It’s unfortunate to hear that you had such a negative experience from debate. As someone who has judged public-school high school policy and public forum debate, I will say that I am not that surprised. That being said, I do take issue with your characterization of all/BP debate with the video plus the statement “I do think British Parliamentary Debate style is a bit less broken than this, but like, not that much.”
I cannot speak to every BP league/competition in the world, but I have never seen nor heard of such drastic gamification of debate in BP—or anything even come close to it—in the four years that I did BP in college. In fact, I have often seen people hold up BP and collegiate policy debate as polar opposites, with BP being one of the least toxic/gamified formats (at least among the major formats) and policy debate being the most. (BP definitely has some problems with left-leaning judge bias, but it could be a lot worse and that’s not really that unique to BP.)
Ultimately, I don’t want to be rude/abrasive, but I feel that the video really gives a deeply misleading picture of BP, even if it is only a mild-moderate exaggeration of collegiate policy debate. I think it’s unfortunate to think that many people who are unfamiliar with debate (let alone BP specifically) may come away with such a misleading picture of BP/debate in general based on this extreme example of a different format. I’m not sure how to say this in a non-confrontational way, but I personally think that some kind of revision/redaction (e.g., a disclaimer saying that the video is not of BP, acknowledgement that BP is different) may be in order.
I will just add the following video to illustrate that the gamifying (e.g., speed and spread tactics) of debate is not so inherent to the sport or even specific formats themselves, but rather are heavily determined by league culture (e.g., what kinds of judges are used, how debaters are taught to debate): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvhNvumnZ1U&t=23s
(Although, do excuse the pathos-heavy story at the beginning, and remember these are just high school students)
A lot of my models here come from talking to Evan Hubinger about this, who has a lot of thoughts on debate and competed at the national level in Policy debate in college.
My guess is that overall debate is really badly goodharted. All of the different variants. One of the ways policy-debate in particular is really badly goodharted is that everyone talks so fast nobody can comprehend them. But this is really far from the only way policy debate is broken. Indeed, a large fraction of policy debates end up not debating the topic at all, but end up being full of people debating the institution of debating in various ways, and making various arguments for why they should be declared the winner for instrumental reasons. This is also pretty common in other debate formats (though I don’t know how common in BP in particular). Evan won a bunch of his highest-level debates by telling stories about pirates for 15 minutes, and then telling everyone that the institution of debate is so broken and useless and wouldn’t it just be better if we would use this time to learn cool facts about history like the pirate anecdotes I told you in the first 80% of the debate?
If people were just talking fast, I do think that would be a problem, but not a super big one. I can imagine a kind of hyperoptimized court system that functions fine with everyone talking at 2-3x normal speed. The problem is that it’s evidence that the system at large has very little defenses against goodharting and runaway competition effects.
As far as I can tell, some other debate formats do not have the problem of everyone talking at 2-3x speed, but basically have many of the other problems, and importantly, all share the fundamental attribute that they have very few successful defenses against goodhart’s law. And so somehow, even though it might differ from debate format to debate format, the actual thing the competitors are doing has very little to do with seeking the truth.
The debates I participated in in high-school had nobody talking fast. But it had people doing weird meta-debate, and had people repeatedly abusing terrible studies because you can basically never challenge the validity or methodology of a study, or had people make terrible rhetorical arguments, or intentionally obfuscate their arguments until they complete it in the last minute so the opposition would have no time to respond to it.
I watched about 20 minutes of the video you linked, and I do think just from that slice it seems much less obviously broken than the video I linked, and that does seem important to recognize.
I do also think that I can only really interface with that whole video in a healthy way by repeatedly forcing myself to take a step back and basically throw away all the information that is thrown at me, because I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust the process that produced it. Like, I don’t think I left that video having a better understanding of seatbelt laws (the topic of debate). I learned some useful relevant facts, but I am still worried that I left that debate with worse beliefs about seatbelt laws, and very likely much worse than if I had just read the Wikipedia article on it. Of course, the point of the debate is not for me to learn about seatbelt law, but I do also think the same is probably true for the participants.
“The problem is that it’s evidence that the system at large has very little defenses against goodharting and runaway competition effects.”
