This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It'll happen as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended.

It's unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is hard if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (i.e. they're not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you've introduced role-playing elements, basically)

Something similar seems to have happened in sport fencing. The style of fencing in the 19th and early 20th century is now known as "classical fencing". It was practiced as a sport but also as a preparation for duels, so the techniques had to be useful in a fight with sharp weapons. Wikipedia[1] says

> Scoring was done by means of four judges who determined if a hit was made. Two side judges stood behind and to the side of each fencer, and watched for hits made by that fencer on the opponent's target. ... There also were problems with bias: well-known fencers were often given the benefit of mistakes (so-called "reputation touches"), and in some cases there was outright cheating.

Then in the 1930s, electrical scoring was introduced. This is objective, but it led a big change in style, because now you could score by just touching your opponent, even if such a light attack would be ineffective in a real fight.

By contrast, kendo never introduced electrical scoring, and still uses human judges. A judge can refuse to award a point if an attack connected but didn't have enough force behind it---this avoids rewarding techniques that would not work in combat. So kendo is maybe closer to actual sword fighting, but on the other hand e.g. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash makes fun of the subjectivity:

> As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the right amount of zanshin.

I guess the corresponding thing in debate club would be to give more discretion to the judges, so they wouldn't award a point if there was insufficient follow-through...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing

One thing is that this makes it sound like "force" is the primary measure of scoring for kendo, but it's not. Judges (there are three, majority is required for a point) have significant leeway in judging hits and one of the primary, if not THE primary criteria is whether the striker displayed proper "spirit," which can be explained in various ways.

A forceful strike that simply does not show intention would never be given a point; in fact, at lower levels where such things happen, it wouldn't be uncommon for a clearly reckless, forceful strike to a target area to be given a foul.

Valid scoring areas are also incredibly limited and unrealistic.

The point I'm trying to make in a roundabout fashion is that kendo is just as much a victim of sportification via rules as fencing. :)

Is there a way to change the rules of public debate to align the game with the interest of the people?

To the author's point, it seems like the problem is fixed for a short time after new rules are introduced. Then, after the Machiavellian players figure out the weak points, the competition becomes a grotesque of what it was intended to be.

This makes me think Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation.

It's much more difficult to game the system when the game's rules keep changing.

[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/63773/what-jefferson-said

Is the problem that politicians are too good at debate or is the problem that voters lack the critical thinking skills to recognize that they're being played? I'd lean much more towards the latter. In watching public policy debates during election cycles, I always notice how little it resembles the debates I did in high school. Politicians, debating the way they do for voters, would lose in high school debate competitions. If anything, debate taught me to recognize nonsensical arguments that were, none the less, somewhat convincing. I wonder what would happen if more voters were acquainted with the experience of having won an argument based solely how you argued rather than the substance of your position.

> Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation

Ah...but now you've just created a meta game that controls the actual game. The Machiavellian players, as you put it, would just figure out how to control the rule rewriting process to achieve their necessary victories once the game starts being played. The only thing that makes the rule changes in debate work for a while is that the rules are written by impartial people who are trying to fix a broken situation and, crucially, are ineligible to play by the rules they create.

Gerrymandering: states are precisely "cracked and packed" to maximize the number of expected majority-red districts in a state and minimize the number of majority-blue.

Partisaned primaries: optimization of campaigning and stumping is done thru visiting specific states that vote early in the primary. Most people don't vote for the best possible candidate, they vote for the candidate they dislike the most that they think can win. The biggest states (CA, TX, NY) are traditionally vote only a few weeks before the end of the primary while NH and IO vote extremely early, and thus, have outsized influence on who most people get to vote for.

Electoral college: Republican candidates don't spend any real effort in deep blue states and Democratic candidates don't spend any real effort in red states.

These are the extreme optimization of quirks in our "democracy" in the same way modern fencing is an extreme optimization of modern fencing rules rather than training for real-world sword fighting battles.

This definition of gerrymandering makes it sound like only Republicans do it, but in fact both major parties do it. For example https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/how-dee...

Btw, the way to counter a flick is to not get hit by it. I know that sounds stupid, but whipping the blade substantially decreases it's length. So just space around it.

I was a sabreist but my friends did foil and spent a lot of time bitching about the change. (Some people looooove their flicks)

(On the other hand, you might get a judge who would laugh you out of the room for making such an argument, or on the other end of the spectrum a judge from somewhere in rural west Texas who will automatically vote against anyone who speaks >200 WPM. The judge is God first and foremost, but if your judge claims to be tabula rasa you can make and potentially win any argument you feel like.)

The way to make debate about truth seeking is to find the right judges who prioritize that.

After the first few times, and after I got a much better grip on my latitude and what was expected of me, I started to make it clear before I judged, "I find it somewhat hard to follow spreading and I have noticed that I tend to consider plausibility when evaluating arguments, please keep those in mind" and usually there is a flurry of quiet re-strategizing before the debate, followed by a somewhat more meaningful exchange. However it has never quite gotten to the level where anything really felt resolved and it indeed always feels like a bizarre "game".

The idea of truth-seeking is laughable. You are required to switch sides each time.

Or as to the feeling that nothing feels fully resolved. It seems like that should be expected when the opponents are well-matched; rather than, say, a runaway victory resolved in favor of one side? Even then, I don't think any sports spectator would want a team to actually give up partway through and concede rather than continue.

I'm with you, except for this bit. The side-switching is the primary way for truth-seeking to enter debate. If you only look for arguments for one side, you're a demagogue. Truth-seeking consists of searching for the strongest arguments for both sides. Most people struggle to argue at their best for both sides simultaneously, so debate sequences them.

That's a shame. Most tournaments I've been involved with organizing had an optional 15 min training session and/or handed out a one page information sheet. You should suggest something similar if you ever judge again. In particular, such a sheet should begin with something addressing (c) -- "you are in charge, make any decision you want".

> However it has never quite gotten to the level where anything really felt resolved and it indeed always feels like a bizarre "game".

This is mostly to be expected, and is true pretty uniformly throughout the various styles of debate (including those outside the USA). Turns out the majority of high school students aren't very good at designing and presenting arguments. It doesn't help that in the first speeches they are often presenting arguments that they didn't actually write themselves.

I understand the cynicism of the OP as in the upper divisions it can turn into this bizarre free-for-all speed reading contest, but there are alot of students who didn't go all-in, never even tried competing at that level, and still got something valuable out of it.

IMO, the reason why the activity is valuable is because it forces the students to think critically in a way that they don't get to do in other activities. The best students take the time to find new research, to look at what they find and figure out what articles are worthwhile and which are just smokescreens (or "fake news"). But even the less experienced students still benefit because they are forced to argue both sides, which makes them think about why the arguments in one side may be weaker than the other.

Also, well-run tournaments try to match teams of equal experience as much as possible. They have "speed reading" divisions but they also have novice divisions as well. After the first 2-3 rounds they also try and and match teams with similar win/loss records so that even two poorly matched teams have a chance to find their level.

For the most part, even students who only go for a semester or two of debate and never come back are better off than those who weren't exposed to the activity. It may not help in terms of making Democracy better, but it does help students learn to do research, think on their feet, and feel more comfortable about speaking publicly.

What could possibly go wrong :-/

One might argue that the jury system in legal cases functions primarily as a check upon the risks of corruptible judges, whether that corruption takes the form of mere bribes or appeals to intellectual vanity. But of course once you go down the democratic route, the temptation to appeal to the emotions of the poorly-informed creates a new set of problems.

Another part of the problem that I feel the author overlooked is the default dualism of debate, with all nuance and complexity reduced to one option or the other. This is reflected in the either/or nature of litigation and referenda, where the preference for a clear majority decisions encourages the sort of gamesmanship that undermines institutional participation int he first place.

Lately I've been exploring alternative decision-making systems and one that has captured my interests is designed for moderate-size groups (up to a couple hundred people) in a two-step process: people slit into smaller groups to originate proposals, then vote as a large group to rank them. the key difference is that participants get 3 votes, so they can advance up to 3 proposals they consider worthy, or put all 3 votes behind a single issue they care passionately about.

Of course any system is subject to manipulation once formalized, this approach seems to generate greater collective satisfaction with pluralistic outcomes (emphasis added because I haven't fully researched it yet).

When I was in high school, American teams usually did pretty poorly in international competitions because the Lincoln-Douglas style does not transfer well into World's style.

Also, American rugby is probably not as good because the good football players are, well, playing football ;)

The "that's your fault" comment was from the perspective of the judges. As in, in LD the judges can follow the breakneck speed whereas in worlds they don't bother to.

