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?
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
> 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.
Which is how you get exposed to new ideas. Learning how to argue for something you don't agree with means actually learning about that thing, in depth.
You will not learn more in a 40 minute debate round than you will in the hundreds of hours you spend *preparing* for debate rounds (which is something that many other forms lack in comparison to policy).
If it's my job to argue the GND is bad, I have to actually learn what the real tenets of it are, because otherwise I'm not going to find evidence to counter their impact and solvency claims. Likewise, if I have to argue it's good, I have to learn what its tenets are in order to find evidence supporting what it can accomplish, etc. (Just using GND as an example, obviously you aren't assigned advocacies in policy)
The point of extra-curricular high school debate is there is a topic and there are norms that we are here to discuss the topic. The argument about creativity is a good one - the point is that if someone starts talking about how "capitalism is terrible" then you can make that argument. 'They should lose because they are not talking about the topic which means we lose out on that creative structure. I have to take some ridiculous side like "racism is good" if I want to oppose them. It's bad for the structure of debate, etc. etc.' You can make and win on those arguments in-round.
I'm very familiar with high school debate and happy to discuss in detail.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
I was asking about critical theory outside the policy debate structure. Saying "the economic debate" may have been misleading in that context.
What I mean was: Marxism is primarily an economic theory. But if I were a Marxist at a university in the 1990s, I doubt I would have won very many arguments about how flawed capitalism was, and how Marxism was a better way to structure an economy - not after the Soviet Union collapsed, and China embraced capitalism. So if I were such a Marxist, I might look for non-economic grounds on which to argue for Marxism.
No, all of that is still true at most tournaments.
The author's piece is a description of the national circuit, and perhaps of a very few regional circuits that heavily overlap with the national circuit. All of her statistics are for an invite-only championship tournament (TOC) for that national circuit. Note: it's not the national championship, which does exist. It's a championship for competitors in a national circuit.
Most kids attend tournaments close to home. Not only do they not attend the TOC -- they don't even attend a national circuit tournament that would allow them to qualify for the TOC!
That's not entirely true. A lot of Parli is concentrated on the coasts, and most of the West Coast encourages tech debate, so most West Coast debaters end up attending "tech" tournaments. Also, most "close to home" tournaments still give NPDL points.
Also, TOC is the national championship. (NPDL Nationals Exist, but they are a relatively recent addition, and aren't highly respected in the community)
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?
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.
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.
Perhaps 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)
If 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.
This 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.
Or 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
> 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.
> 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.
Ehhhhh I'm not sure I'd say smart, just that low effort trolling or manipulation is harder. Plenty of obvious sock puppets and ideological hacks, and the simplified text system makes it easier in a way.
Like, the standby of "repost last weeks stuff, and then copy-paste comments from previous threads about it to get upvotes" works. You just have a 500 karma lead time.
"Marketing and Propaganda works, even if you understand how marketing and propaganda works"
Absolutely! 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.
> 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.
What 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).
The 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.
This 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.
Opponents 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.
I 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).
Genuinely, 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.
So 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
Regarding 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.
Yes, 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.
As much as I instinctively feel a pretty strong sense of approval about the structure of high level competitive debate, I wonder if it's bordering on a certain niche admiration for form which doesn't prepare one for what I assume debate is supposed to prepare one for, engaging with the whole spectrum of the public on issues of importance to both them and yourself.
It reminds me of what happened to the cloistered world of esteemed traditional martial arts masters when MMA came along.
This is part of the reason why Twitter ended up controlling so much of the world's publc discourse.
Yes, but you still have to point out that the opposing teams arguments are irrelevant. If you just drop the argument, you will lose points.
(Caveat: I'm speaking as a parliamentary debater, I have extremely limited experience with policy debate. In policy, can you just drop an argument without responding to it at all?)
So in policy there aren't 'points', it's just a ballot decision, and I haven't seen speaker points deducted for dropping arguments that didn't factor into the ballot.
The danger in dropping an argument is that dropped arguments are supposed to be accepted as true, since they were unchallenged. So it's essentially conceding that particular argument, which unless it's really dumb and tactically useless, can be pretty dangerous of it's a potential "voter" (which not all arguments are). But there's no need to spend a bunch of time on each one.
You not being good at arguing and lacking the skills to parse through lots of information and pick out the important bits does not make debate a gimmick.
Do you think the characters in the Socratic dialogues Plato writes about are terrible at arguing, because they speak in a normal cadence instead of scrambling through rhetoric as fast as possible?
No, I think they weren't bound by a time limit in a competitive activity. If they had been, and not spread, I'd think they were terrible at debating, yes.
Do you think competitive debate are unable to speak slowly when there's not a time limit?
