To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc...
The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks).
The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters.
> I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)
This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."
Unfortunately "critical theory" (as stereotyped in public discourse, but also as practiced in American academia) is generally like Marxian theory completely stripped of the materialist method and an actual attention to economic fundamentals. It's name-checked radicalism. Any "anti-capitalism" is purely skin-deep, a kind of moral grandstanding but on the whole without any program they could give as an alternative, or even the ability to fully explicate what capitalism really is.
And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left."
Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.
If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself.
Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.
Neither critical theory nor capitalism are revolutionary. They each have large bastions where you will be at best low status, at worst cast out, for criticizing them.
Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.
> There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice
Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.
Critical theorists and academics in general are smart enough to be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. For example, they are at the same time against capitalism and against starving to death in a gulag.
True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it.
> Socially, it is dominant
No, its not.
> (particularly among that demographic).
There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.)
It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.
> There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.
I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.
There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable
It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.
The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.
Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine"
Different spaces have different cultural values and taboos.
It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools.
It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US.
Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket.
Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.
Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.
My impression is that the author thinks that K's are bad in principle. And that the level of popularity is a problem. Certainly that's how I think about it. What you call "quite a lot of fun to run with," I call, "intellectually dishonest groupthink." Ideas should be debated on the merits of the ideas, and information on the merits of the facts. Winning on the popularity of the ideology you espouse is an easy way to ignore holes in your ideology.
Lawyers have a saying. "If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the facts are on the side, pound on the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." K's are pounding on the table. And pounding on the table is sufficient reason to declare that you have lost the debate.
> wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse
People are taking it more seriously. In the past, one had the capacity to debate opposition. That appears less true today. Debate experience doesn’t seem to correlate, in my experience, with ability in negotiation or public speaking anymore.
High school debate is not a good event for this kind of argumentation. It's a very technical event with stupid rules and ridiculous "speeches" which consiset of someone screaming facts at you at 300wpm in between gasps of air
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.
>Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.
Agreed. Another factor here is how the audience for debate is changing. The author of the article themselves is mass reviewing debate arguments on YouTube. Not so long ago this would have been far more difficult (and thus be seen by far less people). Making these debate arguments widely available to the wider Internet implicates that a simple intellectual exercise where you argue a policy position you see as problematic could help to make that policy position more likely to pass in the future if you are very effective in your arguments...
Your premise is faulty. The aim of debate isn't to foster people who form their own opinions any more than baseball is designed to foster people who can reliably strike fast-moving objects out of the air to a stick. It's a sport, it has rules, and it rewards tactics and strategies devised within those rules. Read Patrick McKenzie about this; he's written a bunch about how competitive debate was unintelligible to outsiders as far back as the 1990s.
with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks)
One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.
>It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.
I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I have a soft spot for this. My grandfather, before he fled Belarus, was trained at a yeshiva and on his way to becoming a rabbi. His explanation of the training was ... Jedi-like, to my young mind. Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. Any shortcuts to rhetorical passion might be allowed, but learning to parry them and see through them was what was truly valued... well and beyond the ability to convince others (and certainly beyond obedience or conformity). Not surprising that my family in the US became lawyers.
This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. That being said, failing to take the unlikeable part of a debate is read as cheating - if not to the judges, who may share your bias, then to the audience who you've alienated and failed to convince. And so it can and should fail in the long run, as an impurity in the art.
Socrates was already complaining about the sophists and their ability to argue for and against everything (destroying every truth on the way).
Don't get me wrong, I love arguing and rhetorics, but there are people who abandoned all sense of truth and rationality in debate. Rhetorics are a weapon, and like every weapon it should be wielded by people who know that with great power comes great responsibility.
Sure, one can argue about objective truth and whether it actually exists, but many who wield rhetorics don't give a damn about any truth, be it objective or subjective — they care about winning. And they don't care about the price everybody has to pay for that win.
Despite that I still think putting yourself in a different position to defend is a good lesson, but the goal of rhetorical training shouldn't be to form ruthless mercenaries, but thinkers who can wield the word and still admit they are wrong in an actual, real world debate, when they are shown to be so.
If you are one of those people (like me) who likes debate for debates sake, you have to be especially careful. Like people who like to use guns we have to be especially aware when we use it and for what reason.
Most people who use their rhetoric have never been given the moral compass to wield it.
I don't think the rhetorical appeals to anger, hate and fear that are the hallmarks of genocidal leaders are learned in a debate class. They're low-level schoolyard bully stuff. They're exactly the sort of thing that's tempered by the conscience you develop if you are exposed to new ideas or have to argue something that's strange to you. Hateful rhetoric drives, and is driven by emotion. So is loving rhetoric. If you find you have to defend some group of people you previously had a loathing for, there's a fair chance you'll start to see things from their point of view, if only because it's human nature to become emotionally invested in what you're arguing about. (Check out any stupid bar fight where both sides know they're wrong, but are completely emotionally invested).
Yes, speech is a tool and a weapon. We should call out arguments made in bad faith; but we need more people who can identify them to do so.
Sadly, it seems the kind of caution you advocate is conspicuously absent from cable "news" punditry. Even worse, there are millions of viewers who feel that they are being informed by this kind of caustic debate.
> Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind.
I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.
No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that.
Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side.
Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.
The point is to learn to see through manipulation, among other things.
Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate is to detect and outline that difference, and show it to your audience, if any.
The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse.
Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.
Not necessarily. We were doing this in sociology seminars at college and it was not about manipulating the audience at all. It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. It is basically a practice of the skill of critical thinking. When you try to argue your opponent's side and to your surprise, you come up with arguments that seem good to yourself, that is getting closer to the truth, isn't it?
It is common in high school debate tournaments to argue the same resolution repeatedly at every tournament through the school year. Each match you are assigned one side or the other and you should be ready to go 100% on that side. You aren't trying to persuade anybody. You are trying to make as many arguments as you can, be ready and refute any arguments from the other side, identify logical fallacies, etc.
The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through.
These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.
The point of the argue both sides exercise is that it does help get to the ultimate truth.
When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true!
That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.
Yes - and it's rich to me that veterans of sophistry as a game are complaining about new tactics. Granted, I don't think highly of most of these kritik-hijackings either, but they only exposed the shallowness (or "nihilism" in the author's words) at the core.
> This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening.
> Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate.
> This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.
Putting aside the whole question of debate this is a such a fascinating misunderstanding of what Yeshiva is. It’s so close and yet somehow entirely wrong. I don’t know if I could explain what happens in Yeshiva in a way that would any sense to this crowd, but I can affirm it is mind bending, and I have never felt more exhausted than when I was in Yeshiva. No amount of work, physical or mental since then has come close.
Reminds me of a friend who was invited to appear on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show as a subject matter expert, and told how O'Reilly asked him which side of the "debate" he wanted to take. Kinda funny given how many O'Reilly fans thought he believed in what he was saying!
> I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith.
I'm legitimately not sure whether by "this is an attempt" you're referring to critiques in debate or the article.
In practice, for better or worse very few of the people who use critiques in debate are true believers. Even if they're leftists taking a generally leftist approach, a Marxist is likely to take up an Afro-pessimist position or vice versa for tactical reasons. Exactly the sort of "have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor" you commend is involved - only rather than just two sides, the sides include "X would have good consequences", "X would have bad consequences", "you're doing good/harm by talking about X", "X is on/off topic for this year's resolution", etc.
As for the article - it may be attempting to defend the virtue of being able to effectively defend opposing points of view, but it's doing so in a confused way at best. Just to give a couple examples:
> Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles
It is indeed often more effective in debate to respond to a critique by denying or reversing the (often tenuous) link to what you actually proposed than to try to refute an ideology wholesale, but that burden is entirely consistent with the mentality that learning to "defend the opposite side" is valuable. And even so the premise here is wrong - at least when I was doing this <redacted> years ago, it was by no means taboo to simply counter-critique at the ideological level instead.
> This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory
It's true that competing at the national level in high school or college debate demands quite a lot in terms of research and preparation. It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.
> High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds
This is silly hyperbole that suggests (a) Slow Boring could use better editing and (b) the author would have benefited from actually trying to engage with substance of some critiques, such that they might be able to distinguish Karl Marx or the afropessimists from Nick Land or the e/accs...
>> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.
Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.
High school debate has always been broken. It has only very rarely been about the contest of ideas, and always been about how to win. For example there is a concept called 'spreading' in policy debate. This is where you speak as fast as humanly possible to lay out as many points as possible and if the opposing team fails to address or mention any of them you claim victory. For some reason this strategy, which makes the debaters all but unintelligible is allowed and leads to victory.
In Lincoln Douglas debate it was common to construct what is called a 'collapsing tautology'. Your argument is constructed to look like a series of logical steps with which there can be argument, but in fact all it is is a tautology that ultimately can't be refuted. It's a trap and if the opponent engages at all they lose.
More generally HS debate is politics and persuasion. Know the judges, build charisma, learn what works regardless of the content.
The introduction of a new noxious debating strategy might be noteworthy, but it is no more ruining debate than all the others, and the students don't actually care about the strategy or its tenants any more than they care about the validity of Rawlsian justice.
What you describe as "spreading" sounds a lot like the infamous "Gish Gallop", a hugely effective debate technique named after young-earth creationist Duane Gish, who would spew out dozens of weakly supported arguments, secure in the knowledge that each argument would require at least twice the amount of time to refute [1].
The most interesting part of this article to me was the end, where the author argues about how important High School Debate is and how Kritiks are the ruin of this important tradition. I was a HS debator in the early 90s, before K's were popular, and from my experience debate was already a fun but ultimately harmful activity. The whole idea was to spew a constant stream of arguments that didn't have any merit as quickly as possible, hoping the opposing team would forget to respond to just one out of 100, and then you win.
HS Debate already trained a generation of win-at-all-costs, who cares if you are right folks like Karl Rove. I don't see how the current generation of kritik based debate could possibly be any worse
I'm reminded of Patrick McKenzie's experience in college debate, where he took to every compatible proposition the argument "abolish the koseki" (the Japanese family register), a problematic Japanese cultural tradition that he could count on his opposition being unfamiliar with, until they ultimately had to change the debate rules to prevent that strategy:
This story doesn't really hold water for me; you do this once, we all laugh about it, but by the next week every team has a neg case file for this and a dozen variations of it.