The most competitive ones, to start with, wouldn't blindly follow an LD style regardless in front of a judge pool and format which naturally abhors it and favors collaborativeness, wit, etc.

And yup, it is a bit more like this imaginary scenario: past high school, there is no more gridiron football (irrelevant sidenote: this does seem likely to happen given the CTE rates amongst players who don't proceed past high school) and so the next generation's Odell Beckhams will move to England after high school to become Premiership players. Which actually is a fascinating thought experiment too...

Knowing and understanding the nuances of the the judging pool and the competition are just as important as anything else, so teams that "transfer" between activities are always at a bit of a structural disadvantage. Especially at the elite level where the differences in raw ability and background knowledge start to become imperceptible.

Show me the incentives/disincentives people are exposed to, and I'll tell you how they'll behave... since most people are rational actors (even if "good" or "bad").

Lastly, how is the debate behavior these flawed rules resulted in, not just a "gish gallop"? (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop)

AC normativity K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RTv2KtA_XBhkRQeHmC69BfTi...

NC analytic philosophy K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zoPxDoFEu7-paUsK5GhTKyW6...

NC speed K: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXKYu8K4DX5DoVVnLlPxmPMf...

Doing this in LD might fly, but in CX it's basically an obnoxious way to throw the round. (Which I did back in high school, repeatedly, with as much success as you'd expect.)

Nuke War impacts? yeah, I'm running Compassion Fatigue K. On AFF you better believe I'm running a kritikal case with 'dismantling patriarchy through discussion' as my primary voting issue against the ridiculous Mead cards the neg was going to bring out.

All I'm saying is that it certainly can be effective as this is what I did and found great success both locally and in the national circuit

If debate is meant to be preparation for participation in a polity, why would you adhere to exclusionary jargon and obscure proceduralism? Of course it's fun to be an insider, as in any other sphere of nerd endeavor, but this is the rhetorical equivalent of bodybuilding with the help of steroids. Yes, it is satisfying to the competitors, but at the expense of comprehensibility to everyone else.

As a non-American who loved debate growing up (but in a more old-fashioned and qualitative policy forum style), the first time I saw policy debate on TV I almost threw up in disgust. This kind of thing is why voter participation rates are so low and people hate politicians (sweeping assertions that I have no intention of substantiating today, by the way).

The research and critical thinking aspects of this are absolutely valuable skills to learn. But the more technical it becomes, the more you're applying the logic of industrial production to qualitative argument, to the point of losing your audience completely. I suggest that this emphasis on point-scoring reduces the incidence of critical thinking in the population as a whole, and offer as an analogy the Selectorate Theory model of Bueno de Mesquita & Smith in The logic of political survival.

In brief, this theory argues that per-capita rewards for members of a selectorate (group which chooses political leaders) diminish as the size of the group initially expands but gradually increase again and exceed the original limit as the selectorate comes to comprise a greater portion of the electorate.

As far as debate is concerned, it is thus more fun at first to win the approval of a small number of insiders through gamesmanship than to please a larger general audience, but as you are able to successfully appeal to larger audiences the fun factor increases again and will eventually exceed the original maximum.

A lot of debaters cross over and do extemp on off weekends.

To be clear, there are no "rules" in debate except that the judge gets to decide who wins, and perhaps the amounts of speaking and prep times allotted each team. There is no scorekeeping other than W or L on the final ballot. One might reasonably expect that the human element would force debaters to "keep it real", so to speak - speed-reading through a bunch of obviously-bullshit argumentation that a policy will lead to half a dozen different global nuclear wars is not something that most people would find convincing, after all.

What's actually happened is that debaters have built up an elaborate metagame, debating with their own terminology and conventions that have grown obnoxiously opaque to the uninformed viewer, and they've been enabled to do so by some unfortunate realities of the debate environment.

Since it's hard to find normal people willing to spend their Saturdays sitting in a high school classroom listening to teenagers role-play as politicians, debate judges are frequently sourced from within the community - they'll be former debaters, or debate coaches from a different school. Debating for a "flow judge" ("flowing", in debate jargon, is how argumentation is tracked on paper) is a very different thing than debating for a "lay judge", and the debate techniques described in the article are vastly less prevalent in the latter case. Most hardcore debaters, however, prefer to have a flow judge - it enables them to use their entire bag of tricks, and frankly is more fun.

This ends up allowing the craziness of the debate metagame to perpetuate by a couple means - for one, it means that schools hosting debate tournaments are pressured to supply flow judges for as many rounds as possible, especially for important finals rounds (if they don't, students won't want to come back, and tournament registration fees are important part of a debate team's funding). Secondly, it alienates lay judges, who often come out of a round feeling "unqualified" to render a decision, overwhelmed with anxiety about being forced to assign a winner and a loser among teams who might as well have been speaking a different language. Finding a layperson willing to judge policy debate more than once is really rare.

So the problem really isn't that the rules encourage degenerate behavior, it's that flow judges do by continuing to award wins to that bullshit. And in the context of policy debate, I don't even know if I'd call this a problem - we enjoyed our made up rules just fine, and if you wanted something more down to earth you could just move to LD or PF styles.

Being able to impress "flow judges" has zero bearing at being able to persuade anyone else. Which it would seem would be the one useful thing you would want to come out of a debating community.

If we need a new format, I suggest an "Obama" debate style. The man clearly understood the policies and their implications, but spoke in a way that moved people deeply at an emotional level, and came away inspired instead of pissed off at their enemies. God, that seems like such a long, long time ago.

But, for what it's worth, high school debate programs are more properly speech and debate programs. Tournaments do include indirectly-competitive events such as oratory, in which competitors give a ten-minute freeform speech and the rhetorical qualities you seem to value are encouraged and rewarded. Debate is just one aspect of the activity.

Basically, this. Everyone's got an opinion on what should win a debate round. Until you ask them to spend Friday evening - late Saturday evening in high school classrooms listening to the 5+ debates on the same topic. Then suddenly their opinion doesn't seem so important to them anymore.

Very frustrating.

Because logical analysis and research skills are valuable, and it's a good way to teach those skills.

(It's also a good way to teach presentation skills, by the way. Thinking on your feet at 100 wpm is much easier if you've been doing it at 400 wpm for a few years.)

Also, perhaps even more importantly, many students seem to really enjoy it.

> given the importance of argumentation as a social skill

I think you've mistaken argumentation for rhetoric and persuasion, which are related but different skills.

It's perfectly possible to make strong arguments at a rapid pace of delivery. Reading a mathematical proof at 400wpm shouldn't make it any more or less correct.

In fact, in practice, there's a strong positive correlation between delivery speed and quality of argumentation in high school debate (although this is not causal and mostly has to do with the fact that "speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment" as another poster put it).

> One wonders what outcomes might result from (say) having an adult judge and 12 jury members drawn from the student body.

Judges of high school debates are adults (or, at least, high school graduates). The only debates judged by students are "pre-junior-varsity" rounds.

That doesn't explain why it's extracurricular.

I'm trying to be brief as I've made several comments in this thread already and don't want to swamp it with my own opinions. In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.

I could have removed all between-word spaces from this comment (eg to fit within some arbitrary character count limit) and it would still be comprehensible to most readers, but at the cost of significant extra work.

There is a not-insignificant additional participation cost and time outside the regular school day to participate; that being said, in some schools speech/debate has (at least historically) been "curricular" in that it satisfies core English requirements, rather than being either a pure elective or exclusively extracurricular activity.

> In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.

Quality of argumentation doesn't count in debate if the audience can't keep up with it (either in "real life" or high school debate). "Ordinary people" are an abstract concept; the audience always consists of actual people, who vary from any particular concept of "ordinary" in different ways.

I don't understand what you're trying to say :( Do you mean it should be required curriculum? Or just an activity? (If the latter, FWIW football and board games club are also extracurricular. The term really just means "something done in association with school but outside the classroom" these days.)

> I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.

The goal is to educate the student.

Also, students learn to present slowly and persuasively, then speed that up. It's not like they're talking quickly day 1. Many top policy debaters also do well in e.g., extemporaneous speaking, which is much more presentation-oriented. It's not an either-or.

I've found that debate formats which emphasize persuasion/rhetoric tend to only teach persuasion/rhetoric, whereas formats that emphasize evidence and logic (even o the exclusion of rhetoric) tend to teach all three. (Just not always at the same time.)