Unable? No. The format of competitive debates often lends itself to awarding 'points' based on the number of arguments that can be put out, rather than examining their validity. A time limit only makes that pressure worse.
The Socratic dialogues are written like normal human conversations in an attempt to give the audience the ability to read and understand the ideas being spoken. That's why they are still studied, thousands of years later. The insane drivel-speak of competitive debates will be lucky to be remembered for any few years after the topics they regurgitate stop being relevant.
Just because you are incapable of understanding it doesn't make it drivel. The fact you are trying to discount high school debate on the basis of it not being the Socratic Dialogues (which, to be clear, nothing you have ever done or will do will stand up to those either), just shows you're not arguing in good faith.
High school debate will not be on the same level as Plato, not unless they are miraculously talented high schoolers involved. The techniques that are taught in high school debate still make it far less resembling Plato's writings, or anything coherent. A high schooler taught to argue in a coherent way would produce something that is not drivel. The content of high school debates is drivel. It is a torrent of pre written, basic arguments designed to be quickly heard and given points by judges who already memorized all of those points. No one trying to persuade in the real world talks like a competitive high school debate. Not presidents, not angry college students, not smarmy news anchor talking heads. It's only worth is inside the academic setting where you win points for how many crappy arguments you can cram in a sentence. That's what makes it drivel.
You keep saying "points", but rounds are not decided based on points. Do you actually have any idea how competitive debate works?
Spreading arguments doesn't help you if they're bad arguments. If you think that just laying out more (bad) arguments will win against an experienced team, you're either delusional, or you've never actually watched high-level policy debate.
There are judges, and they incentive verbal diarrhea by making the winners the one who can produce the most 'correct' arguments in the least amount of time. This perverse incentive structure does not exist anywhere else except in competitive debate.
>If you think that just laying out more (bad) arguments will win against an experienced team, you're either delusional, or you've never actually watched high-level policy debate.
I think any argument that is spread is bad. Some are a worse kind of bad. But none are good.
> and they incentive verbal diarrhea by making the winners the one who can produce the most 'correct' arguments in the least amount of time
No, this may happen at low-level tournaments which still have lay/'mommy' judges, but no actual high-preff'd tournament judges are giving out ballots based on the number of arguments run.
Policy is a back-and-forth activity, and whatever arguments are made in the constructives have to actually hold up to the responses to them. If a team is running 9 T arguments, and the Aff team doesn't address their shitty "'The' means a specific singular entity, so using only one part of the USFG is a violation' T argument but covers 3 of the actual strong ones and runs a T-abuse argument as well, no judge is handing Neg the ballot for that.
And none of that is even beginning to touch on Condo (conditionality), which is a whole area of theory arguments specifically addressing Neg running arguments that they don't extend (and why they shouldn't be allowed to). That's especially effective when they're doing some kind off-case abuse like T or competing CPs.
Also, what do you mean "argument that is spread"? You either spread your speech or you don't. No one spreads arguments individually.
> As it turns out the best debaters can talk fast AND make good arguments simultaneously.
Ideally yes, that's what's its SUPPOSED to be like. But I have seldom or never seen it in practice.
It's on the system and judge to stop the students from talking over each other. I don't blame the students. They are just playing the game. If they get rewarded by short-cutting the debate, why not?
Talking over each other? What form of debate did you do? In policy there only one speaker at a time, and no one interrupts the other team's time to try to talk over them. That would be a sure loss, assuming the judge didn't straight end the round immediately.
It’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.
Answer: Slaves get food, clothing, and shelter, but not freedom. Homeless people have freedom, but you can't eat freedom. Mike Tyson, after visiting Africa, said "I'm glad my ancestors got on the boat."
It'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.
a) 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.
On 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.
No. 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.
Except I'm not saying "only consider one instance of slavery that is bad". By all means, consider them all. Then there's the question of whether slavery can inherently be remotely good. Also, I said "instance of slavery" but that downplays the scale and impact of the systems that enabled slavery. Of course I'm not pointing at an example of slaves being mistreated as my only reasoning.
But then the other side is not arguing slavery is good, but slavery is good except for this exception, which could likely be continued at infinitum. At some point we end up at the true scotsman fallacy, where no existing slavery was ever "real" slavery. .
If we take a scientific view, one example acn falsify and statement, so shouldn't
There is no 'the' American slave experience. There was a lot of variety. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was written for the purpose of convincing people that slavery is so evil we should go to war to end it, but most of the slaves in the book had a pretty nice life at first. (But the eventual downside of being owned mean you have no control over when/if it all goes bad).
American slavery was one of the cruelest forms of slavery in recorded history.
