I suspect a skilled debater ( in the modern competitive debate format) would be a useful addition to the sort of Defence Against The Dark Arts thing I’m thinking of here.
My guess is the dislike for rhetoric or competitive debate around LessWrong is that it’s often used to argue for incorrect conclusions. I haven’t done competitive debate [1] before, but my understanding is you get handed the Pro or Anti position at random and have to do your best to argue for that conclusion? If that’s the case, it does seem like a case of having ones bottom line already written. . . which is fine, for the goal of practicing trying to discern the true thing when someone’s trying to convince you of a false one!
And in terms of general educational outcomes- I haven’t done a deep dive into the subject, but you make a good pitch!
Yeah, so there are quite a few different formats (I won’t even mention all of them below) and they can evolve, and they work somewhat differently here, and “being honest in your advocacy” comes up in the debates themselves quite often (but the other side is, sort of necessarily, also argued whenever the debate “goes meta about debate itself” like that).
I. “SPAR”
In High School (when I was competing in individuals events for the team I eventually returned to and coached) there was one tournament every year that had a “SPontaneous ARgument” competition.
That tournament was the best, and lots of us loved to SPAR, and that was just like the thing you’re imagining.
You don’t even know what the question will be. Its usually something trivial like “Peanut better is objectively better than jelly” but it could be “Invading Iraq was a mistake” or whatever.
If both people agree on who wants to be pro/con they can, otherwise its a coin flip.
Amateur parent volunteer judges with no rhetorical training then judge on… random criteria?
It is, to serious undergraduate NDT tournament at a national Finals, what your first day at an improv class is to starring in Hamlet.
II. RESOLUTIONS SELECTED BY A NATIONAL COMMITTEE
In serious policy debate the community picks a RESOLUTION and then at a tournament you take the affirmative three times, and the negative three times. When you are affirmative, you pick ANY CASE YOU WANT that is an instance of a detailed policy consistent with the RESOLUTION to advocate.
At least that’s how it works nowadays. Sometimes in the past there was poor resolution selection such that every round for the entire year was the same argument and it was terrible. The trick to a good one is to hit the zeitgeist a bit, but also to leave wiggle room for crazy cases.
1928 Resolved: That a federal department of education should be created with a secretary in the president’s cabinet.
1943 Resolved: That a federal world government should be established.
1966 Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor-management disputes in basic industries.
1985 Resolved: That the federal government should provide employment for all employable United States citizens living in poverty.
1999 Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its foreign policy toward Russia.
2007 Resolved: The United States federal government should establish a policy substantially increasing the number of persons serving in one or more of the following national service programs: AmeriCorps, Citizen Corps, Senior Corps, Peace Corps, Learn and Serve America, Armed Forces.
2016 Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.
In general, teams can run cases they truly believe in, or they can run “trick cases”, or they can run centrally topical cases. These are more like dimensions? In modern times there’s a whole other thing called “kritiks” which I’ll touch on very lightly later. Affirmative cases can often be positioned in these three or four dimensions, but often push very hard into one specific dimension.
III. Example Trick Case: Bomb Russian Booze
I remember a trick case with Russia, where the affirmative plan was to send Navy Seals into Russia, and secretly bomb literally every large alcohol distillery (also all the warehouses with stores of vodka), and get away with it (no one would know who the bombers were), and so (the claim went) nothing would change except a massive increase in the price of hard alcohol in Russia, based on massive decrease in the supply, and thus a massive lowering of their rates of alcoholism, for a massive net benefit to Russian domestic wellbeing.
And this was, obviously, INSANE. But it kept winning! :-D
They had all this published recruiting material, that young men are often exposed to by ROTC recruiters, saying that the Navy Seals were essentially made of magic and could do anything and never be caught.
And they submitted it as strong direct written evidence of the ease with which the plan could be carried off, and bloviated about how “the American government would never lie to its precious young men in its recruiting material so either this is true or else the USG is evil… is that what you’re really saying when you accuse our recent and clearly cited evidence of being overstated?? do you you lack patriotism?!?”
It was hilarious. People almost always laughed the first time they heard it. And (rare) Flow Judges and (common) Coms Judges could both appreciate the “technically clean logic” and (often) the fun/patriotic/cynical showboating.
IV. Other Example Cases: Drug Legalization & Dioxins
So, basically, if you wanted to spend your optimization pressure to pick an AFF case you really really believed in (like as a political posture?) even if it had shit evidence, and only one crackpot in one insane progressive magazine with a readership of 1000 was advocating it directly (and you weren’t even doing what the crackpot suggested because that was a bad plan, but you were modifying it creatively yourself)… I mean… you could do that, but it would be tougher and maybe less funny?
And funniness, in my book, counts for a lot.
((I kinda “went authentic” my second year of actually debating, trying to pass off radical domestic drug reform in the US as a “demand side” attempt at a “foreign policy” adjustment towards a country with large “illegal” opium farms and cartels and stuff. It was something someone in their early 20s might foolishly think was wise? Arguably we were Brucing a bit in choosing to run it… we sometimes actually lost on AFF, which is not great.
