Category: debate

Potshot #2

Menick is reaching a flawed conclusion, in my opinion, not because his reasoning is unsound — try not to faint of shock — but because his underlying assumptions are.

Assumption #1: My pref sheet is based on paradigms.

Hah, as if.   The nether regions of the pref sheet are sometimes based on a reading, or the mere existence, of a paradigm.   The meat of the pref sheet, however, is based on first hand experience with judges.   We keep a written log of our RFDs in our team Dropbox; I read those regularly to adjust our pref sheets, because that’s actual data, and not just random assertions and opinions like the paradigm represents.     I’ve never read the paradigms of our top judges; I rely instead on being in the room when they say “I vote on theory” and ignore their assertion that they never will.

As such I find judges, the ones I prefer anyway, rather predictable.   When my debaters lose a round, they get an L; when they win one, they get a W, and we can talk about how to make the former turn into the latter.     99 times out of 100 I can figure out why they lost a given judge and most of those times, it’s because they ignored something I told them to do beforehand.   The other 1 time, the pref sheet probably changes.   My pref sheet isn’t about converting Ls into Ws; it’s about winning when we do win the debate, and being able to coach beforehand.

Remember, señor Menick, that the folks you’re hearing from are those coming into tab suggesting that you find them a better panel, as if you hadn’t already thought to try.   It takes someone rather unfamiliar with the way things work to imagine that tab rooms put out horrendous panels and withhold good ones until asked.   In short, you’re hearing only from people who don’t know what they’re doing, and drawing general conclusions from that data.   Talk about your flimsy evidence.

Assumption #2: Good pref sheets can win all the rounds!!!

A good chunk of rounds are yours no matter the panel; a good chunk of rounds likewise are impossible to win.   If you’re a senior with ten bids against a sophomore with ten cards, you’re going to win unless you do something tragic, even in front of a 1-5 judge.   The pref sheet isn’t about that; it’s about helping you in the marginal debates.   Which debates are marginal depends on what your level is; a younger team should have different prefs than an older.

Assumption #3: The W/L is the only concern of the pref sheet

This assumption is the most important of the set.   The number I hang on a judge isn’t entirely about the likelihood they’ll vote for us.   It’s just as much informed by the type of debate that judge would like to hear.   If you don’t like debating theory, then you de-pref the theoriest of the theory judges, even if one or two of them is likely to vote for you anyway.   The aim here is not to win rounds you would have lost otherwise, but to have debates you find enjoyable and are prepared for.

NStar was a mighty LARPer, and was most at home with DAs and CPs and such.   If some framework-happy sophomore in her first varsity tournament came along, and hit him round 2 in front of a 1-2 judge in her favor, a judge who positively loves philosophical framework debate, she’d still be toast.     But she could argue the kind of debate she wanted, and he could not, despite being better at it.   So even with the W, a harm is caused.   It’s sometimes an unavoidable harm, but it’s one the pref system is designed to minimize; and it’s one that blunt, imprecise tiers minimize less well.

Note that it is not a harm that NStar had to debate framework; it’s simply relatively unfair that one debater got to steer the debate into her own home turf and the other didn’t.   A better outcome is a judge who likes yet a third style of debate, and so both debaters have to adapt equally.   That is, after all, the idea behind mutuality, and an argument for the maximal mutuality possible.

At a wider level, too, I’ll pref differently for younger debaters.   Some judges are not as good for us stylistically, but they’re great educators and can give excellent feedback.   I won’t stake a junior or senior’s last bid round on being able to adapt to them in front of their favoritest debaters; but I might take the chance to get a good post-round for a student who is going to lose those rounds anyway.

Assumption #4: Team’s opinions don’t matter

Take away everything else, denounce it as the foul lies of a dirty Papist or what have you; and you’re still left with a final thought: the perception of fairness sometimes matters as much as the reality.   If a rating is entirely about unfounded imprecise opinions — which I would assert might be true for some people’s pref sheets but isn’t of mine — those opinions still matter.   A kid walking into a debate where she feels she has no shot to win because of the judge, likely will not, even if she actually had a decent shot after all.

There are a lot of reasons to de-prefer a judge; there’s the judge who might actually like your style a great deal but freaks out out, or the college freshman judge who you have a crush on and can’t string two words together in front of.   There are a host of considerations that go into a pref sheet, and some of the are opaque to the tabber; if we’re going to have the tool at all, it may as well be as good as you can make it.