> A quote from a letter by Isabella Gibbons, who had been enslaved by professors at the University of Virginia, is now engraved on the university's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers:
>> Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will.
American slavery didn’t hold a candle to the cruelty of Arab slavery. Imagine all the horrors of American slavery and they cut your balls off. Slavery and genocide mixed together, with the evil benefit of no free descendants to contend with.
Castration was a common punishment in American slavery, and “didn’t hold a candle to” is a really egregious whitewash. Questions like whether it’s better or worse than having a child sold off are potentially valid philosophical debates but the only valid conclusion is that both were heinous systems deserving only condemnation.
Mediterranean oar slaves sound like they had it worse: force to row every day in the sun until your skin burned, got infected, then you died from said infection. Afterwards your corpse was tossed overboard. You were replaced with another slave held in the hold and the process repeats.
American slaves were generally purchased (with a mortgage) so they were not infinitely replenished.
You're responding to someone who has taken a pretty strong position and backed it up with reason and anecdote. Don't answer it by telling the person who made the argument that they should feel guilty for making the argument. That's why everybody is stupid now.
Just tell them why they're wrong, point by point. Point out implicit premises that don't hold up. Do anything else other than try to convince the other person to stop speaking. People don't shut up because you tell them to, you have to make them shut up. That is a slippery slope.
Overly rosy description and/or low bar. As for Mike Tyson, it's convenient to appeal to history as how things must be, rather than just one path of how things were. To be fair, asking people to come up with reasonable arguments for slavery (aside from the people benefitting from slavery) is a tad difficult.
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.
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.
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.
An enthymeme is like saying "giving everyone free health care would be socialism!", and leaving out the unstated premise that socialism is bad. It's surprising how much garbage can be shoveled into an argument if it's anchored on one premise the audience believes without evidence.
That's simply not true. Critical theories do not depend on modal logics, nor is your characterization of modal logics correct.
Critical theory and justifications for essentially Marxist ideologies have pretty much nothing to do with Kripke, who was writing within a strict Anglo-American/analytic tradition. Kripke didn't invent any kind of magical thinking. His contribution to modal logic was that he showed, formally, its completeness (as a teenager, too).
You seem to be pointing at a common critique of poststructuralist thinking as focused on the "dissolution" and "destruction" of meaning. This has a lot more to do with Derrida, who wrote strictly in a continental tradition. Critical theories do not rest on modal logics, since many of them are anti-foundationalist in nature, they would probably not rest on anything except works in the 'critical theory' canon (e.g. Marx, Adorno, Foucault, etc).
Ironically, and I mean this sincerely, but if you had actually read anything by Kripke (or critical theorists), you would realize that his most famous work after completing modal logic was restructuring semantics in a way that espoused scientific essentialism (cf. Naming and Necessity). That is something critical theorists would very likely be antagonistic towards.
They're just dog whistling about racism, because if you read their comment at arm's length, you would realize that it itself is a negative "modal" argument of the exact form that it seeks to decry.
I was reading about Kripke's modal logics for applications in LLM's, so I will agree that my study of them wasn't part of the indoctrination they seem to be used for in cultural studies programs. I had first encountered him in the syllabus of some cultural studies programs where modal logics were used as the formal basis and justification for the a-logical aspects of some feminist critiques in the 90s.
Saying that a subset of post marxist theories are not marxist theories seems pretty standard motte and bailey. I'd refer you to James Lindsay's descriptions of how these critical theories fit together into the miasma of nonsense that is being taught to kids today, as he's done deeper work on the subject. My interest is in synthesizing it, because since it is just internaly consistent and so divorced from reality, there are likely infinite versions of it that could serve as an antidote to the pernicious indoctrination "educators," are subjecting children to.
My politics are unambiguous, they are anti-Marxist, as it is not sufficent to be neutral to it's variants, and one has to actively confront it when it pretends to be anything other than a system of deception.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
They aren’t going to wield power because “talk fast and derail the entire conversation with unrelated arguments that appeal to far-left college students” isn’t going to convince any normal people of anything and is not a useful rhetorical technique. The most this style of debate might do is to cause left wing political cause to shoot themselves in the foot.
There is an argument that "debate" in the manner performed by these clubs primarily trains people to think only in the ideological terms/framing given to them by their "betters". "Debate" in this sense is intellectually impoverished. Call it "rhetorics" if that's all you want -- it's useful, but it is more akin to Toastmasters than politics or political debate.
If there is to be any actual political thinking involved, then some challenge to the given framing must be allowed, or the framing must be capaciously defined. But it will still be mostly a lesson in rhetoric.