In my first year we just went straight up the middle with a dioxin emission fix based on mandated medical waste incinerator smokestack filters paid for by government subsidies, and enforced by fines for refusing to accept the retrofit. Dioxins are basically not emitted in the US anymore, but back then they were. We won a lot. And it wasn’t even a trick case! But people didn’t laugh… just nod along and agree that this boring thing was boringly correct and the negative arguments were grasping at straws. The coach made sure we didn’t change since we were beginners and etc etc.))
Often, teams would pick a case, and change it a little bit between every tournament and bring polished proposals and skilled defense to tournaments at the end of the year.
The hard and creative (and more morally ambiguous) part was Negative.
V. The Desperate (Deeply Theoretical?) Bullshit Negatives Need To Ever Win
Over and over and over (usually three times every tournament) you hear this AMAZING First Affirmative Constructive (1AC) and with shining rhetoric, a clean story, tidy evidence, and true confidence in the voice of the person speaking it, and…
...you want to stand up and applaud and say “this is a great proposal that America should do”...
...but instead you have to pull shit out of your ass somehow to say NO to it...
...like maybe: “NO! uh… because… technically it is a prima facie burden of the affirmative team to propose a plan with no vagueness, and here is a formal expert in rhetoric to back us up on this claim about how debate has to technically work if it is to be properly educational, and this plan is vague because… uh… [checks list of 20 ways a plan can be vague that was given to them by the advanced team that usually gets to at least the quarter finals in tournaments] it lacks a clear funding mechanism… and you, dear wonderful Judge who is very wise and full of common sense, you wouldn’t sign a blank check, would you? wouldn’t that be crazy? this is a prima facie burden! and it can’t be fixed in the second speech! if they didn’t have it in the first speech you know they’re just making shit up and you can’t trust them, and therefore they should lose and there’s no two ways about it, and here are five independent reasons that the basic idea, if true, constitutes valid reason to give the ballot to us, all based on just the truth that their plan was vague <and so on>”.
You actually give it A LOT more structure thatn that. Break “Vagueness” into an A, B, C, D set of claims, where the four lettered claims abstractly explain why NEG has to win. Give each letter several numbered justifications… Also, you make four other half-crazy arguments, each of which attacks the AFF case from orthogonal directions from “Vagueness”.
Then (on the Vagueness position) the AFF later says:
(1) you made an ad hominum in your accusation, about them not being trustworthy
(2) and yes do too they have a price number, and they just baldly assert <a made up price> with no evidence at all, and
(3 & 4 & 5) they make some other rebuttals, but they don’t don’t refute EVERY independent line of argument through your entire plan vagueness scaffold.
So in your counter you magnanimously grant almost everything they said, except for the totally made up price which is obviously made up. Which you reiterate is too late so shouldn’t count for educational reasons, and also NEW 1 its a fake number with no evidence, and also… <three more new numbered arguments>.
And you point out that you made more and stronger arguments that they ignored, and reiterate the A B C and D of the Vagueness argument...
...using only A2, A4, B1, B5, C2, C3, and D3, D4, and D5 as voters.
You point out that you now have 2x2x2x3==24 different paths to retain the overall Vagueness Position in a form that could destroy AFF! <3
(These 24 paths to victory are a shorter and smaller version of what you originally said! You said more before… via speed reading a generic Vagueness Template that you’ve practiced speed reading the pro forma parts of.)
And then you remind the judge that the next time the AFF talks it won’t be a constructive, and they would have made their strongest arguments, and if they make new arguments it wouldn’t be fair, because you probably could have made strong creative counter-arguments to those new arguments, but you won’t have the time or legal allowance for that (which might be why they would have stuck arguments in that were weak in the long run but strong initially)...
...and so anything else they make up later would violate the “educational spirit” of “the noble practice of policy debate”, and so, sadly, despite the case possibly being great in real life (unless either of the two other independent anti-affirmative voting arguments goes through) the judge will have to Vote On Vagueness And Vote Negative.
And then you watch the judge’s facial expressions carefully during this as they look down at their notes and write what you say… or whatever the judge does. Its the judge. The judge is god for the round. You want the ballot, right? The judge controls the ballot.
VI. Subservience To The Judge Is Good Strategy
Depending on the judge(s)’s nods or frowns, maybe in an even later (even shorter) speech, you might concede or silently drop or spend only 20 seconds half-assing the Vagueness position at the very very end?
Or you might hammer it super hard in an eloquent minute long rant explaining why this is ONE OF TWO very very strong and very very independent reasons to Vote Negative.
And you spell out a potted but plausible history of the debate so far (that everyone has notes on and it just happened but it was fast and you’re trying to crystalized it in people’s minds) summarizing all the rhetorical flubs of the AFF team who had a BURDEN OF PROOF! And not-at-all-fakely emoting about how the AFF burden of proof is so important… right now… (until you’re on AFF in the next round, insisting that stock issues are fake bullshit in general, and Vagueness isn’t even one that people normally cared about)...
In finals, there are three judges!
Based on facial expressions these three “gods” might buy different things, so there are entire lectures you’ll get from the coach in the five hour van ride to yet another college for yet another tournament, on how to pick what to drop and what to emphasize so that you can try to get at least two of the three judges in the final to vote for you, even if they vote on different issues.)
And then sometimes all the prep work and all the fallbacks, and all the combinatorial optimization gives you a weaselly win as a negative?
