Something similar seems to have happened in sport fencing. The style of fencing in the 19th and early 20th century is now known as "classical fencing". It was practiced as a sport but also as a preparation for duels, so the techniques had to be useful in a fight with sharp weapons. Wikipedia[1] says
> Scoring was done by means of four judges who determined if a hit was made. Two side judges stood behind and to the side of each fencer, and watched for hits made by that fencer on the opponent's target. ... There also were problems with bias: well-known fencers were often given the benefit of mistakes (so-called "reputation touches"), and in some cases there was outright cheating.
Then in the 1930s, electrical scoring was introduced. This is objective, but it led a big change in style, because now you could score by just touching your opponent, even if such a light attack would be ineffective in a real fight.
By contrast, kendo never introduced electrical scoring, and still uses human judges. A judge can refuse to award a point if an attack connected but didn't have enough force behind it---this avoids rewarding techniques that would not work in combat. So kendo is maybe closer to actual sword fighting, but on the other hand e.g. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash makes fun of the subjectivity:
> As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the right amount of zanshin.
I guess the corresponding thing in debate club would be to give more discretion to the judges, so they wouldn't award a point if there was insufficient follow-through...
One thing is that this makes it sound like "force" is the primary measure of scoring for kendo, but it's not. Judges (there are three, majority is required for a point) have significant leeway in judging hits and one of the primary, if not THE primary criteria is whether the striker displayed proper "spirit," which can be explained in various ways.
A forceful strike that simply does not show intention would never be given a point; in fact, at lower levels where such things happen, it wouldn't be uncommon for a clearly reckless, forceful strike to a target area to be given a foul.
Valid scoring areas are also incredibly limited and unrealistic.
The point I'm trying to make in a roundabout fashion is that kendo is just as much a victim of sportification via rules as fencing. :)
Is there a way to change the rules of public debate to align the game with the interest of the people?
To the author's point, it seems like the problem is fixed for a short time after new rules are introduced. Then, after the Machiavellian players figure out the weak points, the competition becomes a grotesque of what it was intended to be.
This makes me think Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation.
It's much more difficult to game the system when the game's rules keep changing.
[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/63773/what-jefferson-said
Is the problem that politicians are too good at debate or is the problem that voters lack the critical thinking skills to recognize that they're being played? I'd lean much more towards the latter. In watching public policy debates during election cycles, I always notice how little it resembles the debates I did in high school. Politicians, debating the way they do for voters, would lose in high school debate competitions. If anything, debate taught me to recognize nonsensical arguments that were, none the less, somewhat convincing. I wonder what would happen if more voters were acquainted with the experience of having won an argument based solely how you argued rather than the substance of your position.
> Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation
Ah...but now you've just created a meta game that controls the actual game. The Machiavellian players, as you put it, would just figure out how to control the rule rewriting process to achieve their necessary victories once the game starts being played. The only thing that makes the rule changes in debate work for a while is that the rules are written by impartial people who are trying to fix a broken situation and, crucially, are ineligible to play by the rules they create.
Gerrymandering: states are precisely "cracked and packed" to maximize the number of expected majority-red districts in a state and minimize the number of majority-blue.
Partisaned primaries: optimization of campaigning and stumping is done thru visiting specific states that vote early in the primary. Most people don't vote for the best possible candidate, they vote for the candidate they dislike the most that they think can win. The biggest states (CA, TX, NY) are traditionally vote only a few weeks before the end of the primary while NH and IO vote extremely early, and thus, have outsized influence on who most people get to vote for.
Electoral college: Republican candidates don't spend any real effort in deep blue states and Democratic candidates don't spend any real effort in red states.
These are the extreme optimization of quirks in our "democracy" in the same way modern fencing is an extreme optimization of modern fencing rules rather than training for real-world sword fighting battles.
This definition of gerrymandering makes it sound like only Republicans do it, but in fact both major parties do it. For example https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/how-dee...
Btw, the way to counter a flick is to not get hit by it. I know that sounds stupid, but whipping the blade substantially decreases it's length. So just space around it.