Unlike the commenter, I was an anarchist when I did policy debate. What does my political orientation have to do with what kind of hobby I enjoy? This feels like an extremely conservative take, that hobbies and policy goals must have some kind of libidinal connection. More practically, do you think anarchists don't debate? Have you ever met a leftist?
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.
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.
> A single example chosen specifically because it is extreme isn’t the status quo,
This seems to be the lesson we're slow at learning.
A steady diet of extreme examples tends to shift one's perspective toward a bad position. The position is bad because it struggles to discern reality well - because bad inputs keep skewing the math.
There's liberalism as a political theory (with all its variations, from classical to Rawlsian), which is admirable and distinct from Maoism. But there's also the "liberalism" that's more accurately described as "the set of cultural, social, and political beliefs broadly held by the college educated, urban, professional class." And professing adherence to Maoism is entirely acceptable in that milieu, in a way that professing adherence to e.g. the Religious Right or Trumpism is not. (The fact that this judge's commitment to Maoism is purely symbolic verbal signaling and not linked to any actual activism is besides the point.)
Imagine a judge said he was a committed fascist who would judge students on that basis, regardless of the quality of their arguments. Would that be considered acceptable in the same way the Maoist judge is? Just last night I had dinner with a friend who was telling me about a family member's encounter with Maoist justice: he was murdered by being thrown down a well during the Cultural Revolution.
Or, take the other angle. Suppose you had a staffer on Fox News who spent his off hours writing racist screeds on white supremacist forums (this has actually happened IIRC). Would you take it as a single extreme example that's not worth thinking about, or would you take it as indicative of some deeply troubling aspects of the modern Right?
Then there's liberalism as a political tradition that advocates free markets, laissez-faire economics, civil liberties under the rule of law, and individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech.
In liberal democracy, an elected government cannot discriminate against specific individuals or groups when it administers justice, protects basic rights such as freedom of assembly and speech, provides for collective security, or distributes economic and social benefits.
Indeed I am. Thank you for the context. I wonder if we shouldn't describe these things with more granularity, like how "functional programming" may be used to mean "pure functional abstractions", "pattern matching", and many other things in varying combination.
> > […] 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 […]
Then why would you waste everyone's time, including yours, in being a judge? It's like being a figuring skating judge and saying "I hate the cold and so think this sport done in a cold environ is dumb so will give everyone a zero."
Well, no, most debate topics are not "is political take X good?" Policy questions could be affirmed by leftist positions and argued against from other leftist positions. I think the judge's stance is boring, but everyone seems to be missing that high school policy debate is not meant to make an actual policy decision. It's meant to teach students how to argue within a frame - which is how lots of arguments necessarily happen! You just don't like this judge's particular frame.
This is the classic problem of education having to balance expression and practice. Bringing a gun to a swordfight is effective but if you're in a kendo class it's not especially helpful. Such is the effect of kritik within policy debate. People should learn kritik, I even agree with much of it, but you also want to learn how to argue actual topics. And especially as someone who often agrees with kritik, I would rather the kids exercise that skill here where it doesn't matter, than in the real world with real impacts.
Thank you for explaining this perspective. There’s for sure a balance here between playful education and actual, invested debate. I was leaning too much on the latter, but the former is just as valuable.
I think your comment was fair; you also want them to learn when to bring a gun! I also wholly agree with you that the article's case as presented is quite weak. I read it hoping to learn some kind of actual radicalization of policy debate was happening, not the same pro-K vs. anti-K retread we had 25 years ago but with artificial woke/anti-woke flavor. The author did not develop the ability to frame their arguments in a clear way so that even those who disagree can engage with the ideas therein. (Which itself is maybe the best argument against my defense of policy debate; well, that's also why I left it my senior year in favor of other events...)
They aren't challenging the status quo using this method at all.
As one of the debate examples given: the US should embrace a system of universal healthcare. Instead of actually engaging with the topic, they go all meta on it. Hence, no progress will ever be made.
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:
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).
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.
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.
I was referring to competitive debate, where refusal to engage isn't a feasible option: judges rarely consider "spreading" (Gish Galloping, basically) inherently abusive, and convincing them of its abusiveness via a speed Kritik is widely considered to be a poor strategy, since the offending team is likely able to overwhelm the points of the Kritik with spreading as well.
A gish gallop is an asymmetric attack. They can produce nonsense faster than, say, a physicist can produce physics or a mathematician proofs; and usually have nothing else to do with their time. But in a policy debate framework both sides have equal time, neither is doing original research and both are expected to cite qualified evidence, the judge understands the structural flow of the arguments, and you can say "this is nonsense" faster than they can "explain" the point.
