Re:How critical theory is radicalizing high school debate
by nrfulton on Sunday July 30, 2023 @12:22AM
(#36927780)
> It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry.
It is mind numbing. IMO it's also a fair bit of sophistry, but it's at least sophistry that involves some amount of concept compression. Ie, you can't quite unpack those concepts into a single paragraph of similar size.
> Does this actually have a meaning?
Yes.
Here's a less insane but slightly lossy way of saying this:
If you talk about North Korea only as a threat to be contained, then you can fall into the trap of forgetting that it's a country of humans. That could be a bad trap to fall into for a number of reasons. One reason: if you forget about your adversary's humanity then it becomes easier to commit atrocities. It's easier to "contain the communist threat" than to "fire bomb a village". Instead of rushing ahead with policy decisions that manage North Korea as an abstract security threat, we should first try to understand the various perspectives of people within North Korea.
You can agree or disagree with that opinion, of course, but it's at least intelligible. I hope.
There are some details I left out -- the second sentence in particular has a fair bit of additional stuff packed into it. And the last sentence of my version is a bit over-simplified. But that's the basic idea. And, more to the point, that's the level of detail at which this idea that would actually matter in 99+% of debates. So that's probably how it should be stated.
You can't learn without making mistakes, I guess, and some high school kids really like sounding smart.
On that note: this type of writing also happens in Mathematics and especially in documentation of complicated software. A sequence of long sentences relating fairly abstract concepts. If you already know what those concepts are and how they typically interact, then you can piece together the meaning of the sentences quite quickly. But for a reader without that context, the paragraph is utterly inscrutable, appears to be nonsense, and takes hours to unpack.
The key observation here is about technical writing in general. Describe the basic idea without too much jargon. It's okay to remove some details and over-simplify! Then, if the reader needs more details, give the more precise statement. The expert can safely skim to the precise statement. Everyone wins.
It is mind numbing. IMO it's also a fair bit of sophistry, but it's at least sophistry that involves some amount of concept compression. Ie, you can't quite unpack those concepts into a single paragraph of similar size.
> Does this actually have a meaning?
Yes.
Here's a less insane but slightly lossy way of saying this:
If you talk about North Korea only as a threat to be contained, then you can fall into the trap of forgetting that it's a country of humans. That could be a bad trap to fall into for a number of reasons. One reason: if you forget about your adversary's humanity then it becomes easier to commit atrocities. It's easier to "contain the communist threat" than to "fire bomb a village". Instead of rushing ahead with policy decisions that manage North Korea as an abstract security threat, we should first try to understand the various perspectives of people within North Korea.
You can agree or disagree with that opinion, of course, but it's at least intelligible. I hope.
There are some details I left out -- the second sentence in particular has a fair bit of additional stuff packed into it. And the last sentence of my version is a bit over-simplified. But that's the basic idea. And, more to the point, that's the level of detail at which this idea that would actually matter in 99+% of debates. So that's probably how it should be stated.
You can't learn without making mistakes, I guess, and some high school kids really like sounding smart.
On that note: this type of writing also happens in Mathematics and especially in documentation of complicated software. A sequence of long sentences relating fairly abstract concepts. If you already know what those concepts are and how they typically interact, then you can piece together the meaning of the sentences quite quickly. But for a reader without that context, the paragraph is utterly inscrutable, appears to be nonsense, and takes hours to unpack.
The key observation here is about technical writing in general. Describe the basic idea without too much jargon. It's okay to remove some details and over-simplify! Then, if the reader needs more details, give the more precise statement. The expert can safely skim to the precise statement. Everyone wins.