palmer – Page 27 – azuen.net

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.

Schedules

As you may divine from the increasingly sporadic bylines on this blog, I’ve been busy. Sometimes you spend too much time doing an activity to reflect on it; never mind having sixty activities going at once like I do. Currently I’ve got the dayjob, I’m on the LOPSA Board and spokesbeasting for them, and I’ve got five different classes of hats for forensics: I coach, I run the state league, I run and advise a bunch of tournaments, which is going to be bringing me to sunny Florida this weekend, I write and maintain tournament management software (which fact is largely responsible for the tournament advising), and I run a two week extemp camp in the summertime. Phew.

Part of the trouble with such a schedule is I don’t get much time to sit down and do things properly. I don’t get much chance to gently let an idea simmer and stew, and then prepare materials for it with care and precision. No, it’s a bunch of just-in-time sallies that seem to be mostly sufficient, but not as terribly coordinated and careful as I would prefer. Thus The Book for EXL consists of a mass of lecture notes that I have yet to collect into a discernable form; the tournament software manual is two years out of date, and I still haven’t gotten to the Columbia invitation. Long term projects fall by the wayside in favor of gettin’ it done.

I suffer from another curious affliction, in that my time is at odds with the time that most coaches spend on the activity. I can dedicate non-work hours to this show; I do my email and work on nights and weekends, and occasionally can sneak a minute or ten out of my day schedule to respond to something particularly urgent, but for the most part I am adamant that my employer be treated fairly due to my forensics involvement; they give me lots of leeway to travel around to tournaments, and they get their due out of me in return. But that means often I’ll send a wave of emails out on a holiday or a nighttime and the rest of the forensics world isn’t around to hear it. That’s fine, but a friction all the same.

So perhaps I should give something up, and make it easier. If only it were that easy; it’d be difficult to give up any chunk of what I do. Forensics is underfunded and underdue; the very fact that someone like me has so much responsibility even though this Isn’t My Job is telling about the state of debate education in the land. However, maybe someday I’ll get to take a vacation without ten screaming teenagers along for the ride.

What I’m basically saying is, if you sent me email in the last two weeks, you’re going to get a reply today at the earliest.

And they’re off

So the Bump tournament begins tonight, which means unless he really wants to mess with my head, I won’t be hearing from Jim Menick again until Sunday at the earliest. Not that I mind hearing from Jim, but he has a specific talent for finding the oddest damn bugs in tabroom, so it’s just as well I have a year to prepare new and greater nasty surprises for him for the next edition.

This weekend is the Gracia Burkill tournament at Natick, which is going to be a big affair, on the backs of 50 Novice Readers, 30 some-odd in Children’s Literature, and a whopping 42 Public Forum debate teams. Jim asserts that it gets no traction in the Northeast? Not in my corner of it; especially given that we’re also a good third of the Bump PF field too.

LD Debate also returns to Natick High School for the first time in a long time, with six debaters, but that’s fine; we’ll give them a shot at each other and see what happens. I’m trying to rescue some sense of local debate; most of our LD programs have to travel far to get rounds, and that just reinforces the anti-communicative aspect of a lot of LD; so to prevent it from going the way of policy I’m trying to open up the opportunity at a few locals that can handle it.

Coming soon, though, ballsy news from Philadelphia.

Software Mayhem

The process of releasing changes to a piece of software got a lot easier with the advent of the web-driven application. Time was, you had to build a new version of an application, and then go through a tortured rigamarole process of releasing a new version and watching as lots of old dinosaurs ignored the release and continued to bitch about the bugs you fixed in it. Or worse, they instead downloaded and installed the upgrade, but some pecularity of their computing setup that you didn’t test for got in the way, and it explodes, taking all the user’s data with it.

And the answer to “Did you take a backup?” in such situations is always “Uh, no, was I supposed to?”

Sadly, you can’t test for everything, no matter how much you try. The smoothest upgrades for software usually happen when the authors have found a way to reduce the number of tests needed, rather than conducting more of them; Mac OS X’s applications these days are largely self contained bundles, where you toss the old one and copy the new one into place. So it’s not really an upgrade so much as a brand new install that shares a few settings.

Web applications follow a different logic. It’s one of the reasons I designed tabroom.com to run off the web; I can change a single code file on the server, and it changes everywhere for everyone. This model has a lot of advantages; I don’t have to worry about installers, about operating systems, about anything on your computer; as long as you have a browser (preferably not Internet Explorer, by the way), you have full access to all its features.