And you win against a naively “real world very strong case” where the Affirmative just were kinda lazy about researching the cost of their plan enough? Or not?
It depends.
VII. The Bullshit, Emphasized Above As Silly, Is Actually Often Educational
However also… it overall… these practice really are, often, “educational in general”! <3
The vagueness bullshit might work in the second tournament of the season, but in the fourth tournament of the season, with the AFF running a newer and sexier version of their case, and they will have changed the wording slightly (at no time cost) to mention a price in their Official Plan!
And it will be backed by evidence they didn’t mention, but now have in their laptops or box of papers, that they can quote (but only if you’re fool enough to not notice the slightly different words and try vagueness on reflex, rather than from actually listening and deciding what Negative attacks to try, on the fly, in the round) and the evidence will be based on an expert they found in some library article, after haunting the library for a day.
Negative teams rarely win the same way twice against the same Affirmative team, and by the end of the year the same teams will often have been in the finals against each other two or three times, arguing the same AFF case as always (but now very strong) and “yet another crazy way to attack it” (like a kritik maybe?).
But anyway.
If you go with a stock issues frame, and try Vagueness, on NEG, that first time… (early in a season, with a strong generic theoretical counter-argument to a half-assed AFF case) you might win, especially in High School...
...in college anarchoprogleft types might try to accuse you of being logocentrically racist if you naively try to use stock issues, and anarchoprogleft college judges might agree with that? College rounds can be insane or not, in hundreds of different ways ;-)
I lost to “Kant”… twice. Never got a 3rd rematch.
I lost to “deep eco feminism”… twice and then beat it the third time and had “Cara” (who was in her late 20s, and finally getting a degree to make something of her life, and was intimidatingly confident, and made finals in like half the tournaments I saw) ask for a copy of my citations and evidence at the end, which made me felt super proud. Then she stopped running “deep eco feminism”! Which I thought was high integrity of her!
Anyway. If things are working well overall, Winning As Negative gets harder and harder and harder over the course of the season.
Because there is feedback!
Because it is at least half real, and every 90 minute debate at a tournament gives the AFF yet another real life, adrenaline filled, actual redteamed, OODA loop’s worth of information on how to make their advocacy, that they get to choose and refine (within the arguably vague bounds of the annual resolution that is stable all year) stronger against arbitrary attacks :-)
VIII. Thoughts On The Flexibility Of The Ontology Of Traditional Debate Norms
Mostly here I’m talking about specifically undergrad level “CEDA/NDT debate” and its echo at the High School level which is called “Policy Debate”.
Anyone can make up anything they want, in terms of a group of people who meet to argue and vote and award prizes and whatever.
“Debate” in a fully general form, is nearly infinitely open and flexible. It doesn’t have to be two people vs two people. It doesn’t have to have a yearly resolution (in High School sometimes they change it halfway through the year).
Debates have been happening for millennia and you can do them however it seems correct to you to do them. They are deeply “existential” rather than “essential” when the judges can write anything they want on a ballot, and your job is to get people to grant you ethos, and feel “<YourName> wins” is true of what just happened, and express it somehow. If people are truly good, it can work. If people are bad, then… maybe the methods can save it? Maybe?
The debates exist… that existence includes a competitively collaborative search for the meaning of the competitive practice, with winners and losers, internal to the practice...
The form that exists now agrees, mostly, that it should be able to regenerate itself from inside its own logic, but the forms we have are deeply deeply tested and not everyone will understand all of why things happen and particular way. And these forms are part of continuous traditions going back to the 1920s that are still culturally resonating, which I think is kinda cool <3
If you watch some modern competive debate, you might have a better understanding of why it’s disliked. The Cross Examination Debate Association’s National Championship is the most prestigious of the US college debate tournaments, and the 2014 finals was widely circulated as an illustrative example of the current style.
I’d be interested in hearing more about the different kinds of judges? I just googled Flow and Communication Judge for debate and got a bit about diagramming the flow of a debate.
(You can also say “go read X website” or “the consensus is pretty good, random googling will get you basically the right answer.” Reading up on debate rules has been added to my backlist but you strike me as the kind of person who might enjoy explaining it :) )
“Com judges” might not exist any more (or might be called something different)?
I think the current meta focuses on “K” vs “not-K”? (Roughly, the “K” people only want to debate philosophy, and they sort of abuse the Policy Debate platform (using the logic of policy debate) to try to undermine doing policy debate within a Policy Debate tournament because maybe “better policy outcomes” would happen “in real life” if people stopped having policy debates and debated philosophy instead.)
Coms judges probably do exist, but maybe not “by that name” anymore because they are somewhat timeless? They come in two archetypal flavors:
(1) the default you’d expect of a private school PMC (Professional / Managerial Class) parents who volunteer to judge when their kid’s coach asks for parent volunteers to enable the coach to run a tournament, where those parents will act and judge like normies, and will predictably reward “the appearance of articulate prestige” in terms of PMC cultural standards and...
