I did a fair amount of competitive debate, to moderate success. My understanding is that debate makes you better at persuading (wrt an average person, not a debate judge) as you get started, then worse as you get into mid-level debating (you sound awful and highly idiosyncratic) then much better as you get into the top end (you grok some principles of earnestness and being persuasive compactly).
I also think that an aspect of BP debate you didn’t cover is that it’s a sport where you spend most of your time losing, and where many anchor their self-worth to pretty arbitrary speaker points. As a community it has its upsides but certainly its downsides.
Yeah indeed I think my engagement profile was different from the more competitive attitudes you’d expect high-powered teams/unis to have—our debating club was a small one at a school self-consciously focused on engineering, so it was much more hobbyist. I was always in it for self-growth rather than winning, so it served as a good check on the kind of intellectual hubris that accrued as I was levelling-up in physics. We were fortunate to have a handful of emerita members that could pass on a lot of their knowledge without expecting a big commitment to competition performance. But I’m not surprised (and sorry to hear!) that there are suckier steady-states.
I did a fair amount of competitive debate, to moderate success. My understanding is that debate makes you better at persuading (wrt an average person, not a debate judge) as you get started, then worse as you get into mid-level debating (you sound awful and highly idiosyncratic) then much better as you get into the top end (you grok some principles of earnestness and being persuasive compactly).
I also think that an aspect of BP debate you didn’t cover is that it’s a sport where you spend most of your time losing, and where many anchor their self-worth to pretty arbitrary speaker points. As a community it has its upsides but certainly its downsides.
Yeah indeed I think my engagement profile was different from the more competitive attitudes you’d expect high-powered teams/unis to have—our debating club was a small one at a school self-consciously focused on engineering, so it was much more hobbyist. I was always in it for self-growth rather than winning, so it served as a good check on the kind of intellectual hubris that accrued as I was levelling-up in physics. We were fortunate to have a handful of emerita members that could pass on a lot of their knowledge without expecting a big commitment to competition performance. But I’m not surprised (and sorry to hear!) that there are suckier steady-states.