However, that leads to fun and games whenever I roll out a new feature or new toys or something. This summer one of the big changes I made was a significantly revamped housing interface; I threw it together two years ago for the Lexington tournament, and I hadn’t really had a lot of time to put it together at the time. So I cobbled together barely-good-enough and left it at that. This August, instead, I ripped the whole thing out and built it mostly the right way, and it’s been working pretty well since then.

However, there are two bits of any piece of software that can be…exciting. First is the software itself; it has to play it’s own game the right way. The second, and more dangerous, is how well it plays well with others. The interface between one part of software and another is the danger zone; the housing system could work perfectly, but it might screw up the calculation of judging obligations (another part of the software I overhauled over the summer), or the waitlist mechanism, or lord knows what else. Some baroque combination of settings and tribulations might break something at any minute. It’s very difficult to test for every such combination; and since I’m flying solo on this effort and have limited time to dedicate to it, it’s impossible for me to do so.

Over time, a software develops “maturity”. The edge cases are found, the weirder bugs are teased out, and the complexity of the software settles into a known working state where the expected happens more and more often the more it is used. That takes a few times and a few trials, and large portions of the software have resolved into exactly that role. I launched the system in Kentucky this year, after MA and Jersey and various others have used it for years — they used the simple expediency of “asking.” So far it’s going well; a few bumps, but nothing huge. What’s great is that I know a few different ideas and ways of running tournaments now, which is helpful knowledge indeed for a local league leader like myself.

Housing and the stuff Menick is using hasn’t 100% yet, but we’re getting there. I think next year during Bump I’ll hear from him maybe a quarter as often. It may be sooner, but he hasn’t yet figured out how to turn off the “Break Randomly” setting that I’ve set on his user account. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he tries to export the divisions into TRPC.

The next tasks are speeding things up a little bit; I substantially cut down the disaster checking time last week. I also made the printouts a little better. But most of all, the advent of the “just do everything the way I want it done” button is just f’n wonderful. It took me a while to get all the ducks in a row where that could work, but now it does and it’s lovely.

The next two big projects are at the behest of competing communities; first is programming in support for NFL Districts, which would please the Joyless crowd including the Reverend B.A. and my local folks. I’ve never used Joy so I can’t comment on it too much, but the price tag is daunting if nothing else, and I strongly believe that participation in forensics should not be extractive. A lot of adults go into forensics looking for something; for most it’s the ego boost of winning something, however vicariously, which depending on how far its taken can be healthy or not; extracting money from a largely impoverished activity distorts the world in a way my socialist soul dislikes. I don’t accept money for tabroom.com, both because of that belief, and because if people paid me then I’d have obligations towards them, and that would make for a much worse dynamic.

Second is Debate support. TRPC is a very handy program, and I can make it do most of what I need, but it does have quite a few warts, and the largest is that it’s not very easily learned; I have a very hard time training people up into using it. It also resists certain things, and makes putting things together manually difficult, which is a shame, since it requires manual intervention so frequently. I also don’t like it how only one set of data entry can be happening at once; tabroom lets you enter indiscrimiately from multple stations. Mostly, though, Microsoft has entered into an era of rapidly changing APIs and programmatic requirements, and TRPC is programmed in an archaic runtime language that might not be supported for very much longer; I worry for the day when it no longer runs on anything but the “ol’ bessie” Windows XP computer in the corner; inevitably some future Yalie will try to check his email on it and spill a can of coke in it, and then we’ll be back to tabbing on cards before we know what happened.

And I’m sure when I do either one, something will break. Hopefully not much though. I am getting better at this. Even I flinch when I find some early code of mine embedded in the system.

UPenn

This year I ran the UPenn Liberty Bell Classic for the third time, and the tournament has really turned the corner. First, it’s just a nice campus, and a nice place to be in October. The weather was stunningly perfect, and we eat very well; we have Barb G’s amazing french-toast bagels, we eat in Center City with Tony F, and during the day on Saturday they even stick a freshman into a cab at one point with orders for hundreds of Pats and Geno’s cheesesteaks for lunch. I can’t remember which of the cheesesteak places is the racist one, but they’re both delicious.

The tournament also, after the typical rough Saturday morning start endemic to tournaments on college campuses, proceeded without a hitch. On time, well attended, well judged. The one part of the tournament that did get short shrift was policy, and it was all my fault; at several points I forgot which rooms we were supposed to use at which times and sent the poor tub-luggers scurrying all over creation. And after seeing what remained of the powermatching in the 5th round, the 6th round quickly was revealed to be hopeless, if they wanted judging or opponents. That’s the trouble with a small division, though. Policy is slowly extracting itself from any relationship with the rest of forensics; there aren’t many tournaments left that have both the full slate of events, and an active and healthy Policy division. That said, this year’s Yale draw was up around the 25 team mark, which while not exactly a huge deal, is also a perfectly viable tournament, especially given that those 25 teams came from about 10 different schools from various different states.