(2) church lady debate coaches who think the naive reactions of those PMC parents are essentially correct and timeless and wants to consciously “teach to that test”, and who also personally “judge to the theory that teaches to that test” when they are judging… in a high church way that connects back to latin phrases like “post hoc ergo prompter hoc” and “status quo” and and “ad hominum” and certain ways of organizing policy proposals based on “prima facie stock issues” of some kind (the lynchpin of all of them being the stock issue of “Solvency” where the plan had better at least pretend to be positively likely to positively work to fix some problem, and the AFF has to prove this or else they are a bad AFF). Some of them get very defensive, and sort of refuse to flow, and will pantomime “ripping up the ballot” if a debater starts to talk really fast.
Sankar’s comment is indicative of the lay public’s attitude, that church lady com judges respect.
If you watch some modern competive debate, you might have a better understanding of why it’s disliked. The Cross Examination Debate Association’s National Championship is the most prestigious of the US college debate tournaments, and the 2014 finals was widely circulated as an illustrative example of the current style.
((
Arguably, however, the NDT year end tournament of the merged CEDA/NDT circuit system is more prestigious that the CEDA year end tournament? And former NDT regional circuits tend to be in the South, and are more rhetorically traditional, and less “post-modern” (which some peopledislike for separate reasons). The distinction here isn’t about flow vs not-flow, or stock-issues vs not-stock-issues, but rather K (post modern? philosophic? anarchist? woke?) vs not-K (modernist? policy-centric? archist? conservative?).
))
Flow Judges… flow!
And rely on it heavily to decide their ballot. (There are subtypes. I will not enumerate them <3)
Here is an example image (sauce here) of a flow for ONE (or two???) position(s) (maybe an entire case?!), that was discussed substantively by skillfully-intellectually-organized speakers all of whom remembered and addressed each other’s previous points coherently in a skillful way, to make flowing easy (often maybe using verbally numbered arguments based on everyone taking similar notes in similar ways), in seven sequential speeches (which we know, because there are seven columns):
We have sub-issues going horizontally across the page.
Interpreting this a bit… “H” with a circle at the top left in black ink probably stands for “Harms”, which often shows up in the first affirmative constructive (1AC) proving the stock issue of “Harms”. Something has to be wrong with the status quo. If the status quo ain’t broke, it shouldn’t be fixed. The AFF has to make people want change before they propose change. All of this is latent in “H” in a circle… and it has something to do with something being “untraceable”. Everyone heard this in the round of course. That’s why they can get away with so much shorthand. They might have a whole logic loop in working or audio memory and be able to know what is being talked about if someone says “on the traceability argument in Harms, our response to their response saying <blah blah> is… NEW X”.
Whatever the arguments are, it involved a cited substantive claim, published in 2010, by “Bachi” (whoever that is).
Back in the image, where is says “Brower ’08” that means someone with the last name of Brower was quoted ver batim based on something published in 2008. The substance of what was said is going to be in everyone’s working memory, but the gist of it is “The economy going down somehow causes something to do with satellites” which we get from “econ V → satellite”.
The red ink is almost certainly the negative rebuttals, which attacked various subarguments line by line with the first such speech not “reasoning” that much, but mostly just reading four pieces of (probably case specific) counter-evidence. (When that happens to you, as the AFF, your stomach often sinks, because you might drop an AFF round, even though you picked the ground upon which to fight, which is a huge advantage.)
The blue and black ink are probably all affirmative speeches. The blue was likely written very fast, in the middle of the round, while speeches were happening.
The black ink was probably “pre-flowed” and written in advance of the round by the affirmative team, to save time, so as not to waste seconds during the round by taking notes on a set speech they already optimized the shit out of (and might know by heart).
This might be a sloppy/weird flow? It has the flavor of something fake.
Normally you’d put each issue on its own piece of paper or file, or tab in your spreadsheet on a laptop, because you don’t know how much it might explode. This is “less real”. Good for pedagogy maybe?
See the “2 Blackouts ’10” in black ink near the bottom?
To the right of that is an “S” with a circle in red ink, which usually means “Solvency” which is a common stock issue that is different from “Harms” (and should be on different paper??). Also, on the far left in the same row there’s red ink that simply says “no solvency” which suggests that the entire horizontal sequence of debate is “about Solvency”… and if this is true then it suggests that the negative had the last word on the subject (and the affirmative might have dropped it)!
If the affirmative really did drop Solvency, then they basically lost the debate.
Therefore a flow judge would probably give the ballot to the negative (unless some other piece of paper also exists, about what standards to use for a ballet, and somehow that debate resolved in “Solvency doesn’t matter anymore for <reasons>”). A Flow Judge would give NEG the ballot even if the flow judge was a flat earther who doesn’t believe in satellites but does believe aliens will rapture us all before anything being talked about in the round actually ever happened… you can be a Flow Judge AND be crazy… but being a flow judge immunizes you some from having wrong beliefs so long as you track syntax and are in a half-honest environment ;-)
So we see here, from the example flow: NEG probably won in some “objective” sense.
And a flow judge would notice and give NEG the ballot?
And this is why debaters often prefer to be judged by flow judges… it puts the speakers legibly and clearly in control of their own destiny within a round, tightening the OODA loop and the lessons it can teach :-)
I suspect a skilled debater ( in the modern competitive debate format) would be a useful addition to the sort of Defence Against The Dark Arts thing I’m thinking of here.