RFD

Finally, to steal a page from debate; there is no offense in the round for less precise categories.   I’ve given a half dozen or so positive reasons for more precision; thus far all I’ve heard in reply is doubt whether the precision achieves a real effect.   But without any affirmative reason to prefer blunter categories, who cares?   Why is a tournament better for having 4 categories instead of 8 or 12 or 16?   All I’ve heard argued is defense: doubt that the 8 category tournament is better than the 4 category one.   There’s no argument on my flow of anything being harmed by having smaller, more numerous categories.   Sure, an 8 tier system will have more 1-2 matchups, but if it makes you feel better, all those 1-2 matchups would be 1-1s in a 4 tier system; and there’ll be fewer of them on the pairing than there would be hiding underneath those 1-1s.   Better for the debaters and the judges both; though perhaps worse for perfectionists tabbers.   Speaking as a perfectionist tabber, surely my sensibilities are an unimportant factor here.

In absence of offense for the larger category pref sheet then, I’m sticking to, and advocating for, more of ’em.

I’ll have my tiers and eat them too

Menick contends that fewer tiers are fine, thanks.   I’m definitely in the more-is-better school with categories.   Fewer categories needlessly throws away information that could be used by tab to make more mutual pairings, is why.

I think the point of difference is that he   defines a “mutual” matchup as a matchup where the two judges are in the same category, and anything else as imperfect.   But the real picture is murkier than that; simply making the categories larger and thereby forcing me to rate more judges in a category does not magically make all those judges equally preferred to my debaters.

Suppose one tournament has 4 categories and another 8; and the first delivers 100% mutual matchups, and the second has a number of one-offs on the pairing.   The second tournament will have delivered the more mutual judging.   The 4-category tournament will have many more matchups that are just as non-mutual as those 8 category one-offs.   They will only nominally be mutual to the eye of the tabber. There will be more of them, too, as the tab system no longer knows which matchups would have been 1-2s in a 8 category system, and so it can do nothing to minimize them.

When you place a 1-2 judge in an 8 category tournament, you know what you’re doing and you know there’s no better choice.   If that same tournament used 4 tiers, then you might place that same judge into the same debate, despite there being a more mutual option which is concealed by the broader, less precise categories.   The pairing looks prettier, but at the expense of the missing data which might make it fairer.   Choosing tier sizes should not be about satisfying the OCD of tab staff.

Pairing mutual matchups is becoming an automatic process, and there’s little reason to deprive this process of additional data.   The point of expanding to more categories while necessarily growing more permissive of one-off matchups is not to increase the numbers of those matchups, but to minimize the number of hidden ones.   So from a tabbing perspective there is little defense in my mind to using blunter, less precise categories.

It may be there’s a limit past which coaches are unable to make distinctions in the judging pool.   That limit is higher than 9, for me: I certainly could have filled out a pref sheet at Lex with clear distinctions between tiers; all my 1s would have been preferred to the 2s, all 2s over the 3s, etc.   The distinctions would have carried real information well down my sheet, and if I were going to the tournament, I’d want the tab staff to have that information in pairing my judging.

College debate has operated for some years under the premise that the limit of reasonable distinctions does not exist, and rates judging ordinally at most tournaments.   I think the high school community largely hasn’t followed suit only because our software wouldn’t permit it, not for any inherent reason.   At worst, finer distinctions do no harm; if you really don’t have any point of difference between 6s and 7s on your sheet, then just randomly assign them between the two ratings.   Given that I am a coach who makes those distinctions, I don’t see why I should sacrifice them because another coach does not.

So in short, I’m a computer programmer, and a data person, and I don’t see much value in sacrificing more data for less.

A thing to remember

Last year was rough for the LD community; we had flying accusations, acrimony, and internet attacks which by their nature afford few defenses.  A good number of people, both debaters and coaches, were attacked online by anonymous voices for things they did not do, which is wrong.   A good number of people were attacked for things they did do, but since the targets were mostly minors or educators and the forum was the internet, that too is wrong.

I stopped writing a lot last year, largely because of these conditions.   To speak up was to align oneself, taking a side where there should be no sides.   I am averse to conflict, and get along with just about everyone in LD.   That’s not by accident; it’s someone I have chosen to be.  I don’t dismiss people who do things I dislike, or even condemn; instead I try to find out their reasons.  Plenty of bad, unethical actions can at least be understood, if not forgiven, once you know the villain’s story.   Plenty of villains, especially at a young age, can be persuaded out of it, helped by the compassion and concern of their “enemies”.

After all, life is just a collection of more or less broken individuals; the best we can do sometimes is try not to harm each other with our jagged edges.   A lot of folks failed to avoid that last year, but many of them were young people with problems of their own, stories of their own, and our debate community failed them as much as it failed their targets.

