> Below are quotes from written judge preferences from the 2023 Tournament of Champions across all four formats
> 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...
But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge?
> For the last 13 years, the University of Montevallo in Alabama has held an event called "The Life Raft Debate," where several professors take the stage and each tries to convince the students that his or her discipline—chemistry, say, or communications—is the most essential field of study. But in 2007, a professor named Jon Smith decided that the debate itself needed saving. Producer Nancy Updike tells the story. (14 minutes)
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/402/save-the-day/act-two-22
This is not correct; for an argument to be valid, the conclusion must follow from the premises.
That judge is saying he will vote based on the conclusion regardless of the premises.
Debate tournaments happen after school or on weekends.
I think you are vastly over-estimating the number of adults who are willing to show up to a school for an entire evening or an entire weekend and listen to 5+ hours of high schoolers debating one another.
By and large, outside of the most elite tournaments, organizers don't have the luxury of choosing judges. It's far more common to have 7 judges for 10 rounds than to have 10 judges for 7 rounds.
However lots of problems exist that have sufficient data.
Debate, pedagogically, also forces students to take data and form coherent arguments, use logic and persuasion and even learn how to have stage presence.
A tool can be imperfect and useful.
Arguing is a form of correctness defending behavior.
I have found the most correct position, and I will now defend it. I challenge you to prove that I am not doing this.
----
I have a t-shirt from a media organization that says "I stand with the facts". I like the shirt and the saying. I think facts are very important; but people experience the world in narrative format. Debate is a way to tell a story. It's a story where you're supposed to keep more than one point of view in mind. I do think that's very useful.
However, when it comes to solving problems, I do not think it is very useful. The debater who uses half truths and shifts the subject before they can be pinned down can be very convincing to the audience, even while the judges see through the tricks.
What evidence could I provide that would change your mind?
If you can point to some kind of evidence (group study above X p value, double blind study, expert opinion, etc) then we are having a proper debate.
If one of the candidates can't list some criteria that would make them update their position, then we are not debating we are proslytizing.
Tools only work when you don't abuse them. That they can be gamed doesn't make them not effective, it just means you need to realize that they can be gamed.
> proper debate.
Unfortunately, only True Scotsmen can have Proper Debates.
> Tools only work when you don't abuse them.
I agree. The point of the parent article is that debate is being abused by kritik. My point is that debate has many weaknesses besides kritik.
> it just means you need to realize that they can be gamed.
I have to expand on this - you, me, and the rest of the audience need to realize that it can be gamed, and how, and we need to notice when it is being gamed.
See also: conflict vs mistake[2]. Left for future work: how do we make (a) advertising, (b) politics more cooperative?
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
> In France, the Cour d’assises itself was inherited from the French Revolution. Since a law of 1941, it is a mixed jury system, meaning that lay citizens sit together with professional judges
That kind of stuff makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Presumably, too, since the judge doesn't participate in the jury deliberations at all, the (un)credibility of said expert witness never saw the light of day. Did the accused's side raise that possibility during cross-examination at all?
You are not allowed to use your own expertise that is not presented in the trial to inform your decisions.
That is by law. Or at least, it was in Massachusetts when I last served on a jury. Which brought me to actual tears, btw, because the eyewitness testimony was being weighed too heavily.
There is a good reason why pretty much every court proceeding in a democratic country is structured as a debate in front of an impartial party.
There are different types of debating, which may cloud the question; debating once or twice a year on a single prepared topic may be less informative for participants. Debating dozens of times a year on an active team is an entirely different experience. I would not be surprised at all if debate team participation has significant overlap with the rhetoric taught to students in ancient times.
Debating is an object lesson for the participants in how one can find (or should at least be able to find, if you're a good debater) arguments in favour of either side of any given issue.
Debating, especially impromptu debating, teaches quick thinking. It also teaches an ability to empathize with people on any side of an argument - you know, from experience after debating, that one can make good arguments in favour of an arbitrary side of a topic. You regularly work through points of view that you may not personally hold.
It's been said that math is learned at the end of a pencil - you learn it by working through it. Debating is the same - you learn empathy and understanding with points of view other than your own by working through them yourself.
What a waste.
One of the biggest skills it teaches is argument-analysis, and you'd better believe that sticks around outside the debate round.
Whereas if debate gets corrupted you don’t necessarily learn wider skills. Whereas you would if the debate remains convincing to people who aren’t debate judges.
Model UN, a close cousin, emphasized multipolar perspectives but in a context of research, creativity and cooperation.
I think the ethos of Debate is one of the drivers of today's polarization, long before Kritiks arrived.
I think this is a legimate point of view despite the underlying hint of nihilism.
Some traditions emphasise restrictions on the kinds of tactics you're allowed to use (e.g. pure demagogy or deliberate use of convincing fallacies are frowned upon) and I can't help but think of these as like queensberry rules vs mma...
TFA gets into this in its last section about debate's impact on politics. Is it great to train a class of leaders based on competitive technique and effectiveness rather than external reality or support?
