As someone who did debate in high school and throughout college, I am really excited to see this + I think it makes a lot of sense. As you noted, debate often involves evaluating choices in more-neutral ways, seeing both sides of arguments, etc. I’d love to hear more about how this project/idea develops.
The only thing I would note is my moderate dislike for the British Parliamentary (BP) format. Of course, I recognize that it may not be feasible to choose a different format and/or that there may be other justifications for using it (e.g., having more people per round, the league’s culture is not as wacky/out-of-touch as some other leagues’, a greater breadth of perspectives in each round). Still, in my experience/analysis, BP’s 4-teams-of-2 format (instead of the traditional “one team vs. one team” format), wherein teams that are ostensibly supposed to be working together to support their side of the motion are actually partially pitted against each other to get a higher rank in a round, leads to numerous problems that undermine the educational value of the round: knifing* (where one of the “back half” teams undercuts something that the “opening” team on their own side said), abandoning (where one of the back half teams lets the other side strawman or otherwise unfairly attack their opening team’s arguments), the fact that closing government (back-half team for the motion) can really suffer if opening government sets up the round poorly (e.g., when opening government uses really bad definitions), the fact that closing teams are often incentivized to focus on “new” arguments rather than focusing on the “good” arguments (since those will usually already have been taken by the opening teams), etc. (Honestly, this is just a few of the highlights: for a few months off-and-on I’ve been outlining a blog article on why I dislike certain aspects of BP. Who knows, maybe I’ll finish it sometime this month?)
*Although hard knifing is rarely an effective strategy (usually, judges aren’t blind to what’s going on and they’ll punish the knifer if it was bad/uncalled for), it’s maddening how effective soft abandonments are (e.g., only giving half responses then saying something like “we want to focus on new matter on back half”).
Thank you for the comment! Choosing BP was “easy” in the sense that it is the most international format and we were aiming for an event that will be major on the global debate calendar. We think the points you raised are interesting, and even though we believe that BP is actually the most fitting format for the project, the pilot we are running also features some 3vs3 debates, so we will have some ability to compare. If an insight comes up from that comparison we will update.
Sounds good! Like I said, I do recognize that choosing BP probably has quite a few advantages on the (meta?) level in the sense that it seemingly has a more-global audience and topic scope, perhaps a better competitive culture, etc. (Update/clarification: I would say that all of the “flaws” with BP’s format are minor in comparison with the advantages from the BP league culture, which crucially does not have the ridiculous speed and spread from policy debate, as exhibited in the video from Habryka.)
If I ever get around to finishing that article about its downsides I might share a link to it here...
As someone who did debate in high school and throughout college, I am really excited to see this + I think it makes a lot of sense. As you noted, debate often involves evaluating choices in more-neutral ways, seeing both sides of arguments, etc. I’d love to hear more about how this project/idea develops.
The only thing I would note is my moderate dislike for the British Parliamentary (BP) format. Of course, I recognize that it may not be feasible to choose a different format and/or that there may be other justifications for using it (e.g., having more people per round, the league’s culture is not as wacky/out-of-touch as some other leagues’, a greater breadth of perspectives in each round).
Still, in my experience/analysis, BP’s 4-teams-of-2 format (instead of the traditional “one team vs. one team” format), wherein teams that are ostensibly supposed to be working together to support their side of the motion are actually partially pitted against each other to get a higher rank in a round, leads to numerous problems that undermine the educational value of the round: knifing* (where one of the “back half” teams undercuts something that the “opening” team on their own side said), abandoning (where one of the back half teams lets the other side strawman or otherwise unfairly attack their opening team’s arguments), the fact that closing government (back-half team for the motion) can really suffer if opening government sets up the round poorly (e.g., when opening government uses really bad definitions), the fact that closing teams are often incentivized to focus on “new” arguments rather than focusing on the “good” arguments (since those will usually already have been taken by the opening teams), etc.
(Honestly, this is just a few of the highlights: for a few months off-and-on I’ve been outlining a blog article on why I dislike certain aspects of BP. Who knows, maybe I’ll finish it sometime this month?)
*Although hard knifing is rarely an effective strategy (usually, judges aren’t blind to what’s going on and they’ll punish the knifer if it was bad/uncalled for), it’s maddening how effective soft abandonments are (e.g., only giving half responses then saying something like “we want to focus on new matter on back half”).
Thank you for the comment! Choosing BP was “easy” in the sense that it is the most international format and we were aiming for an event that will be major on the global debate calendar. We think the points you raised are interesting, and even though we believe that BP is actually the most fitting format for the project, the pilot we are running also features some 3vs3 debates, so we will have some ability to compare. If an insight comes up from that comparison we will update.
Sounds good! Like I said, I do recognize that choosing BP probably has quite a few advantages on the (meta?) level in the sense that it seemingly has a more-global audience and topic scope, perhaps a better competitive culture, etc. (Update/clarification: I would say that all of the “flaws” with BP’s format are minor in comparison with the advantages from the BP league culture, which crucially does not have the ridiculous speed and spread from policy debate, as exhibited in the video from Habryka.) If I ever get around to finishing that article about its downsides I might share a link to it here...