I was a sabreist but my friends did foil and spent a lot of time bitching about the change. (Some people looooove their flicks)
(On the other hand, you might get a judge who would laugh you out of the room for making such an argument, or on the other end of the spectrum a judge from somewhere in rural west Texas who will automatically vote against anyone who speaks >200 WPM. The judge is God first and foremost, but if your judge claims to be tabula rasa you can make and potentially win any argument you feel like.)
The way to make debate about truth seeking is to find the right judges who prioritize that.
After the first few times, and after I got a much better grip on my latitude and what was expected of me, I started to make it clear before I judged, "I find it somewhat hard to follow spreading and I have noticed that I tend to consider plausibility when evaluating arguments, please keep those in mind" and usually there is a flurry of quiet re-strategizing before the debate, followed by a somewhat more meaningful exchange. However it has never quite gotten to the level where anything really felt resolved and it indeed always feels like a bizarre "game".
The idea of truth-seeking is laughable. You are required to switch sides each time.
Or as to the feeling that nothing feels fully resolved. It seems like that should be expected when the opponents are well-matched; rather than, say, a runaway victory resolved in favor of one side? Even then, I don't think any sports spectator would want a team to actually give up partway through and concede rather than continue.
I'm with you, except for this bit. The side-switching is the primary way for truth-seeking to enter debate. If you only look for arguments for one side, you're a demagogue. Truth-seeking consists of searching for the strongest arguments for both sides. Most people struggle to argue at their best for both sides simultaneously, so debate sequences them.
That's a shame. Most tournaments I've been involved with organizing had an optional 15 min training session and/or handed out a one page information sheet. You should suggest something similar if you ever judge again. In particular, such a sheet should begin with something addressing (c) -- "you are in charge, make any decision you want".
> However it has never quite gotten to the level where anything really felt resolved and it indeed always feels like a bizarre "game".
This is mostly to be expected, and is true pretty uniformly throughout the various styles of debate (including those outside the USA). Turns out the majority of high school students aren't very good at designing and presenting arguments. It doesn't help that in the first speeches they are often presenting arguments that they didn't actually write themselves.
I understand the cynicism of the OP as in the upper divisions it can turn into this bizarre free-for-all speed reading contest, but there are alot of students who didn't go all-in, never even tried competing at that level, and still got something valuable out of it.
IMO, the reason why the activity is valuable is because it forces the students to think critically in a way that they don't get to do in other activities. The best students take the time to find new research, to look at what they find and figure out what articles are worthwhile and which are just smokescreens (or "fake news"). But even the less experienced students still benefit because they are forced to argue both sides, which makes them think about why the arguments in one side may be weaker than the other.
Also, well-run tournaments try to match teams of equal experience as much as possible. They have "speed reading" divisions but they also have novice divisions as well. After the first 2-3 rounds they also try and and match teams with similar win/loss records so that even two poorly matched teams have a chance to find their level.
For the most part, even students who only go for a semester or two of debate and never come back are better off than those who weren't exposed to the activity. It may not help in terms of making Democracy better, but it does help students learn to do research, think on their feet, and feel more comfortable about speaking publicly.
What could possibly go wrong :-/
One might argue that the jury system in legal cases functions primarily as a check upon the risks of corruptible judges, whether that corruption takes the form of mere bribes or appeals to intellectual vanity. But of course once you go down the democratic route, the temptation to appeal to the emotions of the poorly-informed creates a new set of problems.
Another part of the problem that I feel the author overlooked is the default dualism of debate, with all nuance and complexity reduced to one option or the other. This is reflected in the either/or nature of litigation and referenda, where the preference for a clear majority decisions encourages the sort of gamesmanship that undermines institutional participation int he first place.
Lately I've been exploring alternative decision-making systems and one that has captured my interests is designed for moderate-size groups (up to a couple hundred people) in a two-step process: people slit into smaller groups to originate proposals, then vote as a large group to rank them. the key difference is that participants get 3 votes, so they can advance up to 3 proposals they consider worthy, or put all 3 votes behind a single issue they care passionately about.
Of course any system is subject to manipulation once formalized, this approach seems to generate greater collective satisfaction with pluralistic outcomes (emphasis added because I haven't fully researched it yet).
When I was in high school, American teams usually did pretty poorly in international competitions because the Lincoln-Douglas style does not transfer well into World's style.