> but at the cost of significant extra work

IME the extra work to move fast, once you have the basics, is not all that significant. Plus, smart beats fast.

In that 9th grade course, the teacher was the judge, with students' input. There were no speed reading games, as the debaters were not trained hobbyists in deception: It was a matter of putting out the best argument to defend your position.

Right. In practice, if you want to engineer the rules to be good, (I think) you need both the rigid, pre-defined, unforgiving logical rules, and some inarticulable "I know it when I see it" rules.

I wonder, are there any theorems on the bounds of how far an optimizer can deviate from another's agent's desired outcome if the agent is limited to specifying the rules in n bits and can specify p arbitrary vetoes?

(Made another reply, but kept this separate for its unrelated point.)

It is also very common for debates to be judged by people who are very inexperienced in debate. A single weekend tournament can involve hundreds of rounds of debate, many dozens happening simultaneously. So a tournament can require several dozen judges. These judges are often volunteers recruited by the hosting school. They could be parents, teachers, janitors, the lunch lady, bus drivers, you name it. In such situations, the judges might get a 5 minute overview of what they are supposed to know, then they are handed a ballot that is "self-explanatory" (not).

If you spew to a judge like that, their eyes will glaze over and they will mark you down. But even if they don't, spewing won't help you because the judges don't know how to "flow" a debate to track all the arguments made, countered, etc. And they don't know they are supposed to reward non-rebutted arguments anyway.

So, spewing is really only a valuable technique when you are in front of a judge you know to be competent. This is a minority of all debates. So you have to be prepared to go at a normal speed, which requires a completely different strategy. And you will use those strategies so much more often that they become your bread and butter.

Unless you play on the national circuit. Then you can expect sharp judges.

You can't really avoid lay judges (those with no exposure to the debate community, who tend to default to a more appearance-oriented paradigm), but you can adapt to a degree. The big reason why most debaters tend to dislike debating in front of lay judges is that their ballot decisions can often seem arbitrary. You may ask about their judging philosophy, but even if they provide one, there's no guarantee that they'll actually stick to it. Not because they're "dumb" or "don't understand," but because it's actually a really hard question to answer. It involves a lot of very specific self-reflection that's radically different than what most are used to. Even experienced judges tend to get it wrong, or fall victim to self-delusion. Experience is what helps a judge learn to know themselves (as a judge).

I was overall terrible at debate but that was a bit of fun, even if it wasn't anything that should be called "debate."

Hm, that seems off to me. One word per second is slow! Just from eyeballing this Google search, I'm getting 110-200 WPM as conversational pace:

https://www.google.com/search?q=conversational+wpm+speed&ie=...

EDIT: a quick DDG search on "conversational english words per minute" indicates an almost universal agreement of somewhere in the range of 140-180 wpm, as with parent's Google search.

And don't put more than 10 or 15 words in a group without a significant pause. And complete thoughts shouldn't probably exceed 60 or 80 words if you don't want funny looks.

It all depends on desired outcomes. If we consider dialogue/debate as a kind of dialectic where one argument serves to sharpen the other as both/all parties seek some kind of truth, however that may be construed, then the sport of debate creates a culture of essentially dishonest argumentation.

Debaters get so into winning that they very quickly fail to recognize the difference between battering their opponent into submission, and actually seeking answers in good faith. You can argue until you're blue in the face that the sport can be separated from the "reality," but it turns into a kind of cognitive capture for the debaters. If they can't take a step back, like the author of this article did, and see how fundamentally disingenuous the activity is, then they are going to be actively making society worse insofar as they use their abilities for anything at all (i.e., politics).

This might be a cheap shot, but Karl Rove seems like a pretty good case in point.

What if debates also had a word limit in addition to a time limit. Say, if each side has four minutes to talk, they need to keep it under 500 words, with 500 additional "flex" words throughout the night. Teams going over the word count regularly would be penalized.

Ideally it would force debaters to remain concise. Of course, what would probably happen is the game would devolve to one of memorizing the thesaurus, so it's a hard problem to tackle... But that's okay! Modern video games have balance changes when a certain "meta" becomes too overwhelming. Professional sports leagues modify their rules every year to combat teams giving themselves an edge that isn't within the spirit of the game >coughNewEnglandPatriotscough<. It's a constant battle that any "game" manager needs to address over time.

BTW, the article's fundamental thesis is also factually incorrect. Speed only wins rounds at the lowest level of competition; you'll never win an important tournament by being faster than your opponents.

> This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is

Debate has never had a single, fixed purpose. Especially as an educational activity, debate is a victim of its own versatility. A debate activity optimized to teach logical analysis and research skills might be detrimental to the development of rhetoric and persuasion skills. And vice-versa.

When I go to debate tournaments, what I see are teenagers discussing "amicus briefs and economic analyses" "early on a Saturday morning", as the article puts it. Who the hell cares how fast they talk?

I mean, really, are America's political problems the result of too many people debating "amicus briefs and economic analyses"? Or is our problem too many used car salesman who prefer rhetoric to evidence? Because the latter is the common failure mode you get when debate is judged according to more subjective standards.

In fact, the article contains an exemplar of the sort of argument common in more rhetoric-oriented forms of debate. If you read the article, you get the sense that the author himself once excelled at the speed reading activity he's critiquing, and in fact even won a national championship in it (if you make it to the bio). Wow, if he was so good, he must really know what he's talking about and be making an honest, self-reflective critique (you can even find comments here stating exactly that!)

But in fact that national championship he won was in a very different type of debate that was imported to the US as a reaction to speed reading, among other practices that -- as far as I can tell -- the author never competed in (at least a varsity level). This sort of "technically true very clever" rhetorical bullshit is what turns me off on more persuasion-oriented debate styles. Technical debating styles -- even when slowed down -- emphasize evidence over this sort of rhetoric.

> until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to.

Debate is the way it is because the people judging the rounds do want it to be that way. Given the choice, they prefer an esoteric activity with substantive content over a vacuous duel between competing real estate salesmen. Every single round, someone chooses -- completely of their own free will -- a winner. And the state of the activity is a direct reflection of those choices.

Debate is not the way you want it to be because you and/or people who agree with you are not volunteering enough hours to provide the reward signals that would create the activity and environment that you want.

--

(It's also worth noting that 99% of high school debate rounds are terrible, and that this has more to do with the "high school" part of the sentence and less to do with the particular style of debate -- or even debate itself. 99% of high school football is also crap.)

Also relevant to codes of conduct unfortunately.

As lukasschwab points out in his top-level comment, the narrative that fast presentation results in "quantity over quality" is nearly always not true -- "arguments are still evaluated at speed", and it's more typically "more arguments of greater quality" rather than "more arguments of lesser quality (although the "greater quality" part is, as lukasschwab notes, "a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment".)

Edit: Moving from a long-form rant about something that a freshman barely understands to philosophical minutia that lead to nuclear war takes a significant amount of learning. And that learning is worthwhile.

K-heavy policy is kind of the extreme opposite of that, increasingly meta arguments where no one ever has to concede even a basic model of reality to the other side. I didn't like it as a debater, and I had a dim view of it as a judge, especially from aff side.

(These frustrations had me drift towards group disco and student congress after 2.5 years in policy.)

I'm comfortable emphasizing the educational goals over the civic goals because I've yet to see a high school debate round weigh in on the balance of national (or even state) policy...

So in high school debate I didn't do so well. I think primarily because I didn't have enough information prepared before going in to respond to an opponents case.

I had routinely been smacked down by judges who felt I didn't attack a point sufficiently to avoid conceding it.

So for one tournament, the proposition at hand was whether global concerns ought to be held above local ones. I stated case that aliens had infiltrated most, if not all, national governments, and they had a goal of putting the human race into slavery, or worse. Clearly global concerns for survival trump local government concerns that may be based on ulterior motives. Hey, it was the mid 1990s, and X Files was all the rage among nerds.

My opponents would say they wouldn't even dignify that stuff with an answer. I responded that they conceded my point, then, and judges agreed.

Out of 4 matches that tournament I won three. The fourth time, I got an opponent who actually called my bluff since I obviously had no evidence to back up my assertion.

My debate coach got the scores back and wondered what happened, because I was otherwise the losingest member of the debate team. She congratulated me on winning and hacking the rules, and then told me she never wanted to hear about me composing a case like that again.

The last competition I was at, some of my school's teammates went up against what I thought of as "The Superweapon".

The debate starts out with the normal political, social and military arguments related to your side of the proposition, and then moves on to phase 2: even so, none of it matters because Jesus Christ's return to Earth is imminent. "Expert" after "expert" weighing in on Christ's return and its implication for Latin America.

