...that video is deeply absurd, and I am caught between revulsion and laughter. They are clearly way past the point where there is even a gesture at real usefulness; this might be the most heavily gamed thing I have ever seen.
However, if the video is an example I am confident that this activity can’t do any real harm to our objectives. Who could do this with even the pretense of thinking they would talk to people in the real world that way? It’s just a verbal luge.
Yeah, it’s kinda hilarious. Speaking so fast that your opponents can’t follow your arguments and therefore lose the round is common practice in some forms of competitive debate. But in other debate categories, using this tactic would immediately lose you the round. In my own personal experience of high school debate, the quality of competitive debate depends very heavily on the particular category of debate.
The video above is Policy Debate, the oldest form of debate which degenerated decades ago into unintelligible speed reading and arguments that every policy would result in worldwide nuclear annihilation. In the 1980s, the National Speech and Debate Association instituted a new form of debate called Lincoln Douglas that attempted to reground debate in commonsense questions about moral values; but LD has also fallen victim to speed reading and even galaxy-brained “kritiks” arguing that the structure of debate itself is racist or sexist and therefore that the round should be abandoned.
Public Forum debate, invented in 2002 as an antidote to Lincoln Douglas, is IMO a very healthy and educational form of debate. Here is the final round of the 2018 national championship (starting at 4:05) on the resolution, “On balance, the benefits of United States Participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement outweigh the consequences.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MUnyLbeu7qU&feature=youtu.be
British Parliamentary debate is another form of debate that, in my experience, is more civil and less “game-able” than other forms of debate (though Harrison D disagrees below, with specifics about its pitfalls). One key difference is that, while Public Forum allows and encourages debaters to spend weeks researching and debating a single specific resolution, Parliamentary debate typically a involves generalized preparation on a subject or theme and only reveals the specific resolution a few minutes before the round begins. Because of this, I think Public Forum is more educational for debaters, but Parliamentary is probably easier to run a one-off tournament because debaters won’t be expected to have done as much preparation.
Extemporaneous Speaking is another category involving less preparation, where participants are asked a question about current affairs or politics and have 30 minutes to prepare a 7 minute off-the-cuff speech. There is no “opponent” in Extemp, perhaps limiting the level of discourse, but it might be possible to easily introduce EA-related topics because participants are expected to be conversant in a wide range of topic areas.
On the whole, I’m very glad to see this EA debate tournament being run, and would be very excited to see further work bringing EA topics into debate. I can understand why many people might find some debate tactics toxic and counterproductive, particularly in categories like Policy and LD, but I do think this is the failure of specific categories and tactics and not an indictment of all adversarial debate. Learning the best arguments for both sides of a resolution certainly teaches a bit of an “arguments as soldiers” approach, but I believe the greater effect is to lead debaters to real truths about which arguments are stronger and improve their personal understanding of the issues. In future EA debate events, I would only suggest that organizers be very conscious of these standards and norms when choosing a specific category of debate.
I appreciate this nuanced comparison between formats. I increase my estimation of the goodness of the EA debate project, because this introduces a new pathway to victory:
The creation of an EA debate format, which can be designed against the backdrop of all the poisoned formats to encourage skills and norms more like those we want to develop.
It does feel like the general period for research before the debate would work well for these topics. Do you know if any format has a mechanism for awarding points on the grounds of agreeing with the opponent’s points, or otherwise acknowledging when arguments or data weigh against you?
I think that the culture of British Parliamentary has made it significantly less game-y and more civil than most if not all other formats of collegiate debate, including both prepared formats (e.g., Policy Debate, Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum) and limited preparation formats (e.g., other forms of parli such as American Parliamentary).
I think that the limited topic prep nature of parliamentary debate makes those formats significantly less game-y and more civil than most other formats of collegiate debate.
My main issue with BP is really just two individual characteristics in the format that represent stark differences from the format I did in high school (American Parli, in the Stoa league): the 4-teams-of-2 (instead of 2v2) combined with the lack of access to published sources on the internet when in prep. Really, most if not all of the main issues I highlighted in my comment relate to the first thing, which I think is more fundamental.
So ultimately, I’m not trying to compare BP to policy debate, nor am I trying to compare it to the actual (culturally-driven) practice of American Parli in collegiate leagues (which I’m not as familiar with), it’s really just me comparing it to what I think an ideal format would be when given a decent culture that isn’t so acceptive of gamification.