Or as Wikipedia even says: Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than a free-form one.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know there was a name for this technique. If you listened to RFK jr on Lex recently you heard many many examples. And also Trump. I’ve only heard it described as “flood the zone with shit”, which is a reference to a football (American) tactic
This is not a thing in Policy Debate (certainly not anymore). There are literally tons of different theory arguments against this stuff, like arguing T-abuse, condo, or in the old days even RVIs.
Also, in Policy debate, other than cross-ex the debaters aren't ever talking at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
> 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.
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.
Even if the other side has abysmal reasoning, you won't be able to distinguish that from decent arguments if you blindly try to push your side of things. Besides, establishing common ground is key to cooperation.
> Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea.
I disagree with this so very much.
High school debate was foundational for my adult ability to recognize that nuance exists. Arguing a position that you don’t personally believe in, and winning, is a massively useful tool in understanding that for the majority of topics there are reasonable, intelligent, and acceptable arguments for both sides.
This is a trait seeming missing from most other adults I interact with. Too many people accept blindly that there is a correct and incorrect position and no room in between.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
There are many regional circuits in this country where running a kritik is an instant loss.
Aside from that: debate and meta-debate are not meaningfully separable. If arguments are being made, then there will be an argument about how to evaluate the arguments.
Once you ask the question "what is fiat?" -- which becomes necessary far before any critical theory arrives on the scene -- the door is open to "perhaps pretending something happens and then evaluating the effects isn't the best way to test a resolution".
My basic thought about how academic debate should work:
1. Students should be allowed to choose their own arguments as often as possible.
2. Judges should try to be as impartial as possible and should evaluate student's arguments rather than impose their own opinion. (Pedagogic debate and non-pedagogic debate serve very different purposes. The emphasis on the student's performance rather than the judge's understanding of the world is motivated by pedagogic considerations, and obviously isn't how debates should be evaluated in the real world.)
3. The kids are fine. I promise that seeing a bit of critical theory isn't going to rot their brains.
I disagree about speed talking being apriori bad, but agree it has crowded out everything else on the national circuit.
The same is simpoy not true of critical theory in debate which has been around for a long time and is not the winning argument in anywhere near close to a majorit of rounds.
This absolutely happens. Running a K (kritik) is a risk because if the judge decides that you’re full of shit, they can basically just ignore your case. Your opponent can make an argument to throw the kritik out, and then you’re dead in the water
The article explains it. Students like these formats bc they fit with their interests and politics, students graduate, the ones that were most active in debate become judges and reinforce that these topics will be rewarded
AMC series math contests have a bit of the same problem -- pushing the material format more and more toward memorizing extremely insider arcana over a meaningful survey of the field of study.
There is a fundamental weakness in the fascist-adjacent proscription of orthodoxy while forbidding anything that may challenge or question it. That is not liberalism, it is an echo chamber lacking contact and ability to deal with the whole world.
I also disapprove of the tendency to muzzle people with prior restraint because they raise controversial points because somehow "harmony" is more important than insightful and authentic discourse on topics of greater import because someone "might be offended" or "will encourage negative interactions". If only certain topics can be discussed while others cannot, that is a lack of freedom.
Forbiddance exists in that the judge can decide whom to vote for. Actually halting a debate midround because they broke some tenuous topic rule is a much more aggressive action
We should all have a healthy allergic reaction when things start being argued for and against via extremely general negative terms applied in a subjective way, i.e:
> "fascist-adjacent proscription of orthodoxy".
Every sport has rules, within which great skill can be demonstrated by being able to work within the rules, but in difficult and unexpected ways.
Debates with rules such as "remain relevant to the topic" or "make arguments for A over your opponents arguments for B", are legitimate competitions, that develop legitimately useful skills.
It is not "muzzling" to allow anyone to say whatever they want, but judge their achievements based on the rules of engagement that define a debate competition.
There are no police on a basketball court stopping players from throwing the ball wherever they want. They just won't get points for not putting the ball in the basket.
Many tournaments (especially on the West Coast) and their organizers enjoy and encourage kritical debate. (That's what they did in high school -- Kritical debate was born in Policy Debate, and spread to other formats, so many coaches have that previous experience) Many on the East Coast ban it entirely, or heavily discourage it. At some level, there are almost two different leagues. The "tech" debaters even have their own championship, of sorts (NPDI).
The purpose of a K is not to argue that you should be arguing about Z, it's to say, "X is based on this fundamental assumption, and that assumption is flawed in this way..."
A Neg team running a K has to link directly to the Aff's plan or argument, or they'll just 'no-link' it and move on.
On the K-Aff side, they need to convince the judge(s) that some fundamental assumption of the Topic itself is flawed, which you still have to directly engage with the Topic in order to do.