> the American rugby national team is really bad, probably because American football players (e.g. gridiron football) aren't good either.
From my understanding, including one person I know who represented the US two years ago and now does parli for Yale, high school worlds is not a venue for people (edit: people= American high school students) who do it because they are otherwise competitive.
That said: in college worlds and parli ... worlds, former LDers have done really well (e.g. when that is the competitive venue they go after).
Also, American rugby is probably not as good because the good football players are, well, playing football ;)
The "that's your fault" comment was from the perspective of the judges. As in, in LD the judges can follow the breakneck speed whereas in worlds they don't bother to.
The most competitive ones, to start with, wouldn't blindly follow an LD style regardless in front of a judge pool and format which naturally abhors it and favors collaborativeness, wit, etc.
And yup, it is a bit more like this imaginary scenario: past high school, there is no more gridiron football (irrelevant sidenote: this does seem likely to happen given the CTE rates amongst players who don't proceed past high school) and so the next generation's Odell Beckhams will move to England after high school to become Premiership players. Which actually is a fascinating thought experiment too...
Knowing and understanding the nuances of the the judging pool and the competition are just as important as anything else, so teams that "transfer" between activities are always at a bit of a structural disadvantage. Especially at the elite level where the differences in raw ability and background knowledge start to become imperceptible.
Show me the incentives/disincentives people are exposed to, and I'll tell you how they'll behave... since most people are rational actors (even if "good" or "bad").
Lastly, how is the debate behavior these flawed rules resulted in, not just a "gish gallop"? (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop)
AC normativity K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RTv2KtA_XBhkRQeHmC69BfTi...
NC analytic philosophy K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zoPxDoFEu7-paUsK5GhTKyW6...
NC speed K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXKYu8K4DX5DoVVnLlPxmPMf...
Doing this in LD might fly, but in CX it's basically an obnoxious way to throw the round. (Which I did back in high school, repeatedly, with as much success as you'd expect.)
Nuke War impacts? yeah, I'm running Compassion Fatigue K. On AFF you better believe I'm running a kritikal case with 'dismantling patriarchy through discussion' as my primary voting issue against the ridiculous Mead cards the neg was going to bring out.
All I'm saying is that it certainly can be effective as this is what I did and found great success both locally and in the national circuit
If debate is meant to be preparation for participation in a polity, why would you adhere to exclusionary jargon and obscure proceduralism? Of course it's fun to be an insider, as in any other sphere of nerd endeavor, but this is the rhetorical equivalent of bodybuilding with the help of steroids. Yes, it is satisfying to the competitors, but at the expense of comprehensibility to everyone else.
As a non-American who loved debate growing up (but in a more old-fashioned and qualitative policy forum style), the first time I saw policy debate on TV I almost threw up in disgust. This kind of thing is why voter participation rates are so low and people hate politicians (sweeping assertions that I have no intention of substantiating today, by the way).
The research and critical thinking aspects of this are absolutely valuable skills to learn. But the more technical it becomes, the more you're applying the logic of industrial production to qualitative argument, to the point of losing your audience completely. I suggest that this emphasis on point-scoring reduces the incidence of critical thinking in the population as a whole, and offer as an analogy the Selectorate Theory model of Bueno de Mesquita & Smith in The logic of political survival.
In brief, this theory argues that per-capita rewards for members of a selectorate (group which chooses political leaders) diminish as the size of the group initially expands but gradually increase again and exceed the original limit as the selectorate comes to comprise a greater portion of the electorate.
As far as debate is concerned, it is thus more fun at first to win the approval of a small number of insiders through gamesmanship than to please a larger general audience, but as you are able to successfully appeal to larger audiences the fun factor increases again and will eventually exceed the original maximum.
A lot of debaters cross over and do extemp on off weekends.
To be clear, there are no "rules" in debate except that the judge gets to decide who wins, and perhaps the amounts of speaking and prep times allotted each team. There is no scorekeeping other than W or L on the final ballot. One might reasonably expect that the human element would force debaters to "keep it real", so to speak - speed-reading through a bunch of obviously-bullshit argumentation that a policy will lead to half a dozen different global nuclear wars is not something that most people would find convincing, after all.
