to settle for not lying, which is hopefully easier to check (thus rules on hearsay etc). Now that I’m thinking about it, another point of view might be that scientists, in addition to having less to lose from an unfavourable result, are engaged in a recurring game and thus generally cooperate[1], whereas the parties of a legal case are in a one-shot situation and thus have little choice but to defect. See also: conflict vs mistake[2]. Left for future work: how do we make (a) advertising, (b) politics more cooperative? [1] https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/ [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
rqtwteye 3y ago
Having been in a jury this debate format is a big problem. If one of the sides is not good at presenting their case, there is a problem. In one of my cases the prosecution had an expert witness that stated some totally wrong facts about visibility during sunset. Due to photography I know a lot about lighting conditions so if I hadn’t spoken up during deliberation the prosecution would have gotten away with a falsehood.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  > so if I hadn’t spoken up during deliberation You are not allowed to use your own expertise that is not presented in the trial to inform your decisions. That is by law. Or at least, it was in Massachusetts when I last served on a jury. Which brought me to actual tears, btw, because the eyewitness testimony was being weighed too heavily.

pclmulqdq 3y ago

Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time. I would posit that it's actually a very useful tool in that context. Everyone who argues on the internet is trying to convince the other side, but that's actually the only person you aren't trying to persuade in a properly-structured debate. There is a good reason why pretty much every court proceeding in a democratic country is structured as a debate in front of an impartial party.

c_crank 3y ago
From what I've seen of high school debates, it provides very little for the observers and encourages the students to cram as many nice sounding words in a limited amount of time as possible. Maximum slogans, minimal substance.
- wredue 3y ago
  Are you sure you watched high school debates? That sounds suspiciously like presidential debates.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    High school debates are remarkable for managing to put in 5 slogans in the same amount of time a president would manage one.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Like so? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 What a waste.
- ajolly 3y ago
  That's policy/Lincoln Douglas, parliamentary debate is wildly different. From the article it sounds like having prepared topics and critics is starting to seep even into parliamentary debate. :/
3y ago

Zak 3y ago

This article is about competitive debate, which is no more for learning about the world than bicycle racing is for transportation. Aside from maintaining a calm attitude, those points are irrelevant to the goal of winning the competition.

vacuity 3y ago
I'm pretty sure parent recognizes that and is criticizing competitive debate as "debate".
graeme 3y ago
The difference is you actually move from point A to point B in a bicycle race, and retain the skills of doing so in non-race conditions.
- ang_cire 3y ago
  If you don't think you learn that from competitive debate, you don't know many debaters. One of the biggest skills it teaches is argument-analysis, and you'd better believe that sticks around outside the debate round.
  - graeme 3y ago
    Did you mean to reply to the person above me? My point was that is you are biking no matter how distorted it is from real world cycling you still train in movement. Whereas if debate gets corrupted you don’t necessarily learn wider skills. Whereas you would if the debate remains convincing to people who aren’t debate judges.

evrydayhustling 3y ago

My first reaction reading this article was that this is indeed disturbing, but so was the format of debate I was exposed to in (turn of millennia) high school. The format basically embodies an idea that every opinion is equally valid, and what matters is how strong their advocates are. Model UN, a close cousin, emphasized multipolar perspectives but in a context of research, creativity and cooperation. I think the ethos of Debate is one of the drivers of today's polarization, long before Kritiks arrived.

xyzzy123 3y ago
IMHO the traditions of debate are more analogous to boxing than say, philosophy - a competitive endeavour, emphasising technique and effectiveness rather than a truth-seeking activity per se. I think this is a legimate point of view despite the underlying hint of nihilism. Some traditions emphasise restrictions on the kinds of tactics you're allowed to use (e.g. pure demagogy or deliberate use of convincing fallacies are frowned upon) and I can't help but think of these as like queensberry rules vs mma...
- evrydayhustling 3y ago
  I like the analogy but I think there is an important difference: the issue settled in a boxing or MMA match starts and ends in the ring, but the issues covered in debate are social policies that depend on external truths and impact participants. TFA gets into this in its last section about debate's impact on politics. Is it great to train a class of leaders based on competitive technique and effectiveness rather than external reality or support?
  - morelisp 3y ago
    In reality very few elected leaders participated in policy debate. They mostly end up policy wonks, software developers, or bloggers.