...that video is deeply absurd, and I am caught between revulsion and laughter. They are clearly way past the point where there is even a gesture at real usefulness; this might be the most heavily gamed thing I have ever seen.
However, if the video is an example I am confident that this activity can’t do any real harm to our objectives. Who could do this with even the pretense of thinking they would talk to people in the real world that way? It’s just a verbal luge.
Yeah, it’s kinda hilarious. Speaking so fast that your opponents can’t follow your arguments and therefore lose the round is common practice in some forms of competitive debate. But in other debate categories, using this tactic would immediately lose you the round. In my own personal experience of high school debate, the quality of competitive debate depends very heavily on the particular category of debate.
The video above is Policy Debate, the oldest form of debate which degenerated decades ago into unintelligible speed reading and arguments that every policy would result in worldwide nuclear annihilation. In the 1980s, the National Speech and Debate Association instituted a new form of debate called Lincoln Douglas that attempted to reground debate in commonsense questions about moral values; but LD has also fallen victim to speed reading and even galaxy-brained “kritiks” arguing that the structure of debate itself is racist or sexist and therefore that the round should be abandoned.
Public Forum debate, invented in 2002 as an antidote to Lincoln Douglas, is IMO a very healthy and educational form of debate. Here is the final round of the 2018 national championship (starting at 4:05) on the resolution, “On balance, the benefits of United States Participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement outweigh the consequences.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MUnyLbeu7qU&feature=youtu.be
British Parliamentary debate is another form of debate that, in my experience, is more civil and less “game-able” than other forms of debate (though Harrison D disagrees below, with specifics about its pitfalls). One key difference is that, while Public Forum allows and encourages debaters to spend weeks researching and debating a single specific resolution, Parliamentary debate typically a involves generalized preparation on a subject or theme and only reveals the specific resolution a few minutes before the round begins. Because of this, I think Public Forum is more educational for debaters, but Parliamentary is probably easier to run a one-off tournament because debaters won’t be expected to have done as much preparation.
Extemporaneous Speaking is another category involving less preparation, where participants are asked a question about current affairs or politics and have 30 minutes to prepare a 7 minute off-the-cuff speech. There is no “opponent” in Extemp, perhaps limiting the level of discourse, but it might be possible to easily introduce EA-related topics because participants are expected to be conversant in a wide range of topic areas.
On the whole, I’m very glad to see this EA debate tournament being run, and would be very excited to see further work bringing EA topics into debate. I can understand why many people might find some debate tactics toxic and counterproductive, particularly in categories like Policy and LD, but I do think this is the failure of specific categories and tactics and not an indictment of all adversarial debate. Learning the best arguments for both sides of a resolution certainly teaches a bit of an “arguments as soldiers” approach, but I believe the greater effect is to lead debaters to real truths about which arguments are stronger and improve their personal understanding of the issues. In future EA debate events, I would only suggest that organizers be very conscious of these standards and norms when choosing a specific category of debate.
I appreciate this nuanced comparison between formats. I increase my estimation of the goodness of the EA debate project, because this introduces a new pathway to victory:
The creation of an EA debate format, which can be designed against the backdrop of all the poisoned formats to encourage skills and norms more like those we want to develop.
It does feel like the general period for research before the debate would work well for these topics. Do you know if any format has a mechanism for awarding points on the grounds of agreeing with the opponent’s points, or otherwise acknowledging when arguments or data weigh against you?
Just to clarify my position:
I think that the culture of British Parliamentary has made it significantly less game-y and more civil than most if not all other formats of collegiate debate, including both prepared formats (e.g., Policy Debate, Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum) and limited preparation formats (e.g., other forms of parli such as American Parliamentary).
I think that the limited topic prep nature of parliamentary debate makes those formats significantly less game-y and more civil than most other formats of collegiate debate.
My main issue with BP is really just two individual characteristics in the format that represent stark differences from the format I did in high school (American Parli, in the Stoa league): the 4-teams-of-2 (instead of 2v2) combined with the lack of access to published sources on the internet when in prep. Really, most if not all of the main issues I highlighted in my comment relate to the first thing, which I think is more fundamental. So ultimately, I’m not trying to compare BP to policy debate, nor am I trying to compare it to the actual (culturally-driven) practice of American Parli in collegiate leagues (which I’m not as familiar with), it’s really just me comparing it to what I think an ideal format would be when given a decent culture that isn’t so acceptive of gamification.