There is no such thing as a K debate which just says "I'm arguing about some unrelated thing instead".
“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.
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.
>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.
My point is that the original argument made is not a kritik because it is still arguing against the policy of minimum wage, which is why it's a stronger argument, even if it wouldn't score you many points in a competition.
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).
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.
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.
Did you find speed or spread common in Parli? In any circuit I was in you would get dinged on that fast, and it was more of a dead giveaway that a policy debater was trying Parliamentary.
I never got to do Parli unfortunately, so I can't speak to that. I have only the stories of my coaching team, which was the original coach followed by their star student of a college Parli team that performed very well on the national track (something like second or third for several years). I've seen videos of (maybe national track) high school Policy debaters speed and spreading through a massive ream of evidence, but obviously that doesn't indicate the frequency.
578 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadIt 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.
"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?
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.
Emporia SW won the NDT which was covered heavily in mainstream media
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...
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.
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.
You will not learn more in a 40 minute debate round than you will in the hundreds of hours you spend *preparing* for debate rounds (which is something that many other forms lack in comparison to policy).
If it's my job to argue the GND is bad, I have to actually learn what the real tenets of it are, because otherwise I'm not going to find evidence to counter their impact and solvency claims. Likewise, if I have to argue it's good, I have to learn what its tenets are in order to find evidence supporting what it can accomplish, etc. (Just using GND as an example, obviously you aren't assigned advocacies in policy)
I'm very familiar with high school debate and happy to discuss in detail.
So, the school board was correct!
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.
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.
*we lost the state championship to a team from Hardin, MT, population about 4000 and guess where the state championship was held that year?
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
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.
Yep. Everyone on my team who ran Ks, especially neg, were the people too lazy to do actual research against multiple plans.
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.
What I mean was: Marxism is primarily an economic theory. But if I were a Marxist at a university in the 1990s, I doubt I would have won very many arguments about how flawed capitalism was, and how Marxism was a better way to structure an economy - not after the Soviet Union collapsed, and China embraced capitalism. So if I were such a Marxist, I might look for non-economic grounds on which to argue for Marxism.
The author's piece is a description of the national circuit, and perhaps of a very few regional circuits that heavily overlap with the national circuit. All of her statistics are for an invite-only championship tournament (TOC) for that national circuit. Note: it's not the national championship, which does exist. It's a championship for competitors in a national circuit.
Most kids attend tournaments close to home. Not only do they not attend the TOC -- they don't even attend a national circuit tournament that would allow them to qualify for the TOC!
Also, TOC is the national championship. (NPDL Nationals Exist, but they are a relatively recent addition, and aren't highly respected in the community)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Ehhhhh I'm not sure I'd say smart, just that low effort trolling or manipulation is harder. Plenty of obvious sock puppets and ideological hacks, and the simplified text system makes it easier in a way.
Like, the standby of "repost last weeks stuff, and then copy-paste comments from previous threads about it to get upvotes" works. You just have a 500 karma lead time.
"Marketing and Propaganda works, even if you understand how marketing and propaganda works"
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.
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.
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).
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.
thesohoforum.org puts on a lot of good ones.
Still you could do it using an app these days.
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).
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.
It's basically twitter debate before twitter exists where ppl talking over each other
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.
Am I misinformed on this topic?
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.
It reminds me of what happened to the cloistered world of esteemed traditional martial arts masters when MMA came along.
This is part of the reason why Twitter ended up controlling so much of the world's publc discourse.
(Caveat: I'm speaking as a parliamentary debater, I have extremely limited experience with policy debate. In policy, can you just drop an argument without responding to it at all?)
The danger in dropping an argument is that dropped arguments are supposed to be accepted as true, since they were unchallenged. So it's essentially conceding that particular argument, which unless it's really dumb and tactically useless, can be pretty dangerous of it's a potential "voter" (which not all arguments are). But there's no need to spend a bunch of time on each one.
Sure, it's on me to decide that competitive debate is stupid, optimizing for gimmicks.
Do you think competitive debate are unable to speak slowly when there's not a time limit?
The Socratic dialogues are written like normal human conversations in an attempt to give the audience the ability to read and understand the ideas being spoken. That's why they are still studied, thousands of years later. The insane drivel-speak of competitive debates will be lucky to be remembered for any few years after the topics they regurgitate stop being relevant.
Spreading arguments doesn't help you if they're bad arguments. If you think that just laying out more (bad) arguments will win against an experienced team, you're either delusional, or you've never actually watched high-level policy debate.
>If you think that just laying out more (bad) arguments will win against an experienced team, you're either delusional, or you've never actually watched high-level policy debate.
I think any argument that is spread is bad. Some are a worse kind of bad. But none are good.