It's funny, I have mixed feelings about my policy debate experience but the sort of tendentious criticism in the article makes me want to defend it.
(I want to call the article ill-informed but I suspect the author is actually at least generally aware of all the dynamics you describe and just relying on their audience not to be.)
Despite everything odious about Malcolm Gladwell, he recently did something nice: got himself his ass handed to him in a debate and then went to find out why he lost so badly. Made for a pretty fun podcast, if you are the sort of person who takes joy in Malcolm Gladwell getting knocked down a notch or two. :)
Then there's people acting like 'politics' was never a meta-argument to begin with, it's just as much apart of the breakage. I remember having an assistant coach who'd debated in the 80s being befuddled that we were arguing what Republicans thought of the plan.
Thats always been the problem with competetive debate - you're supposed to argue a position that often has significant culutural weight, meaning its unlikely anything you say will change anyones mind. I was once asked to debate a pro slavery stance in debate class despite obviously everyone being against it. I felt our team did pretty well and the other team did barely anything and yet everyone voted for the other side. Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.
You see that even on sites like this one (or reddit), where the etiquette page beseeches everyone to vote for comments that are useful, insightful, or well-argued, rather than just what they agree with (especially already agree with).
But it never really seems to play out that way; it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour.
This website isn't even that bad compared to literally almost anywhere on the internet. From what I've observed with my comments, my "popular opinion" and "unpopular opinion" comments aren't that far apart in terms of comment karma.
One-liner trivialisms and cheap baiting usually gets flagged here, not upvoted regardless of the topic, which is a very positive thing. I am very grateful to the site's admins and users for this lovely place, it's truly a unique thing.
If something is an interesting debate then most people don't have the expertise to engage meaningfully with the facts and arguments being put forward. Experts can bullshit you all day and no amount of critical thinking is going to pull you out of a deep well of ignorance.
Genuinely, in non academic competition often the best way to “beat” an opponent is to change the rules
Examples of this that are well understood are regulatory capture, where group A convinces a more powerful group B to enforce a new constraint on all competitors to group A. Generally the constraint is a marginal impediment to group A and so “levels the playing field” *wink*
So the idea that there’s some pure form of rhetoric that is actually worth practicing, given that human conflict (from the minor to the major) is rarely to never solved via this mechanism (even in formal legal proceedings) - it’s not clear what is actually being learned here
Other than later in life realizing how formal debate has almost no application and it’s all about how you refine and evaluate your own arguments.
The one time I've been to a debate they asked everyone's opinion on the topic before and after the debate, and then the winners were the ones who persuaded the most people to change their minds. So you can still win even if you're arguing for an unpopular opinion.
It was such an elegant metric I assumed all competitive debates used it. From this article it sounds like they just have judges that vote for the winner though? Crazy.
So called competitive debate is really just a joke about who talk faster. There is no positive feedback loops where either side should take a moment to think and gives feedback. Sometimes agree to disagree is the best option. You learn nothing from the competitive debate.
It's basically twitter debate before twitter exists where ppl talking over each other
It’s somewhat beneficial to lawyers etc simply because it exposes people to a different way of thinking. It’s roughly equivalent to science fairs, popsicle bridges, or math competitions for STEM students.
Back when they had corporal punishment (i.e. "spanking") in US schools I had to debate against it in high-school.
One teacher, who used the punishment frequently, was the judge and simply awarded the debate to the pro paddling side and all my (sourced and referenced) arguments were ignored. I always knew it was BS. Then they banned the practice. And I quit the debate team in anger.
So, I guess I really kind of won the debate, it just took a couple more decades.
> Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.
Winning seems like a low-value goal here. Classroom simulations exist so students can be exposed to the reality of consequences and outcomes.
I feel better goals here would be how to immerse yourself in an unfamiliar/unwanted position and how to understand the dynamics of a scenario with competing, entrenched positions.
What this article is leaving out is that you do need an extremely deep understanding of the opposing arguments to be a good K-debater. There are tons of tools to defeat Kritiks, and if all you can do as the K debater is say, "but thing bad", you won't actually win.
On the contrary, there are a lot of non-K policy debaters who want to be able to parrot the same generics at each other each round, and they don't know how to engage with Ks precisely because they don't understand their own position well enough to argue why the basic assumptions it relies upon are the way they are (or aren't what the K is proposing they are).
Opponents of abortion would argue that the same "this isn't really a human" tactics that the Nazis used are still alive; if everyone is comfortable, it sounds like there's a lot of "at least we're not the baddies" going on.
I mean… they might try to, but that line of reasoning doesn’t hold up to even cursory examination.
The position itself—about othering certain groups—would hold up by itself of course. Unfortunately for those you mention it’s most often employed by those on their side of the debate about groups they dislike (Muslims, gay, trans, etc).
Debate doesn't do any of the thing that I consider critical to learning about the world.
