This feels like a fire fighter showing up to your burning house and saying “well I can’t save your house until we debate the merits of private property ownership”. There is a time and place for policy debates, turning every social interaction into an opportunity to thrown in a red herring is immature and ultimately ineffective. None of these debates are going to move the needle and the aggregate effect won’t move the needle either.

To be fair, we're talking about a very specific, competition, high school debate format. Not the more pure phiilisophical kinds of debate. The former is more like a sport and the "athletes" are simply minmaxing the game. The goal and how you gain point do not necessarily reflect real world values.

We can certainly discuss if they should and how we can encourage/discourage certain tactics, and it feels the article focuses on that. Not so much the comments here.

This. American high school debate format makes no sense. This is just the latest contradiction to be heightened.

Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.

I disagree, I think the skills taught are portable to lay persuasion, and this can be seen by the fact that debaters from the 'weirder' events will often enter a slow, lay debate format, win the tournament, and then return back to the 'weird' format.

The "lay" debate formats have the same technical rules as policy debate, theyre just shorter and dont lend themselves to spreading. Policy debaters clean up because theyre playing debate in hard mode, but the rules are still similar: present contentions, rebuttals, and anything that isn't addressed carries across the flow and is tallied up in the end as a mathematical formulation of who addressed which points when, and were those rebuttals convincing? Theres no room for the soft skills required to legitimately influence people in real life, the most important of which is listening.

Just because you suck at it, doesn't means its not a good/useful event.

Did you watch the video

Yes I followed it just fine. You need to skill up.

Spreading is not a useful skill outside of debate. "Winning" by out talking your opponent is only useful in the context of competitive debate. If you do that when arguing with someone in real life, you come off as an asshole or autistic. Its an utterly useless skill after the age of 22