I had a very large briefcase -- a case full of briefs -- but, uh, none of those briefs really addressed that particular line of attack.

What I wouldn't give to have known about Roko's Basilisk at the time.

EDIT: correction of "unprovable" to "not falsifiable"

Maybe we better need some logic and work our way towards a solution. Having a solid base with well tested theories is a good start. It won't ever be fully bulletproof, sure. There is only one final way to find out. Try it. Maybe we should choose a plan that doesn't involve creating a better world only in the so-called "afterlife".

(I haven't paid attention to policy debate in 15 years and now I wonder what kind of impact smartphones have had, or could have assuming they're not currently allowed.)

"A bunch of people saying that Jesus Christ will return to the Earth soon" is also falsifiable.

What does "return to Earth" mean? Does it mean physically in a human body or is mentally felt by his followers enough?

Define "soon".

The statement "Fourty years of exposure to Flouride in the drinking water will turn our children into communists." is much better defined except for the "communists" part. But we could define a "communist test". If the children exposed to forty years of Fluoride in the drinking water fail pass the "communist" test it is clearly false.

Still, within the short time of the debate you won't find any meaningful answer to these questions thus limiting their utility severely.

I believe that discussing the inevitable return of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (In the next 60 years) to be a waste of time, but that's because I believe the probability of his return, and the subsequent apocalypse of unbelievers, is zero. Unfrotunately, I won't be vindicated in this belief until 2077.

"Oh actually it's not Jesus but Satan that's returning to Earth...."

I imagine, beyond the novelty, this would be an incredibly boring debate to watch.

I enjoy "intellectual discussion", so I went to a college debate team practice once to see if I wanted to join (back in 2003 or so) - I walked out of there with my mind blown. There was absolutely nothing intellectual about college debate team. The entire point was just to see who could say the most words per minute. When I explicitly asked, I was told that content doesn't really matter, just fast talking.

I didn't know anything about debate teams, but it seems most similar to football than to chess?

That it is even called debate is tragic.

1.https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8

The debate itself was far more than 20 seconds. It is entirely selective.

I clicked on the video because I was interested in an example of this high velocity, arcane, rule-optimized debate game that we're all talking about on this story. What I got instead was a video cutting the most shocking and ineffective parts of their performance in with them discussing their win on TV, done for effect. Come off it. I could record your next presentation and edit out all but the parts where you said "umm" and you'd look like a moron. Even more so if I then creatively cut that in with video of you explaining to your boss how you'd done a great job in the meeting. (I have no idea what you do; I am sure you can understand the analogy).

A clip of ANY duration showing those behaviors bid competition is unnaceptable.

> Come off it. I could record your next presentation and edit out all but the parts where you said "umm" and you'd look like a moron. Even more so if I then creatively cut that in with video of you explaining to your boss how you'd done a great job in the meeting. (I have no idea what you do; I am sure you can understand the analogy).

Or, you could generate a single clip where I say "nigga" during a meeting and scream non-sequiturs as quickly as I could in order to get a point across, and I would be rightly fired for behaving like an animal. Regardless of whether the clip is 5 or 20 seconds long

The fact that something is selectively edited does not alone imply that it is biased or incorrect. The clips were more than enough to highlight the state to which modern debate has devolved. There are other, unedited examples of this inane style of "debate".

My point is that this style of debate activity itself is not in any way conducive to the exchange of ideas or advancement of understanding; the fact that they were given a trophy after spending ANY time debating in such a manner is an extremely poor reflection on the state of "debate" in our schools.

There is a lot on this page about what modern debate is and isn't. It's not supposed to be a mechanism for the exchange of ideas or advancement of understating; it's a game, with rules, and players who optimize performance within those rules. This, here, now, is a forum for the exchange of ideas and the advancement of understanding. Notice that neither of us are hyperventilating while trying to score a victory.

I don't think the specific recording you posted is a fair representation of modern debate. Yes, the video presented modern debate in a terrible, terrible light. But, it was scant seconds of a performance which lasted how long? My point is that the material you posted to back up your opinion over-eggs the pudding to the extent that it undermines you. If you think modern debate is so bad, then an ordinary performance recording would make that point perfectly well, wouldn't it?

The Atlantic article posted somewhere close to our discussion here talks about how black students are challenging the rules within the framework of the competitions themselves. These Towson(sp?) ladies seem to be an example of that. I found it a thought-provoking read which didn't suggest any obvious self-evidently correct solution. What did you think?

It is the first clip I found of what I remembered. I am using it as evidence of the state of modern debate, and I attest that it is typical championship behavior. I dont know what more evidence you need.

I'll say it, I think you are giving the champions an excessive benefit of doubt because they appear to be underprivileged minorities. I dont know where that Atlantic article is, but I have a haunch that the trouble comes from giving minorities social privilege because of the color of their skin, and in doing so, avoiding any challenge out if fear of being slandered as a racist.

Edit: I tracked the article down. It's even more absurd than the video, because it attempts to justify the degradation of debate, as though any change is good if brought about by black participants. That article is a joke. That whole tournament was a damn farce. The champions won by debating about something totally off topic. How is that acceptable? You think they would have won if they hadn't been black? Did you even read the article?

Napoleon once derided the English as 'a nation of shopkeepers.' Had he been granted a glimpse of the modern USA, I suspect he'd have labeled it a 'a nation of sales associates.'

I had to buy a new cellphone yesterday, with some administrative wrinkles involving loss of the previous one and a change of service plan. The sales associate would not shut up and insisted on barraging me with useless information while ignoring my repeated attempts to articulate my simple and clearly defined requirements. A transaction that should have taken 10-15 minutes ended taking nearly an hour.

Another poster posted (as a dog-whistle) a link to Towson JR, the first team of black women to win the national debate championship. Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent. The author of this article went to a "pr-Ivy" with a $70 million endowment. That's some privilege to complain about - he even humblebrags about it: "From winter to spring, in settings as grand as a Harvard lecture hall and as cramped as a boiler room in a Salt Lake City public school, [...]". Flying to Alta (so sorry their campus isn't as nice as yours) isn't cheap or something everyone can do!

Also, since everybody rants about spreading - many critical teams do not spread, or are at least under 300 words per minute. There is a growing recognition and acceptance of the privilege it takes to spend an hour each night doing speaking drills.

This is a much better article about the state of debate: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/tradit...

I'm genuinely curious what people think about this:

"On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.

In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!” he yelled."

LOL nah.

Have you ever heard of the Urban Debate League? This is a debate league that is entirely comprised of debate programs from inner city schools. Any school can create a debate program and join the UDL, and they will give you money to become a traveling team if you do well enough. Many schools sent their students to stupid expensive debate camps, too.

While our school was part of the NFL, my family was relatively broke compared to the families that you describe. They still did their damnest to keep me in debate. Very few of my team members were “privileged.”

There were plenty of scholarships that gave us the ability to attend debate camps at significant discounts, and many took advantage of them. There were plenty of kids who were able to pay outright, but it certainly wasn’t exclusive.

At the high school level I get the 'elite' argument (from the TOC perspective - unless you're in NY, IL, GA, CA, or TX, you probably only have 1 TOC qualifying tournament within driving distance) but, as you stated, you don't HAVE to play that game - let the rich private schools fly their kids across the country every weekend while the poorer schools just go to local tournaments in their hand-me-down school bus driven by the coach.

>under 300 words per minute

That still falls far short of allaying the concern in my opinion. I hope people rant about spreading and continue to do so for as long as necessary until it's changed. At least take the practice where this behavior constitutes "winning" and categorize it as something other than debate.

I readily admit that for most people, it's not so simple as, "you want good high school debate? Simple! Just go to Hotchkiss or Exeter." (schools that cost $50k/year) In theory, there's no reason why other leagues and schools could not ban spreading and put down a rhetoric-forward, comprehensive debate format. The catch, it seems, is that none of them have successfully done so. It's probably a culture thing-- the New England prep schools have a fairly large community of teachers and students who know how their debate format works, who know how to practice and judge for a less formulaic format. It's not obvious how you would create such a culture out of nowhere, and you'll get little help from New Englanders, especially the prep set, who are famously provincial about education.