1. Maintain a calm attitude
2. Evaluate facts BEFORE taking sides, and evaluate if you have enough facts to make a conclusion
3. Consider the deeply held beliefs of the primary people involved
4. Honestly evaluate "How could I gather evidence that I'm wrong about this"
5. Consider that the solution may lie outside the area of discussion
The human brain REALLY loves to have a satisfying answer. Debate provides that for some people, but satisfying is not the same as true or useful.
I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this opinion, as it doesn’t match my experience as a competitive debater in college. Have you ever been on a debate team or is this from observing? I’m genuinely curious!
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.
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.
> Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced
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.
I was in high school debate and I would agree with the poster above you. In general, debates are judged based on the stated arguments in the debates, which makes sense. However, what this often leads to is debaters simply preparing rote responses to any argument the opponent may present, and then reading off as many as possible (some even speak extremely quickly, called “speed”).
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.
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.
Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time. I would posit that it's actually a very useful tool in that context. Everyone who argues on the internet is trying to convince the other side, but that's actually the only person you aren't trying to persuade in a properly-structured debate.
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.
From what I've seen of high school debates, it provides very little for the observers and encourages the students to cram as many nice sounding words in a limited amount of time as possible. Maximum slogans, minimal substance.
> Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time.
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.
Edit: all of this is from my experience in parliamentary debating eons ago. Things may have changed, if - as the article suggests - people can win without arguing the actual question they were given.
My first reaction reading this article was that this is indeed disturbing, but so was the format of debate I was exposed to in (turn of millennia) high school. The format basically embodies an idea that every opinion is equally valid, and what matters is how strong their advocates are.
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.
IMHO the traditions of debate are more analogous to boxing than say, philosophy - a competitive endeavour, emphasising technique and effectiveness rather than a truth-seeking activity per se.
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...
That's not a problem with debate. It's a problem with the judges. They are apparently quite willing to be open about the fact that they won't actually do their jobs:
> 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...
Debate has always been corrupted by the practice of last winners driving the contest to ridiculousness, such as the focus on talking quickly over quality content.
But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge?
This article is about competitive debate, which is no more for learning about the world than bicycle racing is for transportation. Aside from maintaining a calm attitude, those points are irrelevant to the goal of winning the competition.
Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior. It's not a universal solution - debating about string theory being true or not is sort of goofy, it's a "get more data" problem.
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.
I think parent's point is that some people seem to think being in a debate club means they're automatically "good" at arguing even when they aren't. Of course, we would all be served by having greater development of critical thinking in schools. Just that people might be cocky.
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.
With an arbiter that’ll hopefully call bullshit on empty rhetorical tricks and even do their own research occasionally, but otherwise yes.
It’s the difference between a cooperative system and an adversarial one: science would grind to a halt if cherry-picking evidence were accepted as the norm; but you could never trust the other side of a lawsuit enough to assume they’re not cherry-picking, so you have to settle for not lying, which is hopefully easier to check (thus rules on hearsay etc).
Now that I’m thinking about it, another point of view might be that scientists, in addition to having less to lose from an unfavourable result, are engaged in a recurring game and thus generally cooperate[1], whereas the parties of a legal case are in a one-shot situation and thus have little choice but to defect.
See also: conflict vs mistake[2]. Left for future work: how do we make (a) advertising, (b) politics more cooperative?
Having been in a jury this debate format is a big problem. If one of the sides is not good at presenting their case, there is a problem. In one of my cases the prosecution had an expert witness that stated some totally wrong facts about visibility during sunset. Due to photography I know a lot about lighting conditions so if I hadn’t spoken up during deliberation the prosecution would have gotten away with a falsehood.
In retrospect, I found the actual debate part of debate to be mostly a chore. But the research and learning parts were a lot of fun. Some things I learned about in high school because of debate:
1. A lot of stuff about the actual topics that we debated. Both in substance, and also in the relevant components of federal policy tools. Eg, I still know a lot of useless facts about US agricultural policy, US foreign aid policy c. mid-2000s, statistics on realistic offshore wind production capacity c mid-2000s, etc. Contra the narrative here: the actual policy topic stuff doesn't tend to age very well...
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. Consequently, also quite a bit about the BOJ (I graduated in 2009, so my peak debate participation years were 2007-2009.)
It's very important to note here: fiscal policy was NOT the debate topic that year! The topic was alternative energy. But we could link into fiscal policy via alternative energy by arguing that green energy investments were in essence stimulative fiscal policy and would trigger inflation when combined with QE and interest rate policy. And then we could benefit from having the most up-to-date evidence about what Bernanke would do (see #6). Again, in 2008-2009. As high schoolers. Without much or any adult direction.
What other extra-curriculars let kids play these types of games?
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 opinions. I know this stuff sounds trivial, but I still regularly have conversations with 30-70 year olds who have never actually read a bill or SCOTUS opinions, so it's apparently not something that people learn how to do in high school, or college, or graduate school.
4. Yes, also quite a lot of critical theory. (It's part of the game and I don't get why people get so fussy about it. If the argument is bad, win. If you get an unfair judge and lose anyways, oh well. It happens and winning actually isn't the point anyways.)
5. But most importantly, lots and lots of research skills.
6. 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 available in debate. Perhaps at elite private schools or schools in the wealthiest suburbs there are good alternatives.