No, this may happen at low-level tournaments which still have lay/'mommy' judges, but no actual high-preff'd tournament judges are giving out ballots based on the number of arguments run.
Policy is a back-and-forth activity, and whatever arguments are made in the constructives have to actually hold up to the responses to them. If a team is running 9 T arguments, and the Aff team doesn't address their shitty "'The' means a specific singular entity, so using only one part of the USFG is a violation' T argument but covers 3 of the actual strong ones and runs a T-abuse argument as well, no judge is handing Neg the ballot for that.
And none of that is even beginning to touch on Condo (conditionality), which is a whole area of theory arguments specifically addressing Neg running arguments that they don't extend (and why they shouldn't be allowed to). That's especially effective when they're doing some kind off-case abuse like T or competing CPs.
Also, what do you mean "argument that is spread"? You either spread your speech or you don't. No one spreads arguments individually.
Ideally yes, that's what's its SUPPOSED to be like. But I have seldom or never seen it in practice.
It's on the system and judge to stop the students from talking over each other. I don't blame the students. They are just playing the game. If they get rewarded by short-cutting the debate, why not?
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.
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.
If we take a scientific view, one example acn falsify and statement, so shouldn't
> A quote from a letter by Isabella Gibbons, who had been enslaved by professors at the University of Virginia, is now engraved on the university's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers:
>> Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_U...
American slavery didn’t hold a candle to the cruelty of Arab slavery. Imagine all the horrors of American slavery and they cut your balls off. Slavery and genocide mixed together, with the evil benefit of no free descendants to contend with.
American slaves were generally purchased (with a mortgage) so they were not infinitely replenished.
it's a pretty universal human desire to give a better life to your children and your children's children, so he might not be very far off.
Just tell them why they're wrong, point by point. Point out implicit premises that don't hold up. Do anything else other than try to convince the other person to stop speaking. People don't shut up because you tell them to, you have to make them shut up. That is a slippery slope.
And here we can see the easily swayed debate judge in action.
A made up Mike Tyson quote, really? At least Kayne actually said the thing about being a slave was a choice, somehow.
On his return he was asked what he thought of Africa and said “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”
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.
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.
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
Critical theory and justifications for essentially Marxist ideologies have pretty much nothing to do with Kripke, who was writing within a strict Anglo-American/analytic tradition. Kripke didn't invent any kind of magical thinking. His contribution to modal logic was that he showed, formally, its completeness (as a teenager, too).
You seem to be pointing at a common critique of poststructuralist thinking as focused on the "dissolution" and "destruction" of meaning. This has a lot more to do with Derrida, who wrote strictly in a continental tradition. Critical theories do not rest on modal logics, since many of them are anti-foundationalist in nature, they would probably not rest on anything except works in the 'critical theory' canon (e.g. Marx, Adorno, Foucault, etc).
Ironically, and I mean this sincerely, but if you had actually read anything by Kripke (or critical theorists), you would realize that his most famous work after completing modal logic was restructuring semantics in a way that espoused scientific essentialism (cf. Naming and Necessity). That is something critical theorists would very likely be antagonistic towards.
Saying that a subset of post marxist theories are not marxist theories seems pretty standard motte and bailey. I'd refer you to James Lindsay's descriptions of how these critical theories fit together into the miasma of nonsense that is being taught to kids today, as he's done deeper work on the subject. My interest is in synthesizing it, because since it is just internaly consistent and so divorced from reality, there are likely infinite versions of it that could serve as an antidote to the pernicious indoctrination "educators," are subjecting children to.
My politics are unambiguous, they are anti-Marxist, as it is not sufficent to be neutral to it's variants, and one has to actively confront it when it pretends to be anything other than a system of deception.
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).
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.
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.
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.
If there is to be any actual political thinking involved, then some challenge to the given framing must be allowed, or the framing must be capaciously defined. But it will still be mostly a lesson in rhetoric.
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.
> 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.
A single example chosen specifically because it is extreme isn’t the status quo, and Maoism isn’t (and is opposed to) liberalism.
This seems to be the lesson we're slow at learning.
A steady diet of extreme examples tends to shift one's perspective toward a bad position. The position is bad because it struggles to discern reality well - because bad inputs keep skewing the math.
Imagine a judge said he was a committed fascist who would judge students on that basis, regardless of the quality of their arguments. Would that be considered acceptable in the same way the Maoist judge is? Just last night I had dinner with a friend who was telling me about a family member's encounter with Maoist justice: he was murdered by being thrown down a well during the Cultural Revolution.