I regularly mopped the floor with the other prep school kids (including Hotchkiss and Exeter) in what I considered extremely basic rounds compared to what I'd seen (as a novice!) on the national circuit. The New England prep school league was more a club for lazy, privileged kids who didn't care much for working on cases or practicing delivery; the reasons no one on my team spread were because the judges were too incompetent to follow it and the kids were too lazy to learn how to think that quickly - not some noble principles or rules banning it, which I've never heard of. They were far more concerned with access to the team budget and the ability to establish a pecking order with associated privileges (like international travel) than actual skill at debate (which was totally orthogonal to one's ability to succeed socially on the team). Besides, the events were a joke -- after dinner speaking? After being exposed to LD and Policy? Give me a break.

> Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.

I do pretty much agree with the author though. Everything has become a game and we've completely lost sight of the fact that we're ultimately trying to build a better society. It's a big part of why I stopped identifying with political labels. Although, as always, I'm suspicious of the concept that there ever were "good old days".

[1] https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...

High school Parli was similar to what you described and was a joy to compete in; a more "pure" debate where clever argumentation and thinking on your feet really mattered. College Parli was a nightmare morass of arguments over rules technicalities in attempts to define the topic as something obviously favorable to your side - my team had a stock "farm subsidies are bad" speech we would try to guide every possible round towards. On average, 60% of each speech was spent on arguing over what the debate round should be about rather than anything of substance.

It's counter-intuitive to me that more preparation leads to worse discussion on the topic.

Debate teaches you how to think. Teaches you how to respond to arguments efficiently and concisely and how to organize information.

I regard HS Debate as the best times of my life. The insane amount of stuff you learn is just crazy. What other activities are there that exposes you non stop to political critique, current events, history, energy policy and puts you in contact with some extremely smart people?

And if you really hate it, there is nothing stopping you from running K's and stuff. Most were really stupid, but at the very least it teaches how to argue against irrational/stupid arguments in a practical manner.

Debates, televised or on stage? They have time limits.

Free-wheeling verbal exchanges? They still have time pressure, in that they are synchronous. And like debates, there's also a linear aspect, where it is easy to forget about tangents or branches of thought.

Essays? They lack interactivity; form and presentation is prioritized over the true content of the argument.

Discussion boards? They are largely immutable, and worse, they are hierarchical - it is still vulnerable to "spreading" since you cannot collapse branches together.

What is needed is a communication medium that is asynchronous, that prioritizes argument content over form or presentation, and that follows a graph-structure form. We don't have that. It doesn't yet exist, outside of mathematical proofs. A system that loosened and adapted those principles for non-specialists to comfortably use could change the world.

(A lot of people have tried working on this, me included - there are plenty of examples of "argument graphing" and the like out there, but none have really proved workable yet.)

Excellent critical thinking takes time, the willingness to revise, and the ability to track. Focusing on speed in the short term just slows things down in the long term.

I was also on my high school debate team, Student Congress to be specific (though Lincoln-Douglas was an option).

I joined because I loved policy and imagining the impact of legislative changes. The fact that most of our debates were on mock legislation that other students had written made it even better, because we argued topics that the real congress would never touch. I learned so much about researching and building arguments, even if my record didn't show it (never placed once in 2 years). I learned that being right was not as important as being aware of the tone of the room and making yourself heard and tailoring your arguments appropriately. I was not naturally gifted for on-the-fly speaking, but I did improve even so. And importantly, I learned things about myself and avoided pursuing a career I might have hated.

I regret nothing even though I have no dusty trophies to show. The friendship and experience I gained from traveling around the state with other politics nerds was, and always will be, the best part.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the backlash against highly technical forms of debate is most indicative of the current political moment. From my perspective, the backlash is basically just lots of people with at-best marginal interest and basically no skin in the game loudly condescending legions of volunteer educators.

More-over, the politicians who most typify the current political moment more resemble the under-prepared student sweet-talking their way out of a substantive debate than the over-prepared egg head presenting an 15-point analysis of an amicus brief at break-neck speed.

Critiques of overly-technical, jargon-filled, evidence-heavy debate styles aren't exactly difficult to sell. And there's a lot to be said for slowing things down (I insist on quality over quantity when I judge).

But it's worth pointing out that the proposed alternative styles devolve into "dueling used car salesmen" at least as often as the former devolve into "speed competitions". I'd rather watch a bad speed match than a bad duel between clueless care salesmen, but that's certainly a personal preference between two objectively bad choices.

In other words, most high school students aren't particularly good at making arguments and will settle for style when they can't win on substance. That's true regardless of the style you choose to emphasize.

The important thing is that tens of thousands of kids learn how to present a speech in front of an audience and also get some practice reading "amicus briefs and economic analyses".

If you want make debate about convincing an audience of laymen, the judgement needs to be done by an audience of laymen. Do that, and the pace of the debate will slow significantly, since there's no benefit to making an argument that the audience can't hear or understand. But then your complaint will become "these people are dumbing down their arguments and winning, how can we fix this?!"

The HUGE point this author leaves out that makes the activity so amazing is that there are essentially no rules but the speech times. And in that 'free market' environment, the incentive to go fast has often been optimal. But there are many ways to play and win the game, perhaps the most important of which is framing the debate for the judge... convincing them how they should evaluate and score it.

If you want to argue for absurdity, you can... but you have to do some combination of 1) proving it rigorously with documented evidence, 2) being more convincing and 3) framing the debate for the judge and persuading them to evaluate the big picture a certain way.

It is a completely acceptable and successful strategy to answer nonsense by pointing out it's nonsense. You just have to know how to do so within the parameters of the game, which has its own 'language', style and conventions.

It is definitely not the best arena for truth-seeking on specific issues. It absolutely is a game. But it's a difficult and deep and brilliant one.

The comments section of the episode page gives you an idea of people's opinion of the state of high school debate.

I'm sorry, did someone really think that a high school extra curricular was going to act as some kind of deep and wisened meditation for teens on rhetoric?

More than anything else, debate forces you to think quick on your feet - really, /really/ quick. Tantamount to an e-sport, but WAY more open ended, since the aff and neg can run just about anything under the sun, or even go meta (which seems more common since the early 90's when I debated).

Yes debate is a terrible model for useful rhetoric. It's also a hellishly fun boxing match for brains/mouths.

This probably comes from my background in music. Marching band members don't demonstrate their proficiency by ripping through scales at top speed, after all.

Yes, speed is going to be a component of many live competitions, particularly among the young and impressionable. In the case of music, though, we simply temper that by including aesthetics in our judgment. It is not enough to play fast, correctly, and synchronized – you must play musically as well. Musicality may require you _not_ to take a piece quickly at all!

Debate practiced at 300wpm pretty much just relegates you to the realm of competitive Rubik's Cube solvers. Which, if that's your thing, great, but it's not something you should want to highlight on your college application...

High School Debate is not some monolithic top down hierachy- there is a vast array of tournaments and events that cater primarily to the needs and preferences of the students who choose to compete in them for fun.

Fast debate with competent judges doesn't just stop being debate...everyone starts slow and over time learns to speak cogently at speed. If their arguments don't make sense at speed to the judge they are typically discarded outright. Fast debate really opens the competitive landscape, since you have a lot more time to open up complex ethical frameworks and longer arguments. If you and the judge and the other debater understand what is being said..well..why should we restrict ourselves from having an educational and fun round? because it matches the preconceptions of some musician on hackernews about what 'debate' is? pish posh

Certainly it has musical and aesthetic merit, historical importance, and it demands talented composers and performers. Additionally, there is lots of other music for folks who don't enjoy it.

If popular accessibility is all that matters, we could pare down music to the major popular genres. I don't think marches would make the cut.

Fast debate is like grindcore; there's room in civics for specialization, even specialization that isn't aesthetically obvious.

It's hard for most to pick out the logic or musicality from the noise of debate or grindcore, respectively. I would hate to live in a world where grindcore is the only music out there. But I'm glad I have the option of putting on some John Zorn when I'm in the mood.

Competitive cubing is pretty cool, but it's an algorithm/dexterity problem that requires none of the creativity that debate demands.

The point of Bach, or band songs, is not precisely to be popular. At least I sure never got popular playing them. :-)

I don't talk to my friends at high speeds, my favorite speakers speak slowly, and I certainly wouldn't talk like a debater when I'm trying to be my most persistent.

The kind of debate McCordick is criticizing is, in my experience, indeed fringe.

There are more mainstream offerings: less technical debate formats such as Public Forum, Parliamentary, and Congress; Mock Trial; Model United Nations; Junior State of America; the Center for Civic Education's We the People competition; popular organized political debates; other oratory activities outside of civics.