IME, that's still true now. This year's topic includes AI. I judged some debates this year and learned some stuff about AI by judging rounds. I'm not an expert or anything, but my PhD was at least AI-adjacent and I've been in AI labs for a good half decade now, so it was kind of surprising to learn new stuff from high school debate kids.
Anyways. I'm more convinced than ever that the kids are okay. Let them play their word games.
Right, how highschool debate should be structured is like this:
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.
Why do the debate organisers tolerate this? If the debate is X versus Y, why allow someone to say we should really be discussing Z? Imagine this in any other competitive arena like sport where during a match some team starts playing another sport entirely. There's nothing wrong with debating critical theory but not if that's not what's being debated. It should be an automatic fail, just as it would be if you're supposed to debating in a certain language and you refuse to do so. This just seems like deliberate sabotage/propaganda masquerading as sincere communication. As much fault lies with the organisers as with those who wish to deliberately pervert the debate.
The article explains it. Students like these formats bc they fit with their interests and politics, students graduate, the ones that were most active in debate become judges and reinforce that these topics will be rewarded
AMC series math contests have a bit of the same problem -- pushing the material format more and more toward memorizing extremely insider arcana over a meaningful survey of the field of study.
There is a fundamental weakness in the fascist-adjacent proscription of orthodoxy while forbidding anything that may challenge or question it. That is not liberalism, it is an echo chamber lacking contact and ability to deal with the whole world.
I also disapprove of the tendency to muzzle people with prior restraint because they raise controversial points because somehow "harmony" is more important than insightful and authentic discourse on topics of greater import because someone "might be offended" or "will encourage negative interactions". If only certain topics can be discussed while others cannot, that is a lack of freedom.
This absolutely happens. Running a K (kritik) is a risk because if the judge decides that you’re full of shit, they can basically just ignore your case. Your opponent can make an argument to throw the kritik out, and then you’re dead in the water
As a debate student that goes to dozens of tournaments a year, arguing about the same policy topic over and over can get very dry. When I was in high school debate, I found these diverse literatures exciting and stimulating, which made my passion for debate much stronger.
It seems like there should be a place for both: one where diverse literature and meta-debate is both accepted and maybe even the point (e.g. make the premise actual critical to the Ks), and another where you are expected to argue for or against a position you don’t agree with. I think there’s tremendous value in having to steelman positions you think are fundamentally bad/incorrect, but I think you’re also right that there’s potential growth value in looking into deeper and different theory systems entirely.
But I think it’s generally a bad thing all around for the Ks to infiltrate literally all debate and crowd out anything else (in the same way the speed-talking phenomenon was [is?] a fundamentally bad thing for debate).
> As a debate student that goes to dozens of tournaments a year, arguing about the same policy topic over and over can get very dry.
That brings up a good point. We probably need to differentiate between a student debate as part of a class vs extracurricular debating.
Students participating in a classroom debate only get so many minutes of exposure; each is valuable. Tighter boundaries would seem to be called for there.
The purpose of a K is not to argue that you should be arguing about Z, it's to say, "X is based on this fundamental assumption, and that assumption is flawed in this way..."
A Neg team running a K has to link directly to the Aff's plan or argument, or they'll just 'no-link' it and move on.
On the K-Aff side, they need to convince the judge(s) that some fundamental assumption of the Topic itself is flawed, which you still have to directly engage with the Topic in order to do.
There is no such thing as a K debate which just says "I'm arguing about some unrelated thing instead".
Many tournaments (especially on the West Coast) and their organizers enjoy and encourage kritical debate. (That's what they did in high school -- Kritical debate was born in Policy Debate, and spread to other formats, so many coaches have that previous experience) Many on the East Coast ban it entirely, or heavily discourage it. At some level, there are almost two different leagues. The "tech" debaters even have their own championship, of sorts (NPDI).
My high school Policy league (2010+) did not allow kritiks essentially at all. It was an extremely rare occurrence to run a negative plan (I'm not sure I ever saw it myself). An aff kritik would absolutely not have been tolerated as we would ding them significantly on Topicality (sticking to the required resolution), which is voted on halfway through the round (so if aff loses, the round is over). I was one of the most resolution bending debators, with most of my aff plans going outside the bounds of what everyone else thought of for that topic.
I think my league was very abnormal however as we had a lot of layman, parent judges that we had to teach rules to (and sometimes the teams had conflicting interpretations), and we didn't allow more abusive techniques such as speed and spread (a common technique in Policy or Parli to present arguments as quickly as possible to prevent the opposite team from being able to address all of them, resulting in a de facto win). We would never have allowed someone to judge with a bio of "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for ... fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism", and it's insane to me that this was allowed at a top end tournament. There were certainly judges that brought their own priors (and we tried to keep track of them to help the rest of our club out), but they generally didn't announce it in such a damaging way.
I agree. The GP post describes the HS policy league I participated in fairly well, except that we didn't have parent judges. We were a small, county league in a league that had all of 4 or 5 schools participating, so we were able to get by using coaches as judges.