nrfulton 3y ago

In retrospect, I found the actual debate part of debate to be mostly a chore. But the research and learning parts were a lot of fun. Some things I learned about in high school because of debate: 1. A lot of stuff about the actual topics that we debated. Both in substance, and also in the relevant components of federal policy tools. Eg, I still know a lot of useless facts about US agricultural policy, US foreign aid policy c. mid-2000s, statistics on realistic offshore wind production capacity c mid-2000s, etc. Contra the narrative here: the actual policy topic stuff doesn't tend to age very well... 2. How the Federal Reserve works: its history, its basic structure and mandates, the reason for its mandates, how decisions get made, how it interacts with other components of the federal government, etc. Also weekly deep dives into quantitative easing as it was being invented. Consequently, also quite a bit about the BOJ (I graduated in 2009, so my peak debate participation years were 2007-2009.) It's very important to note here: fiscal policy was NOT the debate topic that year! The topic was alternative energy. But we could link into fiscal policy via alternative energy by arguing that green energy investments were in essence stimulative fiscal policy and would trigger inflation when combined with QE and interest rate policy. And then we could benefit from having the most up-to-date evidence about what Bernanke would do (see #6). Again, in 2008-2009. As high schoolers. Without much or any adult direction. What other extra-curriculars let kids play these types of games? 3. Some really useful law and policy specific research skills. How to find and read proposed legislation. How the legislature actually works. How to find and read court opinions. I know this stuff sounds trivial, but I still regularly have conversations with 30-70 year olds who have never actually read a bill or SCOTUS opinions, so it's apparently not something that people learn how to do in high school, or college, or graduate school. 4. Yes, also quite a lot of critical theory. (It's part of the game and I don't get why people get so fussy about it. If the argument is bad, win. If you get an unfair judge and lose anyways, oh well. It happens and winning actually isn't the point anyways.) 5. But most importantly, lots and lots of research skills. 6. Quite a lot of natural language processing to help with 1-4, which became surprisingly relevant lately. Policy debate has its flaws. But, at least at my high school, there was no other activity that came remotely close to providing the pedagogical opportunities available in debate. Perhaps at elite private schools or schools in the wealthiest suburbs there are good alternatives. IME, that's still true now. This year's topic includes AI. I judged some debates this year and learned some stuff about AI by judging rounds. I'm not an expert or anything, but my PhD was at least AI-adjacent and I've been in AI labs for a good half decade now, so it was kind of surprising to learn new stuff from high school debate kids. Anyways. I'm more convinced than ever that the kids are okay. Let them play their word games.

csharpminor 3y ago

I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this opinion, as it doesn’t match my experience as a competitive debater in college. Have you ever been on a debate team or is this from observing? I’m genuinely curious! To refute your points a bit :) -> 1. Debate itself is highly stressful, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My time in debate made defending my honors thesis much less stressful and I’m a very calm presenter as a result. 2. This is exactly what debate research forces you to do. You may not get to choose your side, but you’ve done your best to prep in either direction. You get very good at understanding if the evidence provided has any gaps, and if it supports the impacts claimed. 3. Debaters do read judge profiles to understand the audience and determine strategy. 4. This is a major part of prep, as naturally you need to prepare both sides and understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep. 5. This occurs often, as mentioned in the article linked above. Ks and counter plans allow debaters to reframe the topic in many ways. On your last paragraph: I experienced the opposite. Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced. I will say that for my part, debate had a profound impact on my life. It taught me how to research, consider unintuitive perspectives, and articulate a point. My research in debate directly led to a fellowship, honors thesis, and mentorship - all outside of debate. I leveraged my academic success into a great career and owe a lot to the skills I picked up on my college debate team.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
> Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced This reminds me of an observation that I made far too late in life, though I'm not sure how I could have discovered when it would have been most useful, in high school or thereabouts. That is that although I enjoy getting into debates where I am confident I am prepared to push for my own side in the best of faith, I find that in practice what I what I always end up driving toward is to push for a draw, even when I feel my own position is the stronger. Even when I feel like if I have "won", it's muffled under a vaguely anticlimactic suspicion that due to limited time or poorly managed tangential sidetracks that the matter is still unsettled, that I didnt do my best to exhaust all of the reasonable avenues of discourse.
starkparker 3y ago

zug_zug 3y ago

Right, how highschool debate should be structured is like this: Two parties are given sets of random "belief statements" (e.g. "All zugs are wogs", "Some wogs aren't clogs"), and then both parties exchange statements over a limited amount of time, and they either both win, or both lose, depending on whether they can both find the logically inconsistent belief statement. Because this is how we should mentally understand real-world debate.

raincole 3y ago

Debate is "abstract art".