palmer

Committees and nonsense

So once again, an NFL topic committee has caused havoc in debate, presenting us this gem for January 2008:

Resolved: That, by 2040, the federal government should mandate that all new passenger vehicles and light trucks sold in the United States be powered by alternative fuels.

This topic has….problems. That 2040 date, while factually significant, distorts the debates. Kids will argue “Too soon! Not soon enough!” and there will be little way to weight the evidence on either side. Additionally, that phrase, “alternative fuels” is just begging for counterplans and whatnot. It’s also uncomfortably close to the October topic, which was interesting at first, but tended to devolve into boring harms-wars with little interesting, original thought and creative debate.

There’s finally no honest way to predict the pace of scientific discovery, which this topic implicitly requires. I work in the sciences, and I have a hard time budgeting from year to year; if I knew exactly what we’re going to do next year, we wouldn’t have to do it. If my company can’t see six months ahead, how the hell are we supposed to forecast 32 years from now? Eegads, 32 years from now I’ll be older than Admiral Menick. Or we’ll all be consciousnesses floating on the grid by then.

So it stinks.

But what I’m more interested in is how the stinker was born. What has six or more legs and no brain? A committee. Committee creation of things like debate topics can be dangerous for a number of reasons. The topic passes a lot of the tests that a committee can institute; they hold internal debates, conduct research, give broad consideration. So presumably this topic passed those tests. But it, like the social networks topic, fails the “Ugh!” test. The Ugh! test is simple: does someone who wasn’t part of the decision process first react by saying “Ugh!” The reaction of my team — and me — to this topic was overwhelmingly in favor of Ugh!. It appears the Admiral and other interwebs agree.

Committees have a hard time figuring out the Ugh! test. First, committees are bad at creative endeavors to begin with; once social dynamics set in, good expression and daring ideas are dampened out, even if the committee is striving not to allow that to happen. I always prefer extemp topics written by one person I trust over those written en masse by a committee. Committee internal decisions also depend on a lot of extraneous factors; the length of their meetings, schedules, difficulties of remote communications.

But most of all, committee members grow too familiar with the topics and the research behind them to have an accurate “Ugh!” reaction. They work too hard, simply put. I’m sure they start with a list of topics, and give each one a fair shake, researching it out and producing cases. They then debate the sides against each other, and after finishing all that, pick the topic that seems to lead to the best debate.

It feels unfair and irresponsible to just reject topics as losers at an early stage. Topics often have more meat to them than is first apparent. However, once a committee has dug into a topic with research and testing, the “Ugh!” reaction is lost. They’re committed; they’ve spent effort now. The shouldn’t develop “Ugh!” topics at all in the first place, but instead the workflow actually ensures that Ugh! happens a lot.

Why not work past Ugh! though? Why not dig under the surface for that hidden lesson behind an apparently repellent topic? Well, PF is an “ugh!” driven activity. With lay judging, and students who are encouraged to develop broad knowledge rather than the depth that Policy encourages, “ugh!” is enough to taint an entire round, or an entire month. Ugh also proves prophetic.

See, the committee members are adults, and worse than that, they’re debate coaches. They are experts in how to argue things. Students are not. Teenagers can be breathtaking in their ability to come up with bad arguments; usually it’s the combination of a sharp, creative brain that possesses mature processing ability but an immature data set to compare ideas against. Adults may automatically understand a bad idea to be unmitigated BS, but teenagers lack that prior knowledge, and will often confuse bad ideas with creativity. They all think they’ve invented the square wheel for the first time, and that it’s a terrific idea.

The PF committee can have a good debate on just about any topic, but the point isn’t whether they can have good debates on it, but whether the average kids will have good debates on it. An “Ugh!” topic encourages debaters to find novel ways around perceived difficulties in the resolution. Some will succeed and find the ground that the adults on the committee found. However, many others will not. Generally speaking, when debaters strike out on their own, novel territory, all hell breaks loose. Sooner or later you have 16 year olds sagely advising me that every time I fill my gas tank, ten kittens die in Tibet. Or some crackpot running Mr Fusion.

A good debate topic will shepherd these young minds into good debates by presenting solid, top-shelf, interesting, and yes, sometimes obvious arguments that will appeal to them and teach them new things at the same time. A topic that lacks first-pass obvious arguments, like this one, will fail to teach a lot of students. The judges won’t understand the ground on the debate without having to have it be laboriously explained — the phrase “Why 2040?” will be appearing on ballots coast to coast. And the kids will hare off in wrong directions, and talk past each other all the time. And many many kids will never understand it at all.