And, lest you ask the question, no, the coaches were not overtly biased toward their own teams. My partner and I definitely beat a few teams in front of their own coach as the judge, and we definitely lost a few rounds with our own coach judging. There were no explicit position statements by any judges, either. They only "position" was that the affirmative must advocate for the plan in order to win topicality.
Did you find speed or spread common in Parli? In any circuit I was in you would get dinged on that fast, and it was more of a dead giveaway that a policy debater was trying Parliamentary.
I never got to do Parli unfortunately, so I can't speak to that. I have only the stories of my coaching team, which was the original coach followed by their star student of a college Parli team that performed very well on the national track (something like second or third for several years). I've seen videos of (maybe national track) high school Policy debaters speed and spreading through a massive ream of evidence, but obviously that doesn't indicate the frequency.
No, all of that is still true at most tournaments.
The author's piece is a description of the national circuit, and perhaps of a very few regional circuits that heavily overlap with the national circuit. All of her statistics are for an invite-only championship tournament (TOC) for that national circuit. Note: it's not the national championship, which does exist. It's a championship for competitors in a national circuit.
Most kids attend tournaments close to home. Not only do they not attend the TOC -- they don't even attend a national circuit tournament that would allow them to qualify for the TOC!
That's not entirely true. A lot of Parli is concentrated on the coasts, and most of the West Coast encourages tech debate, so most West Coast debaters end up attending "tech" tournaments. Also, most "close to home" tournaments still give NPDL points.
Also, TOC is the national championship. (NPDL Nationals Exist, but they are a relatively recent addition, and aren't highly respected in the community)
If, by political views, you mean boredom with a well worn artificial meta argument that makes a farce of whatever rules do exist in debate. It was funny/interesting once.
Readit News
The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks).
The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters.
> I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)
This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."
And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left."
Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.
If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself.
Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.
Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.
It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.
Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.
True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it.
> Socially, it is dominant
No, its not.
> (particularly among that demographic).
There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.)
It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.
I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.
It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.
Sure. But not in the debate itself.
That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.
how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine"
that is the opposite of "revolutionary"
Also - the world isn’t capitalist for ideological reasons. You have to work hard against nature to destroy the notion of personal property.
It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools.
It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US.
Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket.
Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.
Etc.
I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.
My impression is that the author thinks that K's are bad in principle. And that the level of popularity is a problem. Certainly that's how I think about it. What you call "quite a lot of fun to run with," I call, "intellectually dishonest groupthink." Ideas should be debated on the merits of the ideas, and information on the merits of the facts. Winning on the popularity of the ideology you espouse is an easy way to ignore holes in your ideology.
Lawyers have a saying. "If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the facts are on the side, pound on the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." K's are pounding on the table. And pounding on the table is sufficient reason to declare that you have lost the debate.
People are taking it more seriously. In the past, one had the capacity to debate opposition. That appears less true today. Debate experience doesn’t seem to correlate, in my experience, with ability in negotiation or public speaking anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0
Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.
There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.
Ah, the status quo, truly the highest form of revolution.
Deleted Comment
One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.
Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.
Dead Comment
This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. That being said, failing to take the unlikeable part of a debate is read as cheating - if not to the judges, who may share your bias, then to the audience who you've alienated and failed to convince. And so it can and should fail in the long run, as an impurity in the art.
Don't get me wrong, I love arguing and rhetorics, but there are people who abandoned all sense of truth and rationality in debate. Rhetorics are a weapon, and like every weapon it should be wielded by people who know that with great power comes great responsibility. Sure, one can argue about objective truth and whether it actually exists, but many who wield rhetorics don't give a damn about any truth, be it objective or subjective — they care about winning. And they don't care about the price everybody has to pay for that win.
Despite that I still think putting yourself in a different position to defend is a good lesson, but the goal of rhetorical training shouldn't be to form ruthless mercenaries, but thinkers who can wield the word and still admit they are wrong in an actual, real world debate, when they are shown to be so.
If you are one of those people (like me) who likes debate for debates sake, you have to be especially careful. Like people who like to use guns we have to be especially aware when we use it and for what reason.
Most people who use their rhetoric have never been given the moral compass to wield it.
I don't think the rhetorical appeals to anger, hate and fear that are the hallmarks of genocidal leaders are learned in a debate class. They're low-level schoolyard bully stuff. They're exactly the sort of thing that's tempered by the conscience you develop if you are exposed to new ideas or have to argue something that's strange to you. Hateful rhetoric drives, and is driven by emotion. So is loving rhetoric. If you find you have to defend some group of people you previously had a loathing for, there's a fair chance you'll start to see things from their point of view, if only because it's human nature to become emotionally invested in what you're arguing about. (Check out any stupid bar fight where both sides know they're wrong, but are completely emotionally invested).
Yes, speech is a tool and a weapon. We should call out arguments made in bad faith; but we need more people who can identify them to do so.
I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.
Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side.
Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.
Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate is to detect and outline that difference, and show it to your audience, if any.
The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse.
Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.
The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through.
These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.
When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true!
That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.
This is a current topic of debate in debate...
https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205
> Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate.
> This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.
I'm legitimately not sure whether by "this is an attempt" you're referring to critiques in debate or the article.