My guess is the dislike for rhetoric or competitive debate around LessWrong is that it’s often used to argue for incorrect conclusions. I haven’t done competitive debate [1] before, but my understanding is you get handed the Pro or Anti position at random and have to do your best to argue for that conclusion? If that’s the case, it does seem like a case of having ones bottom line already written. . . which is fine, for the goal of practicing trying to discern the true thing when someone’s trying to convince you of a false one!
And in terms of general educational outcomes- I haven’t done a deep dive into the subject, but you make a good pitch!
Sidenote, I’m using “competitive debate” to refer to the thing college debate clubs get evaluated on, if I’m using the wrong terms let me know
Yeah, so there are quite a few different formats (I won’t even mention all of them below) and they can evolve, and they work somewhat differently here, and “being honest in your advocacy” comes up in the debates themselves quite often (but the other side is, sort of necessarily, also argued whenever the debate “goes meta about debate itself” like that).
I. “SPAR”
In High School (when I was competing in individuals events for the team I eventually returned to and coached) there was one tournament every year that had a “SPontaneous ARgument” competition.
That tournament was the best, and lots of us loved to SPAR, and that was just like the thing you’re imagining.
You don’t even know what the question will be. Its usually something trivial like “Peanut better is objectively better than jelly” but it could be “Invading Iraq was a mistake” or whatever.
If both people agree on who wants to be pro/con they can, otherwise its a coin flip.
Amateur parent volunteer judges with no rhetorical training then judge on… random criteria?
It is, to serious undergraduate NDT tournament at a national Finals, what your first day at an improv class is to starring in Hamlet.
II. RESOLUTIONS SELECTED BY A NATIONAL COMMITTEE
In serious policy debate the community picks a RESOLUTION and then at a tournament you take the affirmative three times, and the negative three times. When you are affirmative, you pick ANY CASE YOU WANT that is an instance of a detailed policy consistent with the RESOLUTION to advocate.
At least that’s how it works nowadays. Sometimes in the past there was poor resolution selection such that every round for the entire year was the same argument and it was terrible. The trick to a good one is to hit the zeitgeist a bit, but also to leave wiggle room for crazy cases.
1928 Resolved: That a federal department of education should be created with a secretary in the president’s cabinet.
1943 Resolved: That a federal world government should be established.
1966 Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor-management disputes in basic industries.
1985 Resolved: That the federal government should provide employment for all employable United States citizens living in poverty.
1999 Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its foreign policy toward Russia.
2007 Resolved: The United States federal government should establish a policy substantially increasing the number of persons serving in one or more of the following national service programs: AmeriCorps, Citizen Corps, Senior Corps, Peace Corps, Learn and Serve America, Armed Forces.
2016 Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.
In general, teams can run cases they truly believe in, or they can run “trick cases”, or they can run centrally topical cases. These are more like dimensions? In modern times there’s a whole other thing called “kritiks” which I’ll touch on very lightly later. Affirmative cases can often be positioned in these three or four dimensions, but often push very hard into one specific dimension.
III. Example Trick Case: Bomb Russian Booze
I remember a trick case with Russia, where the affirmative plan was to send Navy Seals into Russia, and secretly bomb literally every large alcohol distillery (also all the warehouses with stores of vodka), and get away with it (no one would know who the bombers were), and so (the claim went) nothing would change except a massive increase in the price of hard alcohol in Russia, based on massive decrease in the supply, and thus a massive lowering of their rates of alcoholism, for a massive net benefit to Russian domestic wellbeing.
And this was, obviously, INSANE. But it kept winning! :-D
They had all this published recruiting material, that young men are often exposed to by ROTC recruiters, saying that the Navy Seals were essentially made of magic and could do anything and never be caught.
And they submitted it as strong direct written evidence of the ease with which the plan could be carried off, and bloviated about how “the American government would never lie to its precious young men in its recruiting material so either this is true or else the USG is evil… is that what you’re really saying when you accuse our recent and clearly cited evidence of being overstated?? do you you lack patriotism?!?”
It was hilarious. People almost always laughed the first time they heard it. And (rare) Flow Judges and (common) Coms Judges could both appreciate the “technically clean logic” and (often) the fun/patriotic/cynical showboating.
IV. Other Example Cases: Drug Legalization & Dioxins
So, basically, if you wanted to spend your optimization pressure to pick an AFF case you really really believed in (like as a political posture?) even if it had shit evidence, and only one crackpot in one insane progressive magazine with a readership of 1000 was advocating it directly (and you weren’t even doing what the crackpot suggested because that was a bad plan, but you were modifying it creatively yourself)… I mean… you could do that, but it would be tougher and maybe less funny?
And funniness, in my book, counts for a lot.
((I kinda “went authentic” my second year of actually debating, trying to pass off radical domestic drug reform in the US as a “demand side” attempt at a “foreign policy” adjustment towards a country with large “illegal” opium farms and cartels and stuff. It was something someone in their early 20s might foolishly think was wise? Arguably we were Brucing a bit in choosing to run it… we sometimes actually lost on AFF, which is not great.
In my first year we just went straight up the middle with a dioxin emission fix based on mandated medical waste incinerator smokestack filters paid for by government subsidies, and enforced by fines for refusing to accept the retrofit. Dioxins are basically not emitted in the US anymore, but back then they were. We won a lot. And it wasn’t even a trick case! But people didn’t laugh… just nod along and agree that this boring thing was boringly correct and the negative arguments were grasping at straws. The coach made sure we didn’t change since we were beginners and etc etc.))