What's actually happened is that debaters have built up an elaborate metagame, debating with their own terminology and conventions that have grown obnoxiously opaque to the uninformed viewer, and they've been enabled to do so by some unfortunate realities of the debate environment.
Since it's hard to find normal people willing to spend their Saturdays sitting in a high school classroom listening to teenagers role-play as politicians, debate judges are frequently sourced from within the community - they'll be former debaters, or debate coaches from a different school. Debating for a "flow judge" ("flowing", in debate jargon, is how argumentation is tracked on paper) is a very different thing than debating for a "lay judge", and the debate techniques described in the article are vastly less prevalent in the latter case. Most hardcore debaters, however, prefer to have a flow judge - it enables them to use their entire bag of tricks, and frankly is more fun.
This ends up allowing the craziness of the debate metagame to perpetuate by a couple means - for one, it means that schools hosting debate tournaments are pressured to supply flow judges for as many rounds as possible, especially for important finals rounds (if they don't, students won't want to come back, and tournament registration fees are important part of a debate team's funding). Secondly, it alienates lay judges, who often come out of a round feeling "unqualified" to render a decision, overwhelmed with anxiety about being forced to assign a winner and a loser among teams who might as well have been speaking a different language. Finding a layperson willing to judge policy debate more than once is really rare.
So the problem really isn't that the rules encourage degenerate behavior, it's that flow judges do by continuing to award wins to that bullshit. And in the context of policy debate, I don't even know if I'd call this a problem - we enjoyed our made up rules just fine, and if you wanted something more down to earth you could just move to LD or PF styles.
Being able to impress "flow judges" has zero bearing at being able to persuade anyone else. Which it would seem would be the one useful thing you would want to come out of a debating community.
If we need a new format, I suggest an "Obama" debate style. The man clearly understood the policies and their implications, but spoke in a way that moved people deeply at an emotional level, and came away inspired instead of pissed off at their enemies. God, that seems like such a long, long time ago.
But, for what it's worth, high school debate programs are more properly speech and debate programs. Tournaments do include indirectly-competitive events such as oratory, in which competitors give a ten-minute freeform speech and the rhetorical qualities you seem to value are encouraged and rewarded. Debate is just one aspect of the activity.
Basically, this. Everyone's got an opinion on what should win a debate round. Until you ask them to spend Friday evening - late Saturday evening in high school classrooms listening to the 5+ debates on the same topic. Then suddenly their opinion doesn't seem so important to them anymore.
Very frustrating.
Because logical analysis and research skills are valuable, and it's a good way to teach those skills.
(It's also a good way to teach presentation skills, by the way. Thinking on your feet at 100 wpm is much easier if you've been doing it at 400 wpm for a few years.)
Also, perhaps even more importantly, many students seem to really enjoy it.
> given the importance of argumentation as a social skill
I think you've mistaken argumentation for rhetoric and persuasion, which are related but different skills.
It's perfectly possible to make strong arguments at a rapid pace of delivery. Reading a mathematical proof at 400wpm shouldn't make it any more or less correct.
In fact, in practice, there's a strong positive correlation between delivery speed and quality of argumentation in high school debate (although this is not causal and mostly has to do with the fact that "speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment" as another poster put it).
> One wonders what outcomes might result from (say) having an adult judge and 12 jury members drawn from the student body.
Judges of high school debates are adults (or, at least, high school graduates). The only debates judged by students are "pre-junior-varsity" rounds.
That doesn't explain why it's extracurricular.
I'm trying to be brief as I've made several comments in this thread already and don't want to swamp it with my own opinions. In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
I could have removed all between-word spaces from this comment (eg to fit within some arbitrary character count limit) and it would still be comprehensible to most readers, but at the cost of significant extra work.
There is a not-insignificant additional participation cost and time outside the regular school day to participate; that being said, in some schools speech/debate has (at least historically) been "curricular" in that it satisfies core English requirements, rather than being either a pure elective or exclusively extracurricular activity.
> In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
Quality of argumentation doesn't count in debate if the audience can't keep up with it (either in "real life" or high school debate). "Ordinary people" are an abstract concept; the audience always consists of actual people, who vary from any particular concept of "ordinary" in different ways.
