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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
by 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 agoThat'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 agoBut 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.)