In practice, for better or worse very few of the people who use critiques in debate are true believers. Even if they're leftists taking a generally leftist approach, a Marxist is likely to take up an Afro-pessimist position or vice versa for tactical reasons. Exactly the sort of "have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor" you commend is involved - only rather than just two sides, the sides include "X would have good consequences", "X would have bad consequences", "you're doing good/harm by talking about X", "X is on/off topic for this year's resolution", etc.
As for the article - it may be attempting to defend the virtue of being able to effectively defend opposing points of view, but it's doing so in a confused way at best. Just to give a couple examples:
> Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles
It is indeed often more effective in debate to respond to a critique by denying or reversing the (often tenuous) link to what you actually proposed than to try to refute an ideology wholesale, but that burden is entirely consistent with the mentality that learning to "defend the opposite side" is valuable. And even so the premise here is wrong - at least when I was doing this <redacted> years ago, it was by no means taboo to simply counter-critique at the ideological level instead.
> This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory
It's true that competing at the national level in high school or college debate demands quite a lot in terms of research and preparation. It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.
> High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds
This is silly hyperbole that suggests (a) Slow Boring could use better editing and (b) the author would have benefited from actually trying to engage with substance of some critiques, such that they might be able to distinguish Karl Marx or the afropessimists from Nick Land or the e/accs...
I was referring to the article.
>> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.
Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.
Dead Comment
In Lincoln Douglas debate it was common to construct what is called a 'collapsing tautology'. Your argument is constructed to look like a series of logical steps with which there can be argument, but in fact all it is is a tautology that ultimately can't be refuted. It's a trap and if the opponent engages at all they lose.
More generally HS debate is politics and persuasion. Know the judges, build charisma, learn what works regardless of the content.
The introduction of a new noxious debating strategy might be noteworthy, but it is no more ruining debate than all the others, and the students don't actually care about the strategy or its tenants any more than they care about the validity of Rawlsian justice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
The most interesting part of this article to me was the end, where the author argues about how important High School Debate is and how Kritiks are the ruin of this important tradition. I was a HS debator in the early 90s, before K's were popular, and from my experience debate was already a fun but ultimately harmful activity. The whole idea was to spew a constant stream of arguments that didn't have any merit as quickly as possible, hoping the opposing team would forget to respond to just one out of 100, and then you win.
HS Debate already trained a generation of win-at-all-costs, who cares if you are right folks like Karl Rove. I don't see how the current generation of kritik based debate could possibly be any worse
Dead Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10445061
(I want to call the article ill-informed but I suspect the author is actually at least generally aware of all the dynamics you describe and just relying on their audience not to be.)
But it never really seems to play out that way; it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour.
One-liner trivialisms and cheap baiting usually gets flagged here, not upvoted regardless of the topic, which is a very positive thing. I am very grateful to the site's admins and users for this lovely place, it's truly a unique thing.
Examples of this that are well understood are regulatory capture, where group A convinces a more powerful group B to enforce a new constraint on all competitors to group A. Generally the constraint is a marginal impediment to group A and so “levels the playing field” *wink*
So the idea that there’s some pure form of rhetoric that is actually worth practicing, given that human conflict (from the minor to the major) is rarely to never solved via this mechanism (even in formal legal proceedings) - it’s not clear what is actually being learned here
Other than later in life realizing how formal debate has almost no application and it’s all about how you refine and evaluate your own arguments.
It was such an elegant metric I assumed all competitive debates used it. From this article it sounds like they just have judges that vote for the winner though? Crazy.
thesohoforum.org puts on a lot of good ones.
It's basically twitter debate before twitter exists where ppl talking over each other
As it turns out the best debaters can talk fast AND make good arguments simultaneously.
If you can't think fast on the fly about how to refute a position, that's on you.
One teacher, who used the punishment frequently, was the judge and simply awarded the debate to the pro paddling side and all my (sourced and referenced) arguments were ignored. I always knew it was BS. Then they banned the practice. And I quit the debate team in anger.
So, I guess I really kind of won the debate, it just took a couple more decades.
Winning seems like a low-value goal here. Classroom simulations exist so students can be exposed to the reality of consequences and outcomes.
I feel better goals here would be how to immerse yourself in an unfamiliar/unwanted position and how to understand the dynamics of a scenario with competing, entrenched positions.
On the contrary, there are a lot of non-K policy debaters who want to be able to parrot the same generics at each other each round, and they don't know how to engage with Ks precisely because they don't understand their own position well enough to argue why the basic assumptions it relies upon are the way they are (or aren't what the K is proposing they are).
Dead Comment
The position itself—about othering certain groups—would hold up by itself of course. Unfortunately for those you mention it’s most often employed by those on their side of the debate about groups they dislike (Muslims, gay, trans, etc).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: all of this is from my experience in parliamentary debating eons ago. Things may have changed, if - as the article suggests - people can win without arguing the actual question they were given.
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...
> 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?
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.
It’s the difference between a cooperative system and an adversarial one: science would grind to a halt if cherry-picking evidence were accepted as the norm; but you could never trust the other side of a lawsuit enough to assume they’re not cherry-picking, so you have to settle for not lying, which is hopefully easier to check (thus rules on hearsay etc).
