> Have you ever been on a debate team Agreeing with OP and having participated in debate and mock student legislatures, with some success, from middle school t

> Have you ever been on a debate team Agreeing with OP and having participated in debate and mock student legislatures, with some success, from middle school through college — your points in rebuttal illustrate OP's complaints. Your rebuttal plays the prompt before you attempt to understand the point or the person making them. You aren't effectively rebutting anything with your points; regardless of your intent, you've created a prompt out of OP and then presented a case to win it. The pressure of debate doesn't inherently improve a point; not every disagreement can or should be decided with evidence; reading judge profiles doesn't help exercise empathy and sympathy; "understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep" misses the point of critically self-examining what that statement means in the first place; a solution lying outside of a debate is not an invitation to reframe the topic but to step out of the debate to try to come to a shared understanding on a different level. Your approach would be, and has been, a natural approach I've turned to when it was the most prominent (or only) way I'd learned to approach a disagreement. If not OP's point, then at least for me it's proven to be a fundamentally flawed one when applied to most venues outside of the structure of competitive debate. It plays well in a lot of modern venues, especially online, but it doesn't accomplish much.