So in retrospect, it was ill judged on my part to stay out of it.  That was as active a choice as speaking out, after all.  If all the responsible voices are silent, then only irresponsible people speak.  As a result, we never really resolved anything in LD.  We simply outlasted the issues by letting the students who served as lightning rods, unfairly or otherwise, graduate and move on.  I fear we have no better handle on how to address or prevent such things in the future.   That is our shame, and should be our challenge.

Collegiate policy debate is going through a much louder and more fundamental dispute this year.   The divide between teams running arguments based primarily on critical race theory and similar literature, and those who concentrate on the more traditional government plan/disadvantage debate, has grown sharper and more acrimonious.   There’s been active talk about splitting an already small world in half.   The divide is mostly driven by coaches and adults: the debaters seem to be mostly trying to keep their heads down and win rounds.   The nature of how their preference sheets work mean that while the “right wing” and “left wing” debaters regularly confront each other in rounds, their judges and coaches do not, and so the judges and coaches both seem uniquely uncompromising and hostile throughout this past fall.  They view each other at some level as simply enemy generals.

I’m about to be thrust into the middle of it, as I travel to LA next month to tab the USC and CSU Fullerton tournaments, together a “major” tournament swing, occupying the same space an octos bid tournament does in high school.   I will mostly keep a low profile, as it’s not my world; they’re a userbase for Tabroom to me, and I have no direct stake in their dispute.   I appreciate the value of traditional policy debate, even as I laugh at some of its excesses like the politics DA and the consult counterplan.   I can appreciate the need for boundaries like topicality, but at the same time, I cannot help but be persuaded and compelled by the criticisms of the society and debate itself which the “left wing” teams level.   I too am an outsider, though I do not wear that on my skin as others must.   Instead, I have to tell people, which is sometimes an asset, and other times a burden.

Times like last year in LD, and this year in college policy, are when debate disappoints.   When an activity dedicated to discourse and communication fails to address its own issues in a productive forum, but resorts to ad hominems and vitriol, online and in whispered conversations, we have failed in our mission on face.   We contradict our own purpose.

In both instances, the coaches and powers of debate have forgotten something about the nature of tournaments.   They forget that we cannot, and do not, educate only our own teams.   I am your students’ teacher too, and you teach mine.   At tournaments I teach Lexington, but I also teach Bronx, Scarsdale, Whitman, Greenhill, Hockaday, Harvard-Westlake, PV Peninsula… as their coaches teach Lexington.

Debaters can and should compete against one another; one of the secret sauces of debate is that the competitive aspect encourages debaters to use what they learn actively, instead of just repeating it undigested, as on a standardized test.   They have to assimilate information well enough to win rounds on it, and that teaches them a wider body of material with more depth than nearly any high school class.   Debaters can challenge and contend with each other all they want, and not harm debate itself; their competitive drive is our engine.

But coaches should not.   Coaches should see themselves as responsible for the whole of debate, not just their portion of it.   We realize this when prompted, and pay lip service to it occasionally, but do not remember it enough.   Smearing a debater online is a competitive tactic, meant to make the debater less successful; it doesn’t actually address any negative behavior, real or imagined, that debater may have committed.   Attacking judges online for voting on topicality and framework, or for failing to do so, is a competitive tactic, concerned about the wins instead of the message.

In the end, when we start viewing some coaches as “them” and not all part of the grand “us”, be it because of debating style, camps, or worst of all because of race, gender or identity, then we have ceased to be coaches.   The only “us” and “them” is the line between a coach and a debater.   The debaters should play the game, play it hard and fast and to win.   However, as coaches, we lose the right to make winning supersede our responsibility to debate itself, and each others’ debaters.  A good coach is not always a successful coach; and a coach who only aims for success is a bad one.

If I could say something at the start of each tournament, I’d say: be colleagues first and antagonists second.     Say something helpful every tournament to your biggest rival, your least favorite team, and the debater whose style is most unlike your own.   If a debater is upset, ask why; if a debater wins a big round, congratulate them no matter who they defeated to do it, and no matter if you agree with the judges’ decisions.   Wish your opponent good luck before you try and defeat them.   In short: live up to this contest we have built together, and cannot have without each other.

A Theory of Justice: the Musical!