1. A lot of vagaries about the actual topics that we debated. Both in substance, and also in the relevant components of federal policy.
2. How the Federal Reserve works: its history, its basic structure and mandates, the reason for its mandates, how decisions get made, how it interacts with other components of the federal government, etc. Also weekly deep dives into quantitative Easing as it was being invented. (I graduated in 2009, so my peak debate participation years were 2007-2009.)
3. Some really useful law and policy specific research skills. How to find and read proposed legislation. How the legislature actually works. How to find and read court decisions.
3. Yes, a ton of critical theory.
4. Most importantly, basic research skills.
5. Quite a lot of natural language processing to help with 1-4, which became surprisingly relevant lately.
Policy debate has its flaws. But, at least at my high school, there was no other activity that came remotely close to providing the pedagogical opportunities provided by debate. Perhaps at elite private schools or schools in the wealthiest suburbs there are good alternatives.
One team said verification and validation techniques would prevent AI systems from failing catastrophically (must've done homework on their judge...) and then there was some back-and-forth that included one of the teams reading a snippet from some arxiv paper that contained a reference to an interesting piece of work that I didn't know about.
It was fairly amusing because I had to explain that they were perhaps missing the forest for the trees with that whole exchange, but also that I had learned something new.
To refute your points a bit :) ->
1. Debate itself is highly stressful, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My time in debate made defending my honors thesis much less stressful and I’m a very calm presenter as a result.
2. This is exactly what debate research forces you to do. You may not get to choose your side, but you’ve done your best to prep in either direction. You get very good at understanding if the evidence provided has any gaps, and if it supports the impacts claimed.
3. Debaters do read judge profiles to understand the audience and determine strategy.
4. This is a major part of prep, as naturally you need to prepare both sides and understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep.
5. This occurs often, as mentioned in the article linked above. Ks and counter plans allow debaters to reframe the topic in many ways.
On your last paragraph: I experienced the opposite. Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced.
I will say that for my part, debate had a profound impact on my life. It taught me how to research, consider unintuitive perspectives, and articulate a point.
My research in debate directly led to a fellowship, honors thesis, and mentorship - all outside of debate. I leveraged my academic success into a great career and owe a lot to the skills I picked up on my college debate team.
This reminds me of an observation that I made far too late in life, though I'm not sure how I could have discovered when it would have been most useful, in high school or thereabouts. That is that although I enjoy getting into debates where I am confident I am prepared to push for my own side in the best of faith, I find that in practice what I what I always end up driving toward is to push for a draw, even when I feel my own position is the stronger.
Even when I feel like if I have "won", it's muffled under a vaguely anticlimactic suspicion that due to limited time or poorly managed tangential sidetracks that the matter is still unsettled, that I didnt do my best to exhaust all of the reasonable avenues of discourse.
Agreeing with OP and having participated in debate and mock student legislatures, with some success, from middle school through college — your points in rebuttal illustrate OP's complaints. Your rebuttal plays the prompt before you attempt to understand the point or the person making them.
You aren't effectively rebutting anything with your points; regardless of your intent, you've created a prompt out of OP and then presented a case to win it. The pressure of debate doesn't inherently improve a point; not every disagreement can or should be decided with evidence; reading judge profiles doesn't help exercise empathy and sympathy; "understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep" misses the point of critically self-examining what that statement means in the first place; a solution lying outside of a debate is not an invitation to reframe the topic but to step out of the debate to try to come to a shared understanding on a different level.
Your approach would be, and has been, a natural approach I've turned to when it was the most prominent (or only) way I'd learned to approach a disagreement. If not OP's point, then at least for me it's proven to be a fundamentally flawed one when applied to most venues outside of the structure of competitive debate. It plays well in a lot of modern venues, especially online, but it doesn't accomplish much.
The trouble with this is that most times, a nuanced or carefully considered argument will be quickly overridden by several generic responses, and when you don’t respond to all of their responses they will argue that you dropped the point and therefore they automatically win.
Debates mostly devolve into a game of tug of war, with very little thought or quality put into the arguments. K’s are in a similar category, and are mostly successful in an attempt to catch the opponent off guard by arbitrarily changing the topic.
Most of the skills I learned in debate have been thoroughly useless when it comes to determining the truth or making decisions. It has made it easy for me to derail discussions, though.
(and if you tried speaking at speed like a policy debater, you would lose points)
Participating in debate competition does all the things you say. I would say that the biggest benefit is learning how to form a narrative.
As an observer, debate has not so many benefits in the real world. On the competitive debate stage, you have to follow some rules, in the real world, you win by exploiting people.
I do not believe observing debate is effective for finding and deciding facts.
I do not believe observing debate is effective for changing minds. The imposition of 'sides' reinforces many of the biases and fallacies that you're taught not to use; people regularly fight dirty in real life.
Two parties are given sets of random "belief statements" (e.g. "All zugs are wogs", "Some wogs aren't clogs"), and then both parties exchange statements over a limited amount of time, and they either both win, or both lose, depending on whether they can both find the logically inconsistent belief statement.
Because this is how we should mentally understand real-world debate.