I don't understand what you're trying to say :( Do you mean it should be required curriculum? Or just an activity? (If the latter, FWIW football and board games club are also extracurricular. The term really just means "something done in association with school but outside the classroom" these days.)
> I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
The goal is to educate the student.
Also, students learn to present slowly and persuasively, then speed that up. It's not like they're talking quickly day 1. Many top policy debaters also do well in e.g., extemporaneous speaking, which is much more presentation-oriented. It's not an either-or.
I've found that debate formats which emphasize persuasion/rhetoric tend to only teach persuasion/rhetoric, whereas formats that emphasize evidence and logic (even o the exclusion of rhetoric) tend to teach all three. (Just not always at the same time.)
> but at the cost of significant extra work
IME the extra work to move fast, once you have the basics, is not all that significant. Plus, smart beats fast.
In that 9th grade course, the teacher was the judge, with students' input. There were no speed reading games, as the debaters were not trained hobbyists in deception: It was a matter of putting out the best argument to defend your position.
Right. In practice, if you want to engineer the rules to be good, (I think) you need both the rigid, pre-defined, unforgiving logical rules, and some inarticulable "I know it when I see it" rules.
I wonder, are there any theorems on the bounds of how far an optimizer can deviate from another's agent's desired outcome if the agent is limited to specifying the rules in n bits and can specify p arbitrary vetoes?
(Made another reply, but kept this separate for its unrelated point.)
It is also very common for debates to be judged by people who are very inexperienced in debate. A single weekend tournament can involve hundreds of rounds of debate, many dozens happening simultaneously. So a tournament can require several dozen judges. These judges are often volunteers recruited by the hosting school. They could be parents, teachers, janitors, the lunch lady, bus drivers, you name it. In such situations, the judges might get a 5 minute overview of what they are supposed to know, then they are handed a ballot that is "self-explanatory" (not).
If you spew to a judge like that, their eyes will glaze over and they will mark you down. But even if they don't, spewing won't help you because the judges don't know how to "flow" a debate to track all the arguments made, countered, etc. And they don't know they are supposed to reward non-rebutted arguments anyway.
So, spewing is really only a valuable technique when you are in front of a judge you know to be competent. This is a minority of all debates. So you have to be prepared to go at a normal speed, which requires a completely different strategy. And you will use those strategies so much more often that they become your bread and butter.
Unless you play on the national circuit. Then you can expect sharp judges.
You can't really avoid lay judges (those with no exposure to the debate community, who tend to default to a more appearance-oriented paradigm), but you can adapt to a degree. The big reason why most debaters tend to dislike debating in front of lay judges is that their ballot decisions can often seem arbitrary. You may ask about their judging philosophy, but even if they provide one, there's no guarantee that they'll actually stick to it. Not because they're "dumb" or "don't understand," but because it's actually a really hard question to answer. It involves a lot of very specific self-reflection that's radically different than what most are used to. Even experienced judges tend to get it wrong, or fall victim to self-delusion. Experience is what helps a judge learn to know themselves (as a judge).
I was overall terrible at debate but that was a bit of fun, even if it wasn't anything that should be called "debate."
Hm, that seems off to me. One word per second is slow! Just from eyeballing this Google search, I'm getting 110-200 WPM as conversational pace:
https://www.google.com/search?q=conversational+wpm+speed&ie=...
EDIT: a quick DDG search on "conversational english words per minute" indicates an almost universal agreement of somewhere in the range of 140-180 wpm, as with parent's Google search.
And don't put more than 10 or 15 words in a group without a significant pause. And complete thoughts shouldn't probably exceed 60 or 80 words if you don't want funny looks.
It all depends on desired outcomes. If we consider dialogue/debate as a kind of dialectic where one argument serves to sharpen the other as both/all parties seek some kind of truth, however that may be construed, then the sport of debate creates a culture of essentially dishonest argumentation.
Debaters get so into winning that they very quickly fail to recognize the difference between battering their opponent into submission, and actually seeking answers in good faith. You can argue until you're blue in the face that the sport can be separated from the "reality," but it turns into a kind of cognitive capture for the debaters. If they can't take a step back, like the author of this article did, and see how fundamentally disingenuous the activity is, then they are going to be actively making society worse insofar as they use their abilities for anything at all (i.e., politics).