Although I acknowledge that there will always be some level of misalignment between truth-seeking and competition, I would push back on the idea that the system has little defense against drastic goodharting like is seen in both high school and collegiate policy debate: the experience of Stoa (the league in which I debated) and NCFCA are evidence of that. In my view and in the view of some others (see e.g., https://www.ethosdebate.com/community-judges-1-necessity-community-judges/), it seems that one of the important front-line defenses against gamification of debate is the use of community judges who recoil at nonsense and speed. Of course, that introduces tradeoffs that debaters (myself included) sometimes huff about, such as biased decisions, but it still seems worth it. Additionally, I feel fairly confident that there are other important factors that explain the stark cultural differences between Stoa/NCFCA and most public-school/collegiate leagues (e.g., the debaters’ personalities/background, parental involvement, the Christian ethos, the observation of and opportunity for self-differentiation from public-school/collegiate practices).
To address your broader point about the truth-seeking vs. competition drive (goodharting): I and many others in my league have considered this question. (For a brief example article from someone I know, see https://www.ethosdebate.com/art-persuasion-vs-pursuit-truth/) I could be wrong/exaggerating, but I get the sense from you that debate should be really strict about promoting truth-seeking above other things—perhaps even to the extent that debate should almost never sacrifice truth-seeking for other goals. Perhaps that is not what you are saying, but regardless, I would push back and emphasize that debate has a wide variety of purposes, crucially including skills education in general (as opposed to topical education). (I actually recently finished a blog series which I started by outlining some of the major purposes of debate: see https://www.ethosdebate.com/purposes-of-debate-pt-1-the-goals-and-anti-goals-of-debate/ ). In short, I think that the experience of Stoa/NCFCA shows that with reasonable safeguards (e.g., including community judges in the judging pool) debate can be at least neutral if not more positive than negative in promoting truth-seeking, while at the same time is a great way to get youth excited about studying topics, scrutinizing their own views, and learning to persuade others.
That last part applies to that NITOC final (regarding seatbelt policy), which focused on a case that was known for being somewhat pathos-heavy (as opposed to, for example, the case for cutting funding for air marshals, which I and many other debaters would likely have never come to see if it were not subject to the adversarial scrutiny of a competitive season of debate): debate shouldn’t be entirely/solely about truth-seeking; teaching persuasion skills is also really important, because if you have the truth but cannot persuade others, then your ability to act on it is sorely limited.
Also: “people repeatedly abusing terrible studies because you can basically never challenge the validity or methodology of a study”—my experience in Stoa was fairly different: I repeatedly had to defend the methodology of some of the studies I relied on, and was able to challenge the methodology of sources.
It’s unfortunate to hear that you had such a negative experience from debate. As someone who has judged public-school high school policy and public forum debate, I will say that I am not that surprised. That being said, I do take issue with your characterization of all/BP debate with the video plus the statement “I do think British Parliamentary Debate style is a bit less broken than this, but like, not that much.”
I cannot speak to every BP league/competition in the world, but I have never seen nor heard of such drastic gamification of debate in BP—or anything even come close to it—in the four years that I did BP in college. In fact, I have often seen people hold up BP and collegiate policy debate as polar opposites, with BP being one of the least toxic/gamified formats (at least among the major formats) and policy debate being the most. (BP definitely has some problems with left-leaning judge bias, but it could be a lot worse and that’s not really that unique to BP.) Ultimately, I don’t want to be rude/abrasive, but I feel that the video really gives a deeply misleading picture of BP, even if it is only a mild-moderate exaggeration of collegiate policy debate. I think it’s unfortunate to think that many people who are unfamiliar with debate (let alone BP specifically) may come away with such a misleading picture of BP/debate in general based on this extreme example of a different format. I’m not sure how to say this in a non-confrontational way, but I personally think that some kind of revision/redaction (e.g., a disclaimer saying that the video is not of BP, acknowledgement that BP is different) may be in order.
I will just add the following video to illustrate that the gamifying (e.g., speed and spread tactics) of debate is not so inherent to the sport or even specific formats themselves, but rather are heavily determined by league culture (e.g., what kinds of judges are used, how debaters are taught to debate): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvhNvumnZ1U&t=23s (Although, do excuse the pathos-heavy story at the beginning, and remember these are just high school students)
I just want to say I, Ben Pace, feel attacked every time someone criticizes “BP” in this comment thread.
A lot of my models here come from talking to Evan Hubinger about this, who has a lot of thoughts on debate and competed at the national level in Policy debate in college.
My guess is that overall debate is really badly goodharted. All of the different variants. One of the ways policy-debate in particular is really badly goodharted is that everyone talks so fast nobody can comprehend them. But this is really far from the only way policy debate is broken. Indeed, a large fraction of policy debates end up not debating the topic at all, but end up being full of people debating the institution of debating in various ways, and making various arguments for why they should be declared the winner for instrumental reasons. This is also pretty common in other debate formats (though I don’t know how common in BP in particular). Evan won a bunch of his highest-level debates by telling stories about pirates for 15 minutes, and then telling everyone that the institution of debate is so broken and useless and wouldn’t it just be better if we would use this time to learn cool facts about history like the pirate anecdotes I told you in the first 80% of the debate?