Often, teams would pick a case, and change it a little bit between every tournament and bring polished proposals and skilled defense to tournaments at the end of the year.
The hard and creative (and more morally ambiguous) part was Negative.
V. The Desperate (Deeply Theoretical?) Bullshit Negatives Need To Ever Win
Over and over and over (usually three times every tournament) you hear this AMAZING First Affirmative Constructive (1AC) and with shining rhetoric, a clean story, tidy evidence, and true confidence in the voice of the person speaking it, and…
...you want to stand up and applaud and say “this is a great proposal that America should do”...
...but instead you have to pull shit out of your ass somehow to say NO to it...
...like maybe: “NO! uh… because… technically it is a prima facie burden of the affirmative team to propose a plan with no vagueness, and here is a formal expert in rhetoric to back us up on this claim about how debate has to technically work if it is to be properly educational, and this plan is vague because… uh… [checks list of 20 ways a plan can be vague that was given to them by the advanced team that usually gets to at least the quarter finals in tournaments] it lacks a clear funding mechanism… and you, dear wonderful Judge who is very wise and full of common sense, you wouldn’t sign a blank check, would you? wouldn’t that be crazy? this is a prima facie burden! and it can’t be fixed in the second speech! if they didn’t have it in the first speech you know they’re just making shit up and you can’t trust them, and therefore they should lose and there’s no two ways about it, and here are five independent reasons that the basic idea, if true, constitutes valid reason to give the ballot to us, all based on just the truth that their plan was vague <and so on>”.
You actually give it A LOT more structure thatn that. Break “Vagueness” into an A, B, C, D set of claims, where the four lettered claims abstractly explain why NEG has to win. Give each letter several numbered justifications… Also, you make four other half-crazy arguments, each of which attacks the AFF case from orthogonal directions from “Vagueness”.
Then (on the Vagueness position) the AFF later says:
(1) you made an ad hominum in your accusation, about them not being trustworthy
(2) and yes do too they have a price number, and they just baldly assert <a made up price> with no evidence at all, and
(3 & 4 & 5) they make some other rebuttals, but they don’t don’t refute EVERY independent line of argument through your entire plan vagueness scaffold.
So in your counter you magnanimously grant almost everything they said, except for the totally made up price which is obviously made up. Which you reiterate is too late so shouldn’t count for educational reasons, and also NEW 1 its a fake number with no evidence, and also… <three more new numbered arguments>.
And you point out that you made more and stronger arguments that they ignored, and reiterate the A B C and D of the Vagueness argument...
...using only A2, A4, B1, B5, C2, C3, and D3, D4, and D5 as voters.
You point out that you now have 2x2x2x3==24 different paths to retain the overall Vagueness Position in a form that could destroy AFF! <3
(These 24 paths to victory are a shorter and smaller version of what you originally said! You said more before… via speed reading a generic Vagueness Template that you’ve practiced speed reading the pro forma parts of.)
And then you remind the judge that the next time the AFF talks it won’t be a constructive, and they would have made their strongest arguments, and if they make new arguments it wouldn’t be fair, because you probably could have made strong creative counter-arguments to those new arguments, but you won’t have the time or legal allowance for that (which might be why they would have stuck arguments in that were weak in the long run but strong initially)...
...and so anything else they make up later would violate the “educational spirit” of “the noble practice of policy debate”, and so, sadly, despite the case possibly being great in real life (unless either of the two other independent anti-affirmative voting arguments goes through) the judge will have to Vote On Vagueness And Vote Negative.
And then you watch the judge’s facial expressions carefully during this as they look down at their notes and write what you say… or whatever the judge does. Its the judge. The judge is god for the round. You want the ballot, right? The judge controls the ballot.
VI. Subservience To The Judge Is Good Strategy
Depending on the judge(s)’s nods or frowns, maybe in an even later (even shorter) speech, you might concede or silently drop or spend only 20 seconds half-assing the Vagueness position at the very very end?
Or you might hammer it super hard in an eloquent minute long rant explaining why this is ONE OF TWO very very strong and very very independent reasons to Vote Negative.
And you spell out a potted but plausible history of the debate so far (that everyone has notes on and it just happened but it was fast and you’re trying to crystalized it in people’s minds) summarizing all the rhetorical flubs of the AFF team who had a BURDEN OF PROOF! And not-at-all-fakely emoting about how the AFF burden of proof is so important… right now… (until you’re on AFF in the next round, insisting that stock issues are fake bullshit in general, and Vagueness isn’t even one that people normally cared about)...
In finals, there are three judges!
Based on facial expressions these three “gods” might buy different things, so there are entire lectures you’ll get from the coach in the five hour van ride to yet another college for yet another tournament, on how to pick what to drop and what to emphasize so that you can try to get at least two of the three judges in the final to vote for you, even if they vote on different issues.)
And then sometimes all the prep work and all the fallbacks, and all the combinatorial optimization gives you a weaselly win as a negative?
And you win against a naively “real world very strong case” where the Affirmative just were kinda lazy about researching the cost of their plan enough? Or not?
It depends.