This might be a cheap shot, but Karl Rove seems like a pretty good case in point.
What if debates also had a word limit in addition to a time limit. Say, if each side has four minutes to talk, they need to keep it under 500 words, with 500 additional "flex" words throughout the night. Teams going over the word count regularly would be penalized.
Ideally it would force debaters to remain concise. Of course, what would probably happen is the game would devolve to one of memorizing the thesaurus, so it's a hard problem to tackle... But that's okay! Modern video games have balance changes when a certain "meta" becomes too overwhelming. Professional sports leagues modify their rules every year to combat teams giving themselves an edge that isn't within the spirit of the game >coughNewEnglandPatriotscough<. It's a constant battle that any "game" manager needs to address over time.
BTW, the article's fundamental thesis is also factually incorrect. Speed only wins rounds at the lowest level of competition; you'll never win an important tournament by being faster than your opponents.
> This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is
Debate has never had a single, fixed purpose. Especially as an educational activity, debate is a victim of its own versatility. A debate activity optimized to teach logical analysis and research skills might be detrimental to the development of rhetoric and persuasion skills. And vice-versa.
When I go to debate tournaments, what I see are teenagers discussing "amicus briefs and economic analyses" "early on a Saturday morning", as the article puts it. Who the hell cares how fast they talk?
I mean, really, are America's political problems the result of too many people debating "amicus briefs and economic analyses"? Or is our problem too many used car salesman who prefer rhetoric to evidence? Because the latter is the common failure mode you get when debate is judged according to more subjective standards.
In fact, the article contains an exemplar of the sort of argument common in more rhetoric-oriented forms of debate. If you read the article, you get the sense that the author himself once excelled at the speed reading activity he's critiquing, and in fact even won a national championship in it (if you make it to the bio). Wow, if he was so good, he must really know what he's talking about and be making an honest, self-reflective critique (you can even find comments here stating exactly that!)
But in fact that national championship he won was in a very different type of debate that was imported to the US as a reaction to speed reading, among other practices that -- as far as I can tell -- the author never competed in (at least a varsity level). This sort of "technically true very clever" rhetorical bullshit is what turns me off on more persuasion-oriented debate styles. Technical debating styles -- even when slowed down -- emphasize evidence over this sort of rhetoric.
> until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to.
Debate is the way it is because the people judging the rounds do want it to be that way. Given the choice, they prefer an esoteric activity with substantive content over a vacuous duel between competing real estate salesmen. Every single round, someone chooses -- completely of their own free will -- a winner. And the state of the activity is a direct reflection of those choices.
Debate is not the way you want it to be because you and/or people who agree with you are not volunteering enough hours to provide the reward signals that would create the activity and environment that you want.
--
(It's also worth noting that 99% of high school debate rounds are terrible, and that this has more to do with the "high school" part of the sentence and less to do with the particular style of debate -- or even debate itself. 99% of high school football is also crap.)
Also relevant to codes of conduct unfortunately.
As lukasschwab points out in his top-level comment, the narrative that fast presentation results in "quantity over quality" is nearly always not true -- "arguments are still evaluated at speed", and it's more typically "more arguments of greater quality" rather than "more arguments of lesser quality (although the "greater quality" part is, as lukasschwab notes, "a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment".)
Like many things, debate is a specialist practice in its own right. When the argument itself is the focus of competition, you have to go down the rabbit hole and compete over who is the best lawyer of the debate rules.
When you become a practitioner of many specialist topics, the nuance of the rules and exploiting them is part of the mechanics of what you do.
Edit: Moving from a long-form rant about something that a freshman barely understands to philosophical minutia that lead to nuclear war takes a significant amount of learning. And that learning is worthwhile.
K-heavy policy is kind of the extreme opposite of that, increasingly meta arguments where no one ever has to concede even a basic model of reality to the other side. I didn't like it as a debater, and I had a dim view of it as a judge, especially from aff side.
(These frustrations had me drift towards group disco and student congress after 2.5 years in policy.)
I'm comfortable emphasizing the educational goals over the civic goals because I've yet to see a high school debate round weigh in on the balance of national (or even state) policy...
This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It'll happen as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended.
It's unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is hard if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (i.e. they're not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you've introduced role-playing elements, basically)