I saw A Theory of Justice: The Musical! on its last run at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a show bound to appeal to debaters on the title alone; though I weep for the state of modern LD that one of my stronger junior debaters asked “What’s that a reference to?” in response. LD was derailed a little from it’s usual ground a few years ago, not by the influx of policy debate styles I think, but because we had a slate of resolutions focused on individual moral choices, not state functions. When that happened, the basic prep work of a lot of debaters shifted from the concepts of justice and liberty, focused on the state, to deontology and personal morality, which is different literature altogether. Rawls and his ilk were left behind; we have LD debaters who don’t know what the social contract is. Someday, someone will “discover” it anew and present it excitedly to a bemused coaching staff as the Next Big Thing.

Until then, the Musical!. It chronicles the struggle of philosopher John Rawls to either invent the next big theory that both synthesizes and revives political philosophy, or get laid, depending on your point of view. There’s this girl, you see, a student he names Fairness, that he pursues by trying to concoct a Grand Theory of political philosophy. To do so, he travels through a Time Vortex that the physics department conveniently opened in Harvard Quad, whatever that is. He then consults with the various surprisingly musically inclined philosophers of the past.

The production values were, shall we say gently, collegiate. The vortex was a rotating gel, and the set was simply blank with two large veils hung from the back. Yes, veils. The lighting was full of holes; actors’ faces were often in the dark, overzealous use of spotlights, that sort of thing. But I’m sure the lighting hang was just a standard one common to six shows in the same venue, so there’s only so much you can do. The singing was one of those shows attempting to make up in volume what it lacked in other qualities, and the dancing looked exactly like a bunch of painfully white Oxford students trying to dance.

Rawls was a bit too hamfisted in his delivery. Sure, suspension of disbelief wasn’t exactly on the agenda anyway, but Rawls just was flat and kind of broke the veneer of believability sometimes with overdoing some lines. Nozick was written as his archnemesis, chasing Rawls through time to prevent the creation of a theory that might reconcile Americans to income redistribution and taxes. He’s marching at the orders of his dominatrix mistress, Ayn Rand. That character was more fun, by nature; he was played by an emaciated Robert Pattinson stunt double with good comic timing and great Sinister Looksâ„¢.   Nozick was fun as a classic cartoon villain: he cackled a lot but was ultimately harmless.

The rest of the cast was ensemble. The utilitarians were a barbershop quartet, a cute idea, though their song didn’t sound at all like barbershop, though maybe only Americans could tell? The best song was Rousseau, in the guise of an aggressive French ladies’ man who steals Rawls’ love interest away for a scene or two. And the show stealer, of course, was Immanuel Kant, whose entrance late in the show as the six foot tall Deontological Fairy Godmother with a baritone voice as powerful as a howitzer helps Rawls cut through the crap and reach his final a-HA! moment.

But this ain’t Rent. Technical brilliance and magnificent music would have been wasted on the idea. It was supposed to be funny and cute, and it was. The humor was all in-jokes, given in full grand elitism without any hints or clues for the civilians who may be in the audience. It dropped little hints and jokes about how terribly long and unreadable Rawls’ great book was going to be. “I know! I’ll put all the conclusions in the first three chapters!” he says at one point to Fairness, who expresses doubt about the idea. Socrates is a live marionette sitting on Plato’s lap, saying whatever he wants, in front of a crowd of philosopher students who are collectively gayer than the Bronx Science coaching staff. Towards the end, the Veil of Ignorance is revealed as a device that removes your personal selfish motivations; when Ayn Rand is pulled behind it she promptly disappears as there’s nothing else to her.

If you get these jokes, the show is fun. If you don’t, I have no idea what you’d think just happened. So it’s not for everyone, but it was hilarious enough for me.

The silent

There’s a kid on your team.  He’s a sophomore who did really well in his novice year.  He came close to breaking at a finals bid tournament last week; just missed on speaks.  He’s active and engaged in practice, and helps his teammates out.  He loves debate, signs up for every tournament, and helps his teammates cut cards and write cases.  In brainstorming sessions, he’s the one you have to restrain, to give others the chance to participate too, even though his ideas are admittedly usually better.

Today, that kid doesn’t speak.  His parents are divorced after three years of his mother using too much makeup to cover the marks.  His father is wealthy, but his family now struggles to get by, because his mother chose safety over prosperity.  She didn’t do it on her own account; she only mustered the bravery to leave when the father started to hit her son, too.

Debate was his outlet, his way of expressing himself.  Now he can’t open his mouth without risking tears.  So today, he is silent.  Tomorrow, he will drop from the next tournament; sorry, something came up.  Next year, he’ll be one of those kids who just lost interest, or had other priorities.  It happens all the time, nothing to be remarked on.