If people were just talking fast, I do think that would be a problem, but not a super big one. I can imagine a kind of hyperoptimized court system that functions fine with everyone talking at 2-3x normal speed. The problem is that it’s evidence that the system at large has very little defenses against goodharting and runaway competition effects.
As far as I can tell, some other debate formats do not have the problem of everyone talking at 2-3x speed, but basically have many of the other problems, and importantly, all share the fundamental attribute that they have very few successful defenses against goodhart’s law. And so somehow, even though it might differ from debate format to debate format, the actual thing the competitors are doing has very little to do with seeking the truth.
The debates I participated in in high-school had nobody talking fast. But it had people doing weird meta-debate, and had people repeatedly abusing terrible studies because you can basically never challenge the validity or methodology of a study, or had people make terrible rhetorical arguments, or intentionally obfuscate their arguments until they complete it in the last minute so the opposition would have no time to respond to it.
I watched about 20 minutes of the video you linked, and I do think just from that slice it seems much less obviously broken than the video I linked, and that does seem important to recognize.
I do also think that I can only really interface with that whole video in a healthy way by repeatedly forcing myself to take a step back and basically throw away all the information that is thrown at me, because I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust the process that produced it. Like, I don’t think I left that video having a better understanding of seatbelt laws (the topic of debate). I learned some useful relevant facts, but I am still worried that I left that debate with worse beliefs about seatbelt laws, and very likely much worse than if I had just read the Wikipedia article on it. Of course, the point of the debate is not for me to learn about seatbelt law, but I do also think the same is probably true for the participants.
“The problem is that it’s evidence that the system at large has very little defenses against goodharting and runaway competition effects.” Although I acknowledge that there will always be some level of misalignment between truth-seeking and competition, I would push back on the idea that the system has little defense against drastic goodharting like is seen in both high school and collegiate policy debate: the experience of Stoa (the league in which I debated) and NCFCA are evidence of that. In my view and in the view of some others (see e.g., https://www.ethosdebate.com/community-judges-1-necessity-community-judges/), it seems that one of the important front-line defenses against gamification of debate is the use of community judges who recoil at nonsense and speed. Of course, that introduces tradeoffs that debaters (myself included) sometimes huff about, such as biased decisions, but it still seems worth it. Additionally, I feel fairly confident that there are other important factors that explain the stark cultural differences between Stoa/NCFCA and most public-school/collegiate leagues (e.g., the debaters’ personalities/background, parental involvement, the Christian ethos, the observation of and opportunity for self-differentiation from public-school/collegiate practices).
To address your broader point about the truth-seeking vs. competition drive (goodharting): I and many others in my league have considered this question. (For a brief example article from someone I know, see https://www.ethosdebate.com/art-persuasion-vs-pursuit-truth/) I could be wrong/exaggerating, but I get the sense from you that debate should be really strict about promoting truth-seeking above other things—perhaps even to the extent that debate should almost never sacrifice truth-seeking for other goals. Perhaps that is not what you are saying, but regardless, I would push back and emphasize that debate has a wide variety of purposes, crucially including skills education in general (as opposed to topical education). (I actually recently finished a blog series which I started by outlining some of the major purposes of debate: see https://www.ethosdebate.com/purposes-of-debate-pt-1-the-goals-and-anti-goals-of-debate/ ). In short, I think that the experience of Stoa/NCFCA shows that with reasonable safeguards (e.g., including community judges in the judging pool) debate can be at least neutral if not more positive than negative in promoting truth-seeking, while at the same time is a great way to get youth excited about studying topics, scrutinizing their own views, and learning to persuade others. That last part applies to that NITOC final (regarding seatbelt policy), which focused on a case that was known for being somewhat pathos-heavy (as opposed to, for example, the case for cutting funding for air marshals, which I and many other debaters would likely have never come to see if it were not subject to the adversarial scrutiny of a competitive season of debate): debate shouldn’t be entirely/solely about truth-seeking; teaching persuasion skills is also really important, because if you have the truth but cannot persuade others, then your ability to act on it is sorely limited.
Also: “people repeatedly abusing terrible studies because you can basically never challenge the validity or methodology of a study”—my experience in Stoa was fairly different: I repeatedly had to defend the methodology of some of the studies I relied on, and was able to challenge the methodology of sources.