There’s an easy way to avoid “Ugh!” topics; show the final topics around to people not on the committee, and see if they recoil in horror. However, often times such committees in forensics are more informed by a passionate effort to make a process best for competition instead of education. Many coaches believe the worst thing a process can do is give one team an “unfair” advantage, such as knowing a topic a week ahead of time, and releasing a topic earlier to wider audience makes a leak more likely. I doubt it’d be much of an advantage, and I’d prefer that to this nonsense. Even better, a completely open process is guaranteed to be fair. And I know many PF people are trying hard to prevent the event from going the way of LD and Policy, but too many of their attempts to prevent LDish behavior frustrate PF from reaching its full potential, and this certainly is one of them.

So now what do I do? I’ve seen what bad topics do; we’ve had plenty of them this year. The PF September topic was OK but not especially current; the October topic was this Jan topic done better, and it still was a harmswar; the November topic did succeed in teaching the kids a lot about the French health system, which was good, but then in the end they realized that the French health system is actually pretty good and Con got very difficult to argue, which was bad.

Then came December.

Social networks failed the “ugh!” test and the research test both; social network problems are anecdotal, not statistical, and never can be separated from preexisting social problems, which would probably have manifested themselves another way absent Facebook. And even though nervous, jittery school administrators block them the world over, social networks are also utterly uncontroversial among teenagers themselves; they’re part of the world they live in. Can a fish argue against water?

As a coach this is frustrating. I’ve enjoyed teaching only 2 of the 5 topics so far this year, and beyond that, neither of those 2 lead to particularly good debates. Without a really good topic these kids can sink their teeth into, I’m going to start losing kids to the math team. The math team is lovely, but that’s a shame, if this is the reason. I’m really irritated too that the NFL doesn’t even make a show of asking my preferences, and that of my fellow coaches; in typical NFL fashion, the topic committee is appointed in secret from on high (as far as I know) and it picks the topics without a open vote of the members.

Now, open voting can lead to stinker topics too, like the LD Sept/Oct topic. Yale’s LD numbers were down, especially in JV, and I feel that was probably related to the poor topic; Yale’s numbers in every other event were stable or up from the previous year.

However, I have little say at the table to make any of that heard. There’s no open way to gain a voice at the PF table. I’m sure there is a way, but good luck finding it on that atrocity of a website. Even if there were, in my experience the NFL views you solely by how many points & degrees you control. Assistant coaches like myself simply don’t get much traction with them, no matter what I’m in charge of. A lot of coaching is done by non-head coaches, so that’s one of the big reasons the NFL is consistently out of touch. But I’m also not just a coach. I’m a tournament director, and run lots of tournaments. That may not gain me any traction with the NFL, but that in turn means they don’t have much traction with me and my tournaments.

Kids on the pfdebate.org forums are bitching and talking about not bothering to debate in January, and I have a hard time blaming them. I was seriously tempted then to just abandon the stinker topic that was Sept/Oct for Yale, and run a tournament topic, and decided not to; it was in the middle of the topic’s lifespan, and then I’d have to come up with my own. Given the numbers Yale got, I partially regret that — though there’s no way to know if a tournament-specific topic would have lowered them more.

PF topics are more ephemeral, and so can be messed with more. I wonder if the time has come to just say “screw it” and run a tournament topic for Columbia outside the NFL. Or say that Columbia will run the February topic, which will be out by then. I like the subversiveness; I feel the NFL needs some tweaking, since there’s no visible effort to address, never mind fix, the endemic and consistent problems with its newest event. Maybe I could trigger a review if I start just screwing with the event on my own. After all, illegitimate systems deserved to be worked around, as we’re doing with the LD Modest Novice topic, all outside the NFL’s auspices.

And I can just up and do it, with no one else to answer to, the wellspring of creativity itself.

I think I’m going to head on over to pfdebate.org and see what happens.

NFL Finals

So I was thinking a little about the experience of NFL Finals. I saw three main finals (US Extemp, HI, and LD) and two supplemental finals (Storytelling and Editorial Commentary). I was officially present for the Oratory final, but Oratory tends to bore me to tears, so I opened up the laptop and discreetly caught up with my email during that one. I won’t apologize for this; until the event becomes something other than 70 minutes of pop philosophy, moral exhortations and poignant stories from a bunch of 17 year olds, I have little reason to listen if I’m not judging.

Anyhoo, the supplemental events are more or less usual final rounds that you could find at any regional tournament: they feature an appropriate but not overwhelming amount of ceremony, with a fair but not huge number of spectators, who are likely mostly drawn from the local leagues who have a student in the round. The students performed well, together with the vague sense of disjoint oddness that comes from supplemental events — no one does these things full time, and so no one really knows what they’re doing, or even what they’re supposed to be doing. But that’s fine, and they entertain, so we survive.