Or, take the other angle. Suppose you had a staffer on Fox News who spent his off hours writing racist screeds on white supremacist forums (this has actually happened IIRC). Would you take it as a single extreme example that's not worth thinking about, or would you take it as indicative of some deeply troubling aspects of the modern Right?
In liberal democracy, an elected government cannot discriminate against specific individuals or groups when it administers justice, protects basic rights such as freedom of assembly and speech, provides for collective security, or distributes economic and social benefits.
Because it's a pretty standard political and social concept -> https://imgur.com/a/BdkeTf4
Not to mention -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Then why would you waste everyone's time, including yours, in being a judge? It's like being a figuring skating judge and saying "I hate the cold and so think this sport done in a cold environ is dumb so will give everyone a zero."
As one of the debate examples given: the US should embrace a system of universal healthcare. Instead of actually engaging with the topic, they go all meta on it. Hence, no progress will ever be made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
There's a lot more you can do, but those are some pretty uncontentious strategies.
Source: debated for 8 years in school.
Or as Wikipedia even says: Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than a free-form one.
Could you provide one or two such examples so we can evaluate for ourselves?
Also, in Policy debate, other than cross-ex the debaters aren't ever talking at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
Why? One consequence might be to improve your ability to steelman an argument with which you disagree.
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.
This also happens to be one of the most (holistically) effective techniques irl when “debating” with someone.
"Tear it down!"
"OK, but can you give me a good reason to?"
"...It's an obstruction."
"Reeeeeal persuasive."
Even if the other side has abysmal reasoning, you won't be able to distinguish that from decent arguments if you blindly try to push your side of things. Besides, establishing common ground is key to cooperation.
I disagree with this so very much.
High school debate was foundational for my adult ability to recognize that nuance exists. Arguing a position that you don’t personally believe in, and winning, is a massively useful tool in understanding that for the majority of topics there are reasonable, intelligent, and acceptable arguments for both sides.
This is a trait seeming missing from most other adults I interact with. Too many people accept blindly that there is a correct and incorrect position and no room in between.
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.
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.
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).
There are many regional circuits in this country where running a kritik is an instant loss.
Aside from that: debate and meta-debate are not meaningfully separable. If arguments are being made, then there will be an argument about how to evaluate the arguments.
Meta-debate is not unique to debates that contain critical theory. See e.g. http://open-evidence.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/file... which is full of meta-arguments that happen when there isn't any critical theory introduced into the round.
Once you ask the question "what is fiat?" -- which becomes necessary far before any critical theory arrives on the scene -- the door is open to "perhaps pretending something happens and then evaluating the effects isn't the best way to test a resolution".
My basic thought about how academic debate should work:
1. Students should be allowed to choose their own arguments as often as possible.
2. Judges should try to be as impartial as possible and should evaluate student's arguments rather than impose their own opinion. (Pedagogic debate and non-pedagogic debate serve very different purposes. The emphasis on the student's performance rather than the judge's understanding of the world is motivated by pedagogic considerations, and obviously isn't how debates should be evaluated in the real world.)
3. The kids are fine. I promise that seeing a bit of critical theory isn't going to rot their brains.
I do want to clarify that
> 3. The kids are fine. I promise that seeing a bit of critical theory isn't going to rot their brains.
This was not my argument at all, though I think it was the writer’s. Hopefully it didn’t come across that way.
The same is simpoy not true of critical theory in debate which has been around for a long time and is not the winning argument in anywhere near close to a majorit of rounds.
AMC series math contests have a bit of the same problem -- pushing the material format more and more toward memorizing extremely insider arcana over a meaningful survey of the field of study.
I also disapprove of the tendency to muzzle people with prior restraint because they raise controversial points because somehow "harmony" is more important than insightful and authentic discourse on topics of greater import because someone "might be offended" or "will encourage negative interactions". If only certain topics can be discussed while others cannot, that is a lack of freedom.
> "fascist-adjacent proscription of orthodoxy".
Every sport has rules, within which great skill can be demonstrated by being able to work within the rules, but in difficult and unexpected ways.
Debates with rules such as "remain relevant to the topic" or "make arguments for A over your opponents arguments for B", are legitimate competitions, that develop legitimately useful skills.
It is not "muzzling" to allow anyone to say whatever they want, but judge their achievements based on the rules of engagement that define a debate competition.
There are no police on a basketball court stopping players from throwing the ball wherever they want. They just won't get points for not putting the ball in the basket.
A Neg team running a K has to link directly to the Aff's plan or argument, or they'll just 'no-link' it and move on.
On the K-Aff side, they need to convince the judge(s) that some fundamental assumption of the Topic itself is flawed, which you still have to directly engage with the Topic in order to do.
There is no such thing as a K debate which just says "I'm arguing about some unrelated thing instead".
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.