VII. The Bullshit, Emphasized Above As Silly, Is Actually Often Educational
However also… it overall… these practice really are, often, “educational in general”! <3
The vagueness bullshit might work in the second tournament of the season, but in the fourth tournament of the season, with the AFF running a newer and sexier version of their case, and they will have changed the wording slightly (at no time cost) to mention a price in their Official Plan!
And it will be backed by evidence they didn’t mention, but now have in their laptops or box of papers, that they can quote (but only if you’re fool enough to not notice the slightly different words and try vagueness on reflex, rather than from actually listening and deciding what Negative attacks to try, on the fly, in the round) and the evidence will be based on an expert they found in some library article, after haunting the library for a day.
Negative teams rarely win the same way twice against the same Affirmative team, and by the end of the year the same teams will often have been in the finals against each other two or three times, arguing the same AFF case as always (but now very strong) and “yet another crazy way to attack it” (like a kritik maybe?).
But anyway.
If you go with a stock issues frame, and try Vagueness, on NEG, that first time… (early in a season, with a strong generic theoretical counter-argument to a half-assed AFF case) you might win, especially in High School...
...in college anarchoprogleft types might try to accuse you of being logocentrically racist if you naively try to use stock issues, and anarchoprogleft college judges might agree with that? College rounds can be insane or not, in hundreds of different ways ;-)
I lost to “Kant”… twice. Never got a 3rd rematch.
I lost to “deep eco feminism”… twice and then beat it the third time and had “Cara” (who was in her late 20s, and finally getting a degree to make something of her life, and was intimidatingly confident, and made finals in like half the tournaments I saw) ask for a copy of my citations and evidence at the end, which made me felt super proud. Then she stopped running “deep eco feminism”! Which I thought was high integrity of her!
Anyway. If things are working well overall, Winning As Negative gets harder and harder and harder over the course of the season.
Because there is feedback!
Because it is at least half real, and every 90 minute debate at a tournament gives the AFF yet another real life, adrenaline filled, actual redteamed, OODA loop’s worth of information on how to make their advocacy, that they get to choose and refine (within the arguably vague bounds of the annual resolution that is stable all year) stronger against arbitrary attacks :-)
VIII. Thoughts On The Flexibility Of The Ontology Of Traditional Debate Norms
Mostly here I’m talking about specifically undergrad level “CEDA/NDT debate” and its echo at the High School level which is called “Policy Debate”.
Anyone can make up anything they want, in terms of a group of people who meet to argue and vote and award prizes and whatever.
“Debate” in a fully general form, is nearly infinitely open and flexible. It doesn’t have to be two people vs two people. It doesn’t have to have a yearly resolution (in High School sometimes they change it halfway through the year).
It doesn’t have to have five minute constructive speeches with two minutes of cross-examination at the beginning. It doesn’t have to have ballots that say either AFF or NEG. It doesn’t have to have “speaker points” over and above that to help break ties in how the seeding process for finals should work.
Debates have been happening for millennia and you can do them however it seems correct to you to do them. They are deeply “existential” rather than “essential” when the judges can write anything they want on a ballot, and your job is to get people to grant you ethos, and feel “<YourName> wins” is true of what just happened, and express it somehow. If people are truly good, it can work. If people are bad, then… maybe the methods can save it? Maybe?
The debates exist… that existence includes a competitively collaborative search for the meaning of the competitive practice, with winners and losers, internal to the practice...
The form that exists now agrees, mostly, that it should be able to regenerate itself from inside its own logic, but the forms we have are deeply deeply tested and not everyone will understand all of why things happen and particular way. And these forms are part of continuous traditions going back to the 1920s that are still culturally resonating, which I think is kinda cool <3
If you watch some modern competive debate, you might have a better understanding of why it’s disliked. The Cross Examination Debate Association’s National Championship is the most prestigious of the US college debate tournaments, and the 2014 finals was widely circulated as an illustrative example of the current style.
I’d be interested in hearing more about the different kinds of judges? I just googled Flow and Communication Judge for debate and got a bit about diagramming the flow of a debate.
(You can also say “go read X website” or “the consensus is pretty good, random googling will get you basically the right answer.” Reading up on debate rules has been added to my backlist but you strike me as the kind of person who might enjoy explaining it :) )
“Com judges” might not exist any more (or might be called something different)?
I think the current meta focuses on “K” vs “not-K”? (Roughly, the “K” people only want to debate philosophy, and they sort of abuse the Policy Debate platform (using the logic of policy debate) to try to undermine doing policy debate within a Policy Debate tournament because maybe “better policy outcomes” would happen “in real life” if people stopped having policy debates and debated philosophy instead.)
Coms judges probably do exist, but maybe not “by that name” anymore because they are somewhat timeless? They come in two archetypal flavors:
(1) the default you’d expect of a private school PMC (Professional / Managerial Class) parents who volunteer to judge when their kid’s coach asks for parent volunteers to enable the coach to run a tournament, where those parents will act and judge like normies, and will predictably reward “the appearance of articulate prestige” in terms of PMC cultural standards and...