To be fair, I've had the good luck to be involved in High Schools with the resources to offer a selection of these programs, which isn't always the case. I wish speech––the kind of slow, articulate expository speech that wins over non-debaters––was a bigger part of core curricula (in civics, but also in sciences).

Why do they even teach debate, while most high school student probably have never even heard of dialectic. Debate is useful in competitive environments of power, where you have your self interest as a goal. It doesn't seem very healthy for society to be teaching such self centered tactics to high schoolers without at least also teaching about truth centered tactics like dialectics.

I was lucky enough to go to a comprehensive school where the debating chamber was important. The school does not have a debating chamber now. A few key teachers retired and momentum was lost. Strange how the must attend event no longer matters.

I'm not being hyperbolic. The skills to win at US debate are exactly the same skills one uses in a flame war: The goal is to lead the narrative by forcing your opponent to spend the majority of their time denying your arguments. Silence = weakness.

What goes missing from your analysis is how much of the round is won before it even starts. A team coming prepared with well-organized files, "answer-to" blocks, recently-cut politics blocks, etc. will destroy a team using rough-cut cards and analytics.

On a related note, I explicitly avoided policy debate in HS because of its non-sensical verbal vomit style, and by few experiences with Lincoln-Douglass (LD) just seemed too abstract. One of the things I liked at the college level was that teams would present cases that were a little more practical than LD without the "I need to memorize wikipedia and 3 years of the Economist then recite it all" aspects of Policy Debate (PD). Judges also had some discretion on judging whether the case was a fair case (the affirmative team presented a case of their invention usually), which helped curb abuse. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that flexibility at the HS level.

We're a long way from vanished Hellas, but we do know a few tricks they didn't. For instance, we know that the elderly, while suffering a certain decline in the fluid intelligence necessary to react rapidly to novelty, can do well in crystallized intelligence – that factor which employs skills, knowledge, life experience, and, in short, wisdom.

I therefore propose a "Legacy" debate category, to be judged only by those above the age of, say, 70. A pace of 300 words per minute, while impressive, will not be much good when assessed by those whose brains are no longer physically capable of processing that hypersyllabification.

It sounds like the real failure is the failure to meaningfully regulate the offending behaviors. Maybe there is difficulty regulating it, but the "gee, we'll never be able to fix it regardless of how we regulate" is more likely an attitude of lethargic helplessness rather than a meditation on the nature of competitive debate itself.

H'm. Sounds like you got a good education out of it.

I wonder if there are similar fora for adults.

http://www.toastmasters.org/

What? My father was on his high school debate team in the 1930's.

I agree with this quote so much. I was on the debate and robotics team in high school, we did extemporary style in debate. I ended up leaving the debate team and focusing entirely on robotics because debate taught students how to argue, not how to listen. Whenever debate kids would leak into robotics, they would cause endless looping conversations talking about different designs.

The main issue is that high school debate doesn't teach how to listen well, only how to hear well. If debate was more freeform so students could actually form opinions based on what they thought about the resolution, then I believe this problem would be fixed. I have a friend who did my proposed style and said that it was extremely fun, and turned debate into a problem solving exercise.

Even then the funny thing about this article is that, in indicting what it considers a decay in critical thinking, the article misses a lot. Spot the error:

> in recent years its speed has increased markedly, as have the mountains of evidence. The emphasis on logic and critical thinking has waned.

Disclosure: did this activity, was ranked #1 for my class year, etc etc. (Note that doesn't mean I think the activity's perfect, either.) One of the coolest outcomes is that - since it attracts people who want to become lawyers - you end up building a really, really deep legal bench:, fed and appellate clerks, m&a/whiteshoe types, litigators, etc.

I say the function of debate in a democracy is to inform members of the public so that they can make intelligent political decisions.

That being the case, debaters should be thought of as being educators who inform the public about the arguments on each side of an issue, and should be so evaluated. Having a winner and a loser doesn't make, sense. If they both do a poor job of informing, that should be noted, and ditto if they both do well. Perhaps there should be a few prizes in a tournament for the teams that do the best job of informing.

Let me add that positions on policy or ethical matters invariably rest at least in part on deeper assumptions about things like human psychology and history. For that reason, these should be addressed in debate.

As for learning how to think logically and evaluate evidence, that is all part of what it takes to be a good educator.

If anyone disagrees, then they should present their own idea of what is the proper function of debate.

I think that the reason high school debate keeps going wrong is people have never figured out what its proper function in a democracy is. Instead it's been designed to function as a means of testing how intelligent and hard-working the debaters are.

Also, let's remember that we have debates only because our form of government is a democracy and so requires a well-informed public. In countries with non-democratic governments, public debate on social and political issues is generally outlawed.

Maybe I'm insulated because I went to a midwest high-school who didn't care much for the elite tournaments but we still managed to do well at nats.

EDIT:

>High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking.

That depends on your perspective. I'd say the judges learned some things in my debates, would they have changed their minds? Probably not, because 16 year olds just aren't that convincing to most people. It's like that bear joke, you just have to be better than the other guy. But what about my opinions? They may have never changed in the midst of a debate, but case-building is definitely an exercise in truth-seeking. Debaters get more out of it than judges but that'd be natural, they're the ones poring over all the evidence and picking out the good bits. Being adversarial with yourself as you write an aff and neg is far more enlightening than any other approach I've found.

Key thing here: parents judge rounds. These lay judges aren't trained to listen to 300 wpm. They don't know any better though-- they'll still come back to the tab room and say "wow, these kids are really great, I didn't even understand what they were saying!" Yuck. The politicians of tomorrow.

And if your opponents haven't trained spread, what's the use of you spreading? Are you that insecure in your ability to sway others with logic and reason that you would resort to speaking quickly? Maybe instead of getting riled up by the game you should learn a real skill: listening. You'll find more of their flaws that way.

If you can't speak in a way that your listeners can understand, then your words are worthless.

It reminds me of that scene in the "Bad News Bears" where the little league coach realizes the grown-ups pushing the kids to win win win are the bad guys.

Debate has become a worthless life skill. Members of the USA national legislature rarely give speeches to try to convince their fellow legislators of something; mostly the room is occupied by nobody but a couple of clerks and some automated CSPAN TV cameras.

Aristotle might say we've abandoned pathos (understanding our audience) and ethos (personal integrity) in favor of logos (the bs that gets spewed at 300 words per minute).

I'm glad this elite debater is calling bs.

This is quite common online too, especially among creationists:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

1. Spreading is definitely a thing in Lincoln Douglas now as are the wonky Mead 92-like arguments. It’s even easier to spread now that we can flow on computers (which was just beginning when I left in 2005, so I learned how to flow on paper. I still use this format for interviewing people.)

2. People were complaining about the “diminishing intellectual integrity” of debate when I was doing it over 15 years ago, so I’m going to guess that things haven’t changed as much as the author is making it seem.

3. Crazy arguments aside, debate is the only academic sport I can think of that teaches you how to: 1) formulate coherent arguments, 2) defend those arguments with facts instead of opinions, 3) learn how to speak in front of people (sometimes lots of people) and 4) make do out of nothing (we often debated in classrooms, even in tournaments held at colleges).

Debate changed my life. I met people from all sorts of walks of life, rich and poor alike. I debated against and amongst people from all races that believed all sorts of things. If there is any activity that can solve for the notorious achievement gap problem, then this is it.

I learned about rock music by rooming with a guy at Catholic during debate camp. (He introduced me to Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan. I was hooked since.) I had my first serious relationship through debate. God, some of the best memories of my life came through debate. My first flights? Debate.

I was devastated when my school (Bergenfield HS) dissolved their debate team during my senior year. We had one of the best Policy and LD programs in the country and often beat out much wealthier schools than ours (though we had nothing against Texas). Most of the folks that joined our program did well later on in life: a few doctors, a few lawyers, etc. I’m positive that I wouldn’t have the life that I have now had I not said yes to my future captains asking me if I argued too much at home and needed an outlet.

My coach had a huge falling out with the school and called it quits (very difficult decision for him; he was homosexual and was often prosecuted for it). No other teacher wanted to take up the program, which made no sense to me initially but after dating (and eventually marrying) a teacher made a ton of sense (this was likely a labor of love for my old coach that didn’t pay the bills; no other teacher had that passion). The football, basketball, baseball and golf programs went unscathed, of course.

I tried to start a program at Stevens, but scheduling made it really hard. College debate is no damn joke; it’s practically a sport in its own right. People have failed out due to going too hard on debate. The most I could do to get involved was by being a judge on the weekends, but even that got difficult once I started getting into serious relationships and working more.