However, main event finals are an entirely different kettle of fish. The main final hall can hold around 3,000-5,000 people typically, and it’ll go from completely packed for the interp finals, to nearly a third full for the early morning Extemp finals. It becomes clear from the start that the NFL treats them as a Big Friggin’ Deal; they opened the day with an Elvis, they pack the judging panels with all sorts of people they want to impress and suck up to, and so on.

The effect, however, is distinctly harmful to the competition itself. In the US extemp final, the first three kids were able to handle it decently well; Becca, who was second speaker, was there last year, so she certainly didn’t have nearly the same epic tower of nerves going; this was familiar turf. The last three speakers, however, all looked like they were being led to their own executions, and they had to pull the trigger. Poor kids; nothing really sets you up for the experience of NFL finals except for making NFL finals, and since I imagine that most NFL finalists are first-timers in their senior year, there’s not much opportunity to gain experience. The last three kids basically forced their way through their final speeches, which were not very good. I imagine that for them to qualify for the final in the first place, each of them was a far better speaker than they demonstrated in the round; I bet their semifinal speeches were a great deal better.

The main event semis all happen at roughly the same time as one another, and they’re in normal classrooms with about 50 spectators at the most. Going from 50 spectators in a classroom to 1,000 in an auditorium in the course of one jump, and add to that the pressure of it being The National Final, and one grows surprised that more kids don’t wet themselves as soon as they set foot on stage. In some events, like Dramatic Interp, the effect is catastrophic; these pieces are designed to be performed in small, intimate settings and lose much of their punch when flung onto the stage. In Extemp, the kids don’t have their script and their memorized moves to cling to; they still have to make it up. The semis I’ve watched were better rounds by far than the finals I’ve watched, for exactly that reason.

It’s a shame in a way. The NFL is set up to be this big culminating event, and I understand their impulse to make the finals a Big Deal. They want to reward and congratulate the students with a huge experience, and they certainly do that. Their stage manager, too, is a wonderful guy, who very carefully guides the students through the process and tells them over and over, using different phrasing, to neither panic nor worry; he’s set up the process so the students don’t have to concentrate or remember any logistics or schedules, since they always have someone right next to them telling them what to do next. But, the spectacle itself degrades the quality of the round; it doesn’t permit each student to give it their best shot. I could wish the ramp up to a final wouldn’t be so suddenly vast, or that we could tone it down a little bit, so that I could have seen the best shot from the final three speakers, and not simply the best they could do when the stakes were at the absolute highest.

Is this all there is?

So yeah, I started a site here. I’m not really intending it to be a blog, because I know I am not reliable enough to post new original things here every day. I’ll forget and be sporadic, or I’ll fall into a pattern where I post unoriginal things here every day. I’m going to aim for the former pattern. In the age of RSS feeds, that’s useful enough.

I’ve managed to dump all the random poetry that I had up on the old drupal powered site. I have to say, I rather like WordPress; hacking it around was pleasantly simple, everything codewise is laid out in a very sensible manner. The best programs and systems don’t need documentation; you simply start using them and find you understand them already. Bad systems rebuff efforts to easily understand them; in good systems you’re encouraged to learn and tinker more.

As for the point of this whole thing, I don’t truly know. I’m going to naturally talk some about forensics, though I cannot hope to take Jim Menick’s august mantle of Dean of the Coach Bloggers. All two of them. Or us, I suppose.

But I also do other things, and need to find time for them more. I will probably talk LOPSA some here and there, the family certain is always worth a trip, and then the wide world of politics never lacks for bloggers, but one more can’t really harm anything?

I suppose one more can, with a loon like me behind it.

But more than anything, I don’t truly believe anything until I write it down. Putting it out here like this, makes it more real for me. It brings clarity, just as debate should. It hopefully will force me to organize the stupid ideas that come to me at odd moments, usually when I’m driving and can’t write anything down. Sometimes you write ideas down and they fall together clear; other times you take a look and say “eeugh. No.”

Expect that last one a lot.

Valediction

One last day, and I am tired. I reflect on dinners with Chris, who alternates between being completely outraged by the things that are bothering me as well, and completely fed up. I admire his passion for it; I can’t really get that worked up about especially since I know I’m of limited means to do anything. I like a lot of things, and am having a great time even though I see troubles. Chris is a bit of a perfectionist, which both gives him the inability to enjoy things for what they are, but also much stronger ambition to change them.

Today is the game show, one of the highlights of LISA. I’m not of a mind to laugh at the moment, so I skip it, go back and pack my clothes for return on Saturday. The day is beautiful and the rest is welcome. I have a chance to re-charge, read a book a little while, play a game on the computer, watch the NBA preview for the weekend. The Patriots are playing Denver on Monday Night Football the next week.