There’s a judge at your tournament.  She’s a senior in college.  She is a highly preferred judge who is regularly on deep out round panels.   She’s smart, gives good critiques, and usually the debaters she drops feel they were fairly treated.   And, like one quarter of all women her age, she was sexually assaulted.   It was at a party on campus two years ago, and was by her own boyfriend.  She told few people, and had to keep her assailant’s name private, for fear her father would be sent to jail after murdering the bastard.

She sits in the back of the room, listening as negative debaters accuse those who resort to vigilantism of moral cowardice and rights violations, because they need to cover the flow.  She listens to affirmative debaters argue that she is irreparably irrational and so should not be held to moral account for her subsequent actions.  She barely pays attention, because for the fifth round in a row, she is mostly trying very hard to not break down.  She’s not concentrating on the topicality debate; she’s thinking of that ex boyfriend, and wondering if she shouldn’t have spoken his name to her father after all.

And in the RFD, she is silent.  She has nothing to say.   Even the winner comes away baffled.   She uncharacteristically begs off judging early.   After this tournament, she will never judge LD again.  She’s graduating college, getting a real job soon; it happens, all the time.

Domestic violence is a crime that silences people.  Victims cannot bear to speak of it.   Family are your closest people; closer than friends, than colleagues, than anyone else.  We tend to protect our family’s confidences; and abusers hide under that protection, using the shame of breaking family trust to tie their victims down.  Victims carry guilt, and self-blame; they fear that leaving would break the family, that it would ruin their children’s lives for their own selfish needs.   They fear that even speaking out will cause the world to reject them, and their own extended families.   It often does.   This crime is silent.   Even when these long nightmares do end and people escape, the silence continues, because speaking of it at that point only stirs up memories of that shame and fear.

This topic is therefore as undebatable and harmful as the mosque topic; it asks some people to take positions that they simply cannot bear to take; and puts up for debate an area that the game of debate is ill suited for; the emotional content is too high, and the intellectual content overwhelmed by it.   But this attack is crueler still, because the targets are concealed, and may wish to stay so. You don’t know who that sophomore boy is.  You don’t know who that college judge is.  They are silent.  Millions of adult women, and more than a few men, walk around with this burden.  Millions of children grew up in houses that are homes in only the barest sense of the word.   If your team is large enough, it includes some of these children.   If your team is small, and fortunate, nonetheless your next tournament will include some of these children and judges.

But unlike most Muslims, the last group a debate topic called out in this manner, you cannot tell who they are, and you cannot even fairly ask.

The topic asks us to consider if domestic violence is so horrible that cold, deliberate murder, the ultimate immoral act, may nonetheless be a permitted response.  If deliberate murder is even possibly justified by domestic violence — and if it isn’t, how is this debatable? — why are its many victims, millions in number, supposed to keep their emotions in check while debating?   Deliberate murder is possibly in bounds, but hysterics because switch-side debate pits you against yourself isn’t?   And how can people make objective decisions, both in strategy and in judging, if their subjective pasts are so strong?

What happens to the kid who at age 10 dreamed of killing his father to rescue his mother, and now must excoriate his most private secret dream whenever he flips neg?  What happens to the college judge who felt so wrong in her impulse to seek revenge that she stopped herself in a supreme act of will, but now has that choice yanked out into the spotlight by an affirmative case?  And how can you ever know if the person in the back of the room, or across the table, isn’t that sophomore boy, isn’t that college judge?

Does the judge have an obligation in the name of debate to disclose her personal story?   Do you think she should put it in her frigging paradigm?

I know that sophomore boy.  I know that college judge.  Their details are masked, but their stories are true.  I know dozens others like them, inside and outside of debate.   Very few will speak out for themselves.   It’s not worth coming out as a victim and branding yourself with that shame publicly to make a point in debate.   So this topic, too, has silenced them, and banished them from an arena where there should be no silence.  We won’t notice them, because they will remain silent; drift off, leave debate behind them; they will appear to be part of a normal pattern.   And next year, we will again bemoan that few girls do high level debate, and wonder why not.

This issue isn’t about the circuit versus locals.  This uneasiness isn’t about wanting the targeted killing topic.   I’d trust a monkey with a dartboard to pick any of the remaining ones gladly.   It’s not about me; I’m not a victim, my parents never even argued much, much less hit each other.   There has been domestic abuse in my extended family, but not repeated; it was ended quickly in the one case I know of.   But I also know this topic will silence voices, silence debaters, and in doing so, just add more suffocating layers to the silence at the heart of the crime itself.   I want no part of it.