If we have kids, I will definitely nudge them to try debate.

There was a great deal of showmanship involved which could be really fun, and we frequently would change strategies depending on who we were debating. This was also prior to laptop and mobile computing so there was a lot of mileage you could gain from wheeling in a bunch of huge evidence cases (which might have just had your lunch in them) or alternately just a small box of note cards.

I can also remember the giddy excitement of cracking open a new issue of "Congressional Record" and looking for evidence.

I have say it was one of the most valuable experiences I had in education. Sincerely and passionately arguing for a policy and an hour later doing the reverse gives you insight into how opinion is shaped and frankly manipulated.

I had completely forgotten flowing! If you as a judge wanted to signal you had experience in policy debate, all you had to do is show up with a yellow legal pad and turn it sideways on your desk and say nothing else. This was basically a green light to the debate teams to 'bring the speed and spread'.

As a former four-year policy debater (high school), I'd never thought to use this for an interview, but I see how it could work.

One way to make that competitive would be to deliberately build a prisoner's dilemma into the rules: If one party wins, they get the most points. If they reach a compromise each party gets some points. If either party fails to convince the judge, nobody gets nothing.

As far as I can tell, this claim is made up.

Here's the full results packet form the 2017 National Championship: http://results.speechanddebate.org/2017/posting/2017%20Resul....

Cmd-F McCordick: 0 results. (Did not even participate?)

Cmd-F Regis: 5th place in public forum (Eoin Matthews & Randall Zuccalmaglio).

https://www.regis.org/articletest.cfm?id=7403

Nice.

I feel bad attacking his credentials-I am sure he was a fine debater. This article is of course...quite silly. Comparing children reading foucault and baudrillard or cass sunstein and talking quickly about nuclear proliferation with "the kind of language currently poisoning our public sphere" is not even wrong.

Urban Debate Leagues (UDL), often produce championship level debaters that use poems and music as evidence and make arguments up entirely from their own thoughts.

The format of policy is extremely loose and just because the tactics that are most commonly used can be seen as anti-intellectual that doesn't mean that you can't be extremely good while appealing to layman as well.

To understand just how fast these kids are talking, spend a few seconds watching a debate video (this was the first thing that came up when I searched "policy debate" on Youtube, and it's consistent with my own experiences): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4MzZ_WS_Ww#t=1m45s

Debaters started formulating outlandish arguments. The more apocalyptic the outcome the better, with little care for the argument’s probability or real-world application. “A new retirement program will trigger a nuclear war.” “Prison overcrowding would cause the destruction of the ozone layer.” High school debate had come to this.

If anyone thinks this is hyperbolic, I can assure you from my 4 years of experience on the California high school debate circuit during the 00's it is not. The premise of the competition, that "failing to respond to an argument means you concede the argument" means that it doesn't matter whether you have effective talking points; simply that you have talking points of any sort. Volume over effectiveness, speed over eloquence.

However, there was always a stark difference between local debate competitions and invitational or state-level competitions--at higher-level competitions, many judges are former participants, and will take notes on the "flow" of the debate, which allows them to confirm, "Yes, the affirmative side made ten arguments, and the negation side only responded to nine of them," turning into a game of scoring points.

Converesly, at many local/league competitions (which might include volunteer judges with no debate experience, e.g. parents of kids at the schools participating, or faculty at the school hosting the event), many judges lack both the familiarity and the inclination to effectively recognize teams that have "won" based on this technicality, and weight was often given to students who were able to talk "like real people" at a reasonable pace that the judges were able to follow. The "negative" side of this is that sometimes debates were decided by who was a better orator or came across as more charismatic rather than which side had the better logical argument (though you could make an argument that there's value in that as well). Granted, this is based on my experience in the Yosemite Forensics League; I'm sure the tenor at "local" competitions varies on a league-to-league basis, and YAL does include a lot of California's more "rural" counties (think Bakersfield, not San Jose).

I think my experience does get toward a different point, which is that the kind of competition you see at high levels may not be reflective of what some (or even most) kids experience when they simply go to tournaments several Saturdays out of the year and never advance to a larger state tournament. If you're going to a prep school that is renowned for having a champion debate team, then sure, you're going to get fast-talking spreading, but for some kids who aren't hyper-competitive, never advance (and are okay with that), there's still plenty to get out of the program (and arguably more to be gained from a personal enrichment standpoint, even if there's no accolades). That being said, my best experiences with the National Forensics League programs were more on the "individual events" (which features events explicitly score based on oratory ability, e.g. "dramatic interpretation" or "original oratory"), rather than the debate side of things. (At my school, both were coached under the same umbrella program.)

I'm sorry but it's just what the most competitive people are capable of doing. When you practice, you can compete at that speed and it isn't JUST about who read faster. The efficiency and cogency of arguments is STILL EVALUATED at that level.

You can make 20 arguments: 15 bad ones and 5 good ones. A fast and competent opponent will spend less than 5 seconds on each bad one (usually because it's been implicitly answered elsewhere or because it's been contradicted by a higher quality / more recent source) and however much time they need on the good ones.

Now, I agree with your characterization of the difference between 'fast' and 'slow' debate. Both are valuable, both emphasize their own skill sets. And yes, people without tons of time or resources will probably get more out of 'slow' debate. But as someone who did both, I think you're painting a caricature of 'fast' debate, which is an extremely rigorous activity filled with incredibly smart people.

You'll not hear me argue against the point that 'fast' debate is extremely rigorous and filled with smart people. At its core, debate is a game, and certain people have figured out (and more critically, achieved mastery of) the skillset required to win it--that requires intelligence and a lot of hard work.

If my comment came across as negatively characterizing this kind of 'fast' debate, it's mainly because the intent of my post was to say, 'here's what an outsider/layperson might not know about high school debate.' The fact that debates can be won with cogent arguments, and the fact that it's a competition that attracts a lot of hardworking and smart students, are not surprising to most people. However, other aspects of the competition--the incredibly fast pace of speech, and the fact that debates can sometimes be won with absurd arguments based on the "rules" of debate--are probably not consistent with what most people think of when they hear "high school debate."

Former policy/CX guy here, there's no better way to learn speaking, how to make an argument, how to listen well, how to argue responsively, clash, note-taking, how to do research, etc.

If you can do it at 300wpm, normal day-to-day conversation is easy.

I'd think it's at least half the purpose of the whole thing, at least in spirit if not in practice ("spreading"). Otherwise the debate would just be two people submitting printed sheets of bullet-pointed arguments with footnoted references.

Why?

Because they already know how to be orators and can excel at that (I've seen both sides of this: there are pretty prominent examples of former debate champions now working in front-facing roles as PMs, VPs, etc in tech). Having mastered that, it's pretty unsatisfying to compete strictly at that level. Look no further than the intellectual depth of a debate with Tony Blair - an orator who can't follow his argument all the way down - for an example.

Here let me explain the logic of your criticism this way:

> These formatted baking pastry competitions because are useless! Really, who's to say whether any of these guys/gals knows how to poach an egg?

Also: where did "strictly" enter in my post? You seem to rely largely on my post somehow excluding the importance of the actual arguments or any other elements of the competition, which it doesn't. I just thought it was odd you were so dismissive of the public speaking aspect of the competition, as if you'd written "it's strange, but sometimes pastry baking skill wins these pastry baking competitions, which isn't ideal but is kinda OK I guess."

Then I wrote "isn't that a large part of the whole point of it?" and you wrote "pft, they're so beyond baking the baking barely matters, n00b" and now I'm posting, "wait, what?"

[EDIT] Ah, just noticed you're not the poster to whom I originally responded. Maybe you missed some of the context of the first couple posts. That'd explain it.

Continuous speech recognition allows new approaches to scoring.

Teaching scientific discourse, and team collaboration, is increasingly a focus, even down to K.

Imagine being able to do automated judging of team and individual performance, at listening, clear presentation, group facilitation and collaboration, problem analysis and creative problem solving, tasteful system design, and so on. That could be really neat.

No wonder it has been gamed. Intellectual pursuits can never be scored simply, and to do so means you'll get rule gaming that defeats the whole purpose.

Should go back to which team "developed a more convincing argument" and leave it up to the judges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolved_(film)

[I did parliamentary and policy debate in high school; now I'm a High School parliamentary debate coach]

1. @elefanten correctly points out that arguments are still evaluated at speed. This is my experience; the author characterizes it as "bludgeoning," but good debaters increase their speed to add evidence to a small number of strong arguments. Bludgeoning can happen, but it's uncommon. If McCordick's characterization of Policy were accurate, we could expect the fastest debaters to predictably win all their tournaments. This isn't the case. Speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment, but there are diminishing returns. By a third year in competition a high school debater isn't focusing on speaking faster at all. The real competitive edge is in argumentation.