(2) church lady debate coaches who think the naive reactions of those PMC parents are essentially correct and timeless and wants to consciously “teach to that test”, and who also personally “judge to the theory that teaches to that test” when they are judging… in a high church way that connects back to latin phrases like “post hoc ergo prompter hoc” and “status quo” and and “ad hominum” and certain ways of organizing policy proposals based on “prima facie stock issues” of some kind (the lynchpin of all of them being the stock issue of “Solvency” where the plan had better at least pretend to be positively likely to positively work to fix some problem, and the AFF has to prove this or else they are a bad AFF). Some of them get very defensive, and sort of refuse to flow, and will pantomime “ripping up the ballot” if a debater starts to talk really fast.
Sankar’s comment is indicative of the lay public’s attitude, that church lady com judges respect.
((
Arguably, however, the NDT year end tournament of the merged CEDA/NDT circuit system is more prestigious that the CEDA year end tournament? And former NDT regional circuits tend to be in the South, and are more rhetorically traditional, and less “post-modern” (which some peopledislike for separate reasons). The distinction here isn’t about flow vs not-flow, or stock-issues vs not-stock-issues, but rather K (post modern? philosophic? anarchist? woke?) vs not-K (modernist? policy-centric? archist? conservative?).
))
Flow Judges… flow!
And rely on it heavily to decide their ballot. (There are subtypes. I will not enumerate them <3)
Here is an example image (sauce here) of a flow for ONE (or two???) position(s) (maybe an entire case?!), that was discussed substantively by skillfully-intellectually-organized speakers all of whom remembered and addressed each other’s previous points coherently in a skillful way, to make flowing easy (often maybe using verbally numbered arguments based on everyone taking similar notes in similar ways), in seven sequential speeches (which we know, because there are seven columns):
We have sub-issues going horizontally across the page.
Interpreting this a bit… “H” with a circle at the top left in black ink probably stands for “Harms”, which often shows up in the first affirmative constructive (1AC) proving the stock issue of “Harms”. Something has to be wrong with the status quo. If the status quo ain’t broke, it shouldn’t be fixed. The AFF has to make people want change before they propose change. All of this is latent in “H” in a circle… and it has something to do with something being “untraceable”. Everyone heard this in the round of course. That’s why they can get away with so much shorthand. They might have a whole logic loop in working or audio memory and be able to know what is being talked about if someone says “on the traceability argument in Harms, our response to their response saying <blah blah> is… NEW X”.
Whatever the arguments are, it involved a cited substantive claim, published in 2010, by “Bachi” (whoever that is).
((Google scholar offers no insight when I search for something, fwiw. This is bad. A KEY FUNCTION of these notes should be to enable people to do opposition research on key ideas “out in the literature” and get a better picture of reality thereby, and win debates about reality thereby. You want to be able to aumantically hear an argument, and come back later at a new tournament magically knowing the backstory of what was claimed as a posterior, and via scholarship, this can happen! The citation and keywords, for later research, are like the NUMBER ONE THING at least one of the two people on your two person team should be capturing.)
Back in the image, where is says “Brower ’08” that means someone with the last name of Brower was quoted ver batim based on something published in 2008. The substance of what was said is going to be in everyone’s working memory, but the gist of it is “The economy going down somehow causes something to do with satellites” which we get from “econ V → satellite”.
The red ink is almost certainly the negative rebuttals, which attacked various subarguments line by line with the first such speech not “reasoning” that much, but mostly just reading four pieces of (probably case specific) counter-evidence. (When that happens to you, as the AFF, your stomach often sinks, because you might drop an AFF round, even though you picked the ground upon which to fight, which is a huge advantage.)
The blue and black ink are probably all affirmative speeches. The blue was likely written very fast, in the middle of the round, while speeches were happening.
The black ink was probably “pre-flowed” and written in advance of the round by the affirmative team, to save time, so as not to waste seconds during the round by taking notes on a set speech they already optimized the shit out of (and might know by heart).
This might be a sloppy/weird flow? It has the flavor of something fake.
Normally you’d put each issue on its own piece of paper or file, or tab in your spreadsheet on a laptop, because you don’t know how much it might explode. This is “less real”. Good for pedagogy maybe?
See the “2 Blackouts ’10” in black ink near the bottom?
To the right of that is an “S” with a circle in red ink, which usually means “Solvency” which is a common stock issue that is different from “Harms” (and should be on different paper??). Also, on the far left in the same row there’s red ink that simply says “no solvency” which suggests that the entire horizontal sequence of debate is “about Solvency”… and if this is true then it suggests that the negative had the last word on the subject (and the affirmative might have dropped it)!
If the affirmative really did drop Solvency, then they basically lost the debate.
Therefore a flow judge would probably give the ballot to the negative (unless some other piece of paper also exists, about what standards to use for a ballet, and somehow that debate resolved in “Solvency doesn’t matter anymore for <reasons>”). A Flow Judge would give NEG the ballot even if the flow judge was a flat earther who doesn’t believe in satellites but does believe aliens will rapture us all before anything being talked about in the round actually ever happened… you can be a Flow Judge AND be crazy… but being a flow judge immunizes you some from having wrong beliefs so long as you track syntax and are in a half-honest environment ;-)
So we see here, from the example flow: NEG probably won in some “objective” sense.
And a flow judge would notice and give NEG the ballot?
And this is why debaters often prefer to be judged by flow judges… it puts the speakers legibly and clearly in control of their own destiny within a round, tightening the OODA loop and the lessons it can teach :-)