Now that I’m thinking about it, another point of view might be that scientists, in addition to having less to lose from an unfavourable result, are engaged in a recurring game and thus generally cooperate[1], whereas the parties of a legal case are in a one-shot situation and thus have little choice but to defect.
See also: conflict vs mistake[2]. Left for future work: how do we make (a) advertising, (b) politics more cooperative?
[1] https://ncase.me/trust/
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
1. A lot of stuff about the actual topics that we debated. Both in substance, and also in the relevant components of federal policy tools. Eg, I still know a lot of useless facts about US agricultural policy, US foreign aid policy c. mid-2000s, statistics on realistic offshore wind production capacity c mid-2000s, etc. Contra the narrative here: the actual policy topic stuff doesn't tend to age very well...
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. Consequently, also quite a bit about the BOJ (I graduated in 2009, so my peak debate participation years were 2007-2009.)
It's very important to note here: fiscal policy was NOT the debate topic that year! The topic was alternative energy. But we could link into fiscal policy via alternative energy by arguing that green energy investments were in essence stimulative fiscal policy and would trigger inflation when combined with QE and interest rate policy. And then we could benefit from having the most up-to-date evidence about what Bernanke would do (see #6). Again, in 2008-2009. As high schoolers. Without much or any adult direction.
What other extra-curriculars let kids play these types of games?
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 opinions. I know this stuff sounds trivial, but I still regularly have conversations with 30-70 year olds who have never actually read a bill or SCOTUS opinions, so it's apparently not something that people learn how to do in high school, or college, or graduate school.
4. Yes, also quite a lot of critical theory. (It's part of the game and I don't get why people get so fussy about it. If the argument is bad, win. If you get an unfair judge and lose anyways, oh well. It happens and winning actually isn't the point anyways.)
5. But most importantly, lots and lots of research skills.
6. 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 available in debate. Perhaps at elite private schools or schools in the wealthiest suburbs there are good alternatives.
IME, that's still true now. This year's topic includes AI. I judged some debates this year and learned some stuff about AI by judging rounds. I'm not an expert or anything, but my PhD was at least AI-adjacent and I've been in AI labs for a good half decade now, so it was kind of surprising to learn new stuff from high school debate kids.
Anyways. I'm more convinced than ever that the kids are okay. Let them play their word games.
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.
AMC series math contests have a bit of the same problem -- pushing the material format more and more toward memorizing extremely insider arcana over a meaningful survey of the field of study.
I also disapprove of the tendency to muzzle people with prior restraint because they raise controversial points because somehow "harmony" is more important than insightful and authentic discourse on topics of greater import because someone "might be offended" or "will encourage negative interactions". If only certain topics can be discussed while others cannot, that is a lack of freedom.
But I think it’s generally a bad thing all around for the Ks to infiltrate literally all debate and crowd out anything else (in the same way the speed-talking phenomenon was [is?] a fundamentally bad thing for debate).
That brings up a good point. We probably need to differentiate between a student debate as part of a class vs extracurricular debating.
Students participating in a classroom debate only get so many minutes of exposure; each is valuable. Tighter boundaries would seem to be called for there.
A Neg team running a K has to link directly to the Aff's plan or argument, or they'll just 'no-link' it and move on.
On the K-Aff side, they need to convince the judge(s) that some fundamental assumption of the Topic itself is flawed, which you still have to directly engage with the Topic in order to do.
There is no such thing as a K debate which just says "I'm arguing about some unrelated thing instead".
I think my league was very abnormal however as we had a lot of layman, parent judges that we had to teach rules to (and sometimes the teams had conflicting interpretations), and we didn't allow more abusive techniques such as speed and spread (a common technique in Policy or Parli to present arguments as quickly as possible to prevent the opposite team from being able to address all of them, resulting in a de facto win). We would never have allowed someone to judge with a bio of "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for ... fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism", and it's insane to me that this was allowed at a top end tournament. There were certainly judges that brought their own priors (and we tried to keep track of them to help the rest of our club out), but they generally didn't announce it in such a damaging way.
And, lest you ask the question, no, the coaches were not overtly biased toward their own teams. My partner and I definitely beat a few teams in front of their own coach as the judge, and we definitely lost a few rounds with our own coach judging. There were no explicit position statements by any judges, either. They only "position" was that the affirmative must advocate for the plan in order to win topicality.
a) most judges didn't really like it when the debate becomes some weird meta thing.
b) most teams that ran this were NOT good at debate.
What seems new is Judges completely throwing out the substance of the debate and relying on their own political views for the round.
The author's piece is a description of the national circuit, and perhaps of a very few regional circuits that heavily overlap with the national circuit. All of her statistics are for an invite-only championship tournament (TOC) for that national circuit. Note: it's not the national championship, which does exist. It's a championship for competitors in a national circuit.
Most kids attend tournaments close to home. Not only do they not attend the TOC -- they don't even attend a national circuit tournament that would allow them to qualify for the TOC!
Also, TOC is the national championship. (NPDL Nationals Exist, but they are a relatively recent addition, and aren't highly respected in the community)
Yep. Everyone on my team who ran Ks, especially neg, were the people too lazy to do actual research against multiple plans.
Dead Comment