2. McCordick's comparison between "corrosion" in debate and "corrosion" in American national politics is extremely hasty. National politics have not become more inaccessible because they're technocratic and opaque. The 2016 presidential debates were not run at 300+ wpm, nor did they involve detailed policy advocacies. Debate is characterized by technical elitism, national politics by right- and left-populism. How is debate jargon remotely like "the kind of language currently poisoning our public sphere?"

3. McCordick speculates that debate produces students who don't care about truth and public speech, but there's no real evidence of this. Even if there's validity to his stylistic criticisms, it's unlikely debaters are on the whole less civically engaged or politically literate or eloquent than their peers. My experience, at least, is that they're dramatically ahead.

4. He ignores all the skills besides rhetoric. Research and acadmic/technical literacy are critical to prepared debate, as they are to college academics. Debate teaches a number of mental models that I've personally found extremely useful––e.g. for grokking multiple opportunity costs in decisionmaking. It teaches work ethic and self-motivation, both skills admired in athletics. Also topic knowledge at a very accelerated level for high school students.

5. McCordick gives the impression that debate is homogeneously inaccessible, which is inaccurate for a few reasons. A) High-level competition makes up the vast minority of High School debate; the vast majority of debaters are active on nationally uncompetitive local circuits where traditionalist judge expectations keep debate slow and untechnical. B) Other commenters correctly point out the rise of new performative styles that preference debate on relatable terms, which have been highly competitive for years now. C) There are plenty of debate formats that aren't hypertechnical––McCordick even competed in two of them: Public Forum and Worlds. Parliamentary debate often plays a similar role where it's offered.

6. I agree with @ashark that debate's idiosyncracies are a product of Goodhart's Law. Competition is an essential incentive for the workload, in the same way that international science fairs incentivize research (the only other high school competition in which I've seen a similar work ethic). @ashark suggests in a different comment that the only way to counteract specialization is to allow subjectivity in judging. This would just substitute judge-appeal as the metric for competitive success, which is hardly a better proxy for truth-seeking and communication skills given judges' pre-existing political biases on a topic.

7. I understand frustrations with debate's apparent inaccessibility to laypeople. It's a frustration I experienced myself when I first started. Why, though, is there so much frustration over specialization in debate? Why not similar frustration over other specialized activities? Debate definitely doesn't bring politics to the polis, but it needn't. Not all politics is about eloquence; it's also about cost-benefit analysis, philosophical dilemmas, wonky details. It isn't necessary that everyone is a technical expert, and it's naive to believe that policy doesn't demand expertise. I find grindcore offputting, but that doesn't mean grindcore is "corroding" or "perverted."

Interested in developing such expertise? Competitive debate is one of many ways in which to develop it. It certainly isn't perfect, but it teaches skills that don't exist anywhere else in high school curricula.

Does it erode general advocacy skills and interest in truth? Certainly not for debaters who are good at it. If anything, it builds them. Skills are not mutually exclusive.

On a petty note, the article credits Jack with winning "the high school debating national championship"––America Magazine should be more precise. Regis won first in World Schools Debate, not one of the major formats.

I learned a ton about research, writing, and effective argumentation.

Those high school debaters seem like they'd be recognized as 'doubleplusgood duckspeakers' in 1984.

By default, the convention was to apply a "policy maker" paradigm, in which the advantages of the plan affirming the resolution are weighed against the disadvantages brought up by the negative team, and the side with the most "weight" wins. Thus, it's natural that the arguments would eventually converge upon the scenarios with the most weight, i.e. those with the highest death tolls or biggest quantifiable impact on humanity. Nuclear war and climate change were argumentative staples in these types of debate rounds, and I even recall some cases where a policy maker judge, in his oral feedback, literally added up scenarios for each side to determine the winner.

Another convention is "silence means consent", which likely led to the practice of spreading to overwhelm your opponent with arguments so that any unanswered argument automatically gets granted as won. I feel like that practice is more an artifact of the way debates are structured with time limits and restrictions on only considering arguments that were continuously extended throughout the speeches in order to be considered as a valid "reason for decision". Coupled with a desired to quantify each argument in order to outweigh the opponent, I think this behavior is inevitable given the structure of the activity.

However, I feel that the open nature of the evaluation paradigm was a shining educational tool. Given the right judge (e.g. a debate coach, an experienced former debater, or a college debater), you had the option of advocating for any type of evaluation paradigm you wanted. You could open the debate up to meta topics such as whether the affirmative plan was "on topic" by nitpicking the definition of words in the resolution or arguing grammatical technicalities, and claiming that "non-topical" plans were damaging to debate as an activity and warrant a loss; you could attempt to compare the morality of certain scenarios against quantifiable death-toll scenarios, such as advocating that the moral obligation for overturning some court case to symbolize the eradication of racism against some group might outweigh any type of nuclear war scenario; you could even make arguments against the practice of "spreading", in the name of education, and demand that if the opposing team speaks too fast that would damage the educational value of debate and thus warrant a loss.

All and any of these arguments would've been valid, and I feel that provided valuable lessons in thinking outside the box, looking for technicalities, and optimizing approaches for playing the game.

My best friend growing up is a near mystical figure in the insular LD debate community and has coached a lot of nationally successful debaters, including his younger sister who won the TOC and is considered the most dominant LD debater ever as far as I know. Aside from him, at one point another close friend was #1 ranked in the country (he had the most TOC bids that year) and another won Novice Nationals. I was naturally good at it as well (I quit literally hours after winning the Novice state tournament), but I absolutely hated debate for all the reasons listed -- "spreading", abstruse philosophical critiques that always devolved into nuclear war, and the barely intelligible speed-talking that even motivated the dorkiest of debaters to practice circular breathing. I had to find a new friend group (for a while, we're still all close) because these guys talked about nothing except for debate.

> High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking.

I couldn't agree more, and I have said nearly the exact same thing to many people that are unfamiliar with high school debate.

I don't think this necessarily points to any inherent flaw with the competition, either. The goal of a debate participant is not to discover the "truth," it is to defend the side of the debate you are assigned (and over the course of several rounds against multiple opponents, you will inevitably find yourself alternating between sides). It's similar to arguing in a courtroom: as a defense attorney, your goal is not to discover the "truth," but to get a "not guilty" verdict for your client, even if you believe (or know) them to be guilty.

When I was in debate (mid-90s) most research was on paper - you'd have a brief with cut out photo copies ("cards") with the words to read underlined. If you weren't at one of the big schools, you were at a disadvantage, as the debaters themselves weren't seeking any truth in their research; they had teams who just cut every card imaginable. The goal, as in spreading, was just to overwhelm your opponent. (More baffle them with bullshit than dazzle them with brilliance)

It made it cannoying for those of us who were actually trying to organize a club around debating issues.

And you do debate issues, just very very quickly and efficiently.

Anyway, there are other comments I've made that would allow someone to attach my real identity to this profile.

the best at any highly competitive activity - when assembled together - will talk primarily about that thing.

When did it become socially acceptable to behave in this manner?

So indeed, there is nothing for which everything is X.

This is a discussion on high school debate, so please take this comment in that light (with a grain of matter).

For an example, take the 2014 CEDA Championship Debate held at Indiana University -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8

* It seems that all the original videos from the above have been removed (from youtube), only clips are available.

For those that are interested, a response to the criticism of the above "debate" was made that is itself cringe-worthy and difficult to watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pij5Sg4_DY

This is arguably competitive debate's biggest culture clash (though debaters from neither camp could be successful without proficiency in the other)––even if you believe them to be corrosive, it's misguided to construe them as parts of the same trend.

Additionally, it's interesting that you select 2014 CEDA finals as an example, which was not only criticized but also met with fairly vicious racism––why not the 2015 NDT, which exemplifies the kind of debate McCordick criticizes? Or the 2013 NDT, which shows the two styles in interaction?

It has never been, and can't be about truth-seeking, this is exactly what it is not about.

It's always been about an intellectual game. So one learns the others view so one can attack it better, if thats ones goal and along the way learn critical thinking.

This author seems like one of those idiots when they have audience votes, who votes for the side they agree with.

That said their original thesis is correct, debating has gone absurdum and so theoretical a lot of the learning seems to be lost.