I went to one last dinner with Chris, who had been somewhat abruptly ditched by people who probably didn’t notice what they were doing to him — and should have — and Skaar, who I hadn’t met until now. Skaar proved to be externally a gruff reserved Scandinavian and below that a man of sparking intelligence and humor with the most devastating one-liners of the conference, such as “Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s on drugs.”

The rack of lamb was marvelous, and we returned and hesitantly ended up in the party suite again. The crowd was subdued; everyone is over-LISAd. People drifted around and finished some alcohol; what is left could have still half filled the hottub. Whenever people started talking computers Patrick and I waved down the world. We piled on the couches, and I felt more secure and warm than I have all week. Patrick threatened to educate me using BeyoncÃ©. I forgave him his Motown inclinations. Michigan does that to people.

It was a marvelous finish. I realized I was on vacation even though I did everything I set out to for Harvard’s sake and my job. I had a fantastic time, but only because I met LISA on my own terms, and not its own. It has problems, and I am more sad at them than angry; the sadness of personal helplessness — I don’t have time to run for the exec, nor would I be likely to win election if I did. But where I am helpless others may not be so.

I got to know Chris in particular a good deal better, and met and got to know new people in JD, Mark, Patrick, and others. I saw Peg, and had more fun with Lois than I have in months. I got to have a great conversation at the booth with Toni and then failed to recognize her with her fake teeth and Halloween costume the next night. There were many people I knew going in that I didn’t talk to much, and that was all right, because there were many I did.

Perhaps I’m used to dealing with much more stressful travel and much more intense interpersonal dances — when people are aware of issues they tend to get talked about more. Perhaps suffering through years of badly run tournaments meant that I could approach LISA and not have to worry about the vortex of towering self-made significance that many others are overwhelmed by. I knew when to take a break and when I should give things up, like staying up late Thursday or the Game Show.

The last night, Friday, I didn’t sleep. We stayed up the night, and then Chris suggested as we were drifting off that we clean up the room a little, which I found admirable. I hope Geoff woke up pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t a disaster; he suffered much to provide us that space. Chris and Patrick and I wandered to an all night restaurant and ate a vague meal at 5 AM until we had to go back and prepare for our respective flights.

As we left the parking lot of the other motel with the family restaurant, a line of fire trucks six football fields long were lining up and leaving the parking lot in a sort of formation. The flag at the motels and hotels were flying at half mast, and all the lit signs were thanking the firefighters and police officers, more than 5,000 last I heard, who had fought the fire’s spread. They hadn’t quite won, but they had outlasted.

And as the dawn broke and we began to split our ways for our flights home, I saw a parade of names on the doors of the fire trucks. Las Vegas Fire Department. Flagstaff Fire Department. Grand Canyon National Park Service. Los Angeles Fire Department, despite having fires of their own. Phoenix Fire Department. Mesa, AZ. Bullhead Creek, NV. Many others I didn’t recognize.

A parade of names, little banners of pride in cities and states that had answered the call of a desperate city burning. They merged onto the interstate as a smoke-seeded rain at last pelted down, the first light of dawn bleeding through the clouds, and went home.

The horror of good ideas

By Thursday the wind finally had finished its shift, relieving San Diego of the smoke if not the fire. The technical sessions were interesting in their own right, though many were ill suited to my own job and my own domain. Many people grew hostile when I told them this simple truth; everyone things their solution is right for everyone and their assumptions are right for everyone. I’m amazed how many sysadmins can have the intellectual audacity to hold deeply seated opinions about infrastructure and especially security in the absence of any supporting data whatsoever.

We as a profession have a skewed sense of risk management; I suspect the world is not quite as hostile as we think. Most others design their systems so as to minimize failure and breakins; my systems, given our requirements, are designed instead to minimize the cost and effects of failure and breakins. It comes down to the same results, and I am both happy and well regarded in my choices by my small band of users engaged in their various unspeakable acts of computing. However, a horde of sysadmins is absolutely convinced that I will pay dearly for my approach, despite our computing being structured this way for eight years how, despite our empirical evidence accumulated over that time, and despite the fact that they can’t really point to anyone else or any other data that supports their conclusion.

The gap between potential and actual is very strong at these conferences. I listen to talks and think “Oh, good idea!” a thousand times, but I know of them only a handful will actually turn into good ideas. But that is enough. It’s good to think in the abstract, to plot ahead a little. Ironically, I do that most in the Hallway Track; outside of the talks, at lunch or in lounges talking with others about the world. I get more ideas, thing about more things.

That night, I go to sleep while it’s still Thursday. The parties apparently grew in intensity when I left. I’m happy to be unaware of it.