Ali H also did stupendous work with the judge wrangling. Apparently she convinced the UPenn Law school that judging a high school debate tournament is a perfectly good way to earn pro bono service hours required to graduate. At one level this sounds like a shenanigan to those of us who know what kind of specie and cajoling goes into finding hired judges, but on another level, it is actually a very good way to serve the community, especially given that the profits of the tournament go directly back into the high school community in the hands of Penn for Youth Debate, the on-campus wing of Perspectives, that’s working hard to bring LD Debate into the public school system of Philadelphia.

I started calling the Penn law school The Magic Judge Tree: you just shake it and all the judges you’d ever want fall to the ground. At one point, I looked at my TRPC instance with Public Forum loaded into it, and saw things like “Judges needed for round 3: 14. Judges available: 32.” They made excellent judges; several had longstanding LD and Policy experience and judged that; the rest made very sharp and very helpful Congress, Extemp, and PFD judges. What a complete joy to tab; we had trouble with rooms that occupied a lot of my time and made the tabbing interesting, but judges simply were not an issue. If we’d had the rooms, we could have single-flighted the entire thing; next year, we’re working on doing exactly that. Imagine the platonic ideal of a tournament with five single-flighted rounds of debate on Saturday; we can kick the thing off at 11:00 and still end in time for a reasonable dinner. Sleep in, get some breakfast, and then debate! It’s almost civilized, and especially so compared to the usual bleary eyed death march that our tournaments become.

The one area that Penn suffers is their date. We conflicted with St Marks’ this year, which isn’t a big deal, and also the MHL’s first year event and PSATs, which was a big deal. Penn still drew a strong field of 70 or so VLDers, 57 PFD teams, and hit 80+ in both OI and DP, but the other events were rather smaller. The trouble is this particular clear space in the northeast calendar doesn’t always exist; there are years where Manchester is earlier and Bronx is therefore back to back with Monticello with no room left for Penn.

So we need a more permanent solution and home. I’ve been talking to them about the idea of taking on the biggest monopoly in forensics, the biggest bleariest-eyed death march, the overgrown debacle that happens at my glorious ancient alma mater every February.

OOooooOOoooooh. David and Goliath there, eh?

Of course, they’d lose schools and interest from some of the people who go to the tournament each year. But I think they’d also pick up a lot of interest from the large number of schools who do not enjoy and in many cases do not go to Harvard. But more to the point, they could compliment each other well enough. Penn’s tournament is not aiming to make money but to provide a service, and visibility for Perspectives. Harvard’s tournament is no place for learners and novices; it’s competition in the purest sense. So a UPenn tournament not too far away that charged a small fraction of the price that one pays for Harvard could be very valuable and viable. The Philly local schools that attend Harvard could send their B squads, and the rest would have a tournament to go to at all. It’s somewhat warmer, I’m sure; I live less than three miles from Harvard’s campus and yet that tournment weekend always seems unusually bitterly cold even to me.

On the other side, the Harvard tournament is not a pleasant experience in a lot of (fixable!) ways, and this is coming from someone who both gets to sleep in his own bed that weekend, and who knows the comfy hiding spots on campus so as to avoid Cambridge Ringe and Latin. I’m sure the Penn round-robin could attract quite a number of the LDers who have fully qualled for the TOC already and see little point to subject themselves to the roundabout random-results-generator that is Harvard’s LD judging pool. We could have educational talks and other perks that the single-flighted schedule of loveliness might permit.

Hell, if we’re feeling really generous, we could even have someone running the ballot table who won’t fine people for not picking up their ballot on time, when said people were waiting in the line that the understaffed ballot table itself was causing to move too slowly. This actually happened to one of my judges two years ago at Harvard. Minh scrubbed it away, which is fine if you know Minh, but if I was turned off enough in the first place that the ballot table person didn’t recognize what she was doing was wrong. Of course, this is the same ballot table person who told Sarah that “obviously you don’t understand what it takes to put on a tournament of this scale” in the same year Boston was hosting Nationals.

There’s customer service and awareness of the forensics community for you.

It’d be ballsy, and would probably tick a few people off, but I don’t like sacred cows much and think there’s also value in challenging them. It’s indicative that of the 40-50 or so active MFL speech programs maybe 5-6 make the effort to even go to Harvard, despite it being a huge national draw right in our backyard. I don’t know if the Penn students are going to bite at the idea; granted, they have more to lose than I do if this flops and fails. But I still like the idea, and if they don’t bite, I think I’m going to try to find another venue for the Harvard Alternative.

Until then, there are other battles to be fought.