Category: debate

On Fairness: Part II

I went to Greenhill for the first time last weekend, as the proud coach of the eventual tournament champion no less. Winning the first time around isn’t a bad way to begin with a tournament, I have to say.  L’Etoile debated 19 times over the course of the round robin and the tournament, and we had another six rounds from Tinfoil Hat*. Even though we had a massive assist in elim rounds from the lovely CT, that Long March drained my gas tank. Coaching LD is now very active; gone are the days when researching a single case took days and thus you went into each tournament with one affirmative and one negative, and the flip in elims decided which you’d read. Now we have options, and the luxury of matching our arsenal to our opponent’s, which means figuring out how to do so once you know your opponent.

My judging load at the tournament wasn’t so heavy, however.   One easy way to accomplish that is to forget to register oneself as a judge during the round-robin.  Oops.  I don’t put much stock in my status as a Circuit Judge, so it never dawned on me to question it until late in the 1st day.  During the tournament itself, I have the double challenge of being over the age of 25, firmly so, and not having been around the circuit more than a year.  So I don’t get rated that high across the board, and rounds are hard to find for me.  L’Etoile’s continuing success will at some point nudge me into higher ratings, my credit (blame?) for whatever ill defined services I render that help him succeed.  I’ll end up judging more rounds, and then people will come to hate me for what I’ve done, instead of doubting me because they don’t know me.  Such is life.

However, I had one round which turned out interestingly, in the alarming sense.  It started normally enough, until Aff threw a very quick, half-formed theory argument into the midst of his 1AR as defense against a negative argument.  I remember thinking this choice wasn’t tactically smart, and even wrote as much directly onto my flow, but didn’t consider it much beyond that.

Neg sure did.  His reaction was to run a full 6 minute critical theory argument with reverse voters and everything, saying that the affirmative had invoked an ideal of fairness in the round which upholds unfair outcomes.  Debate has notions of “fairness” baked into it that are anything but fair, and are not often questioned.  Aff invoked that standard of fairness without defending it.  So neg argued that I, the judge, should choose a different standard of fairness (as choosing between standards of fairness is necessarily itself arbitrary), and should choose one that checks against the exclusivity of debate, and the exclusion of other voices, by voting down this half baked and ill-developed notion of “fairness” that harms accessible discourse.

Aff, well, he didn’t know (or understand) what hit him.  He extended some arguments about time skew and win skew.  Affirming in LD is hard, and evidence does support that.   I’ve complained extensively about how little action that seems to inspire.  L’Etoile affirmed only once in his march through elims to win the tournament.  But those arguments all rely on that standard of fairness that negative told me to reject.  Aff gave me no clear reason to prefer “debate fairness” over another. He didn’t have much chance to; he had 1 minute of prep time left, and 3 minutes in the 2AR to speak, when he was hit with this thing.  He was set up to fail, therefore. I struggled a lot in sympathy; it was very hard to engage that debate correctly in the time left to him.  I kept wanting to see two more speeches to see how it’d really play out.  I did some work for him, no less, to see how much I’d have to intervene to write an affirmative story.

But I kept coming back to a salient fact: Aff started it.  Theory does boil down to accusing the other debater of cheating — and he tossed it off so casually.  He didn’t mean it flippantly at all, but that’s worse; we do these things without considering their full implications all the time.  Debaters in LD sling this powerful weapon around like it’s nothing.  My own debaters tend to — though L’Etoile will tell you this sparks some lively, ahem, discussions within our ranks.  Debaters will pull it even in front of judges who profess to hate theory itself (not me) or hate how it’s used so often (yeah, I’m guilty of that one).  There’s not much fair about that.  Negative spoke truth.

The unanswered rhetoric from the negative gave me a non-interventionist reason to vote — though I did suspect it was mildly interventionist  at the time, just less so than voting affirmative.  In retrospect, it was not.   I thought it might be, because the unfairness and the casual use of theory gave me active reason not to want to cut affirmative slack despite his manifest time disadvantage weighing heavily in the round.  But in the end, it just meant that my flow said I should vote for the side that I wanted to win, a distinction that I try very hard to maintain as a judge.  I vote on stuff I find stupid or wrong all the time.  Any judge who doesn’t isn’t doing their job well. So when my ballot and rooting interests come together, I doubt myself a little.  But they did come together.

And so, I negated.

I’ve written before about how our community expects and wants debate to be fair, and how debaters tend to react and rebel against unfairness when it affects them.  Boy howdy did I get that.  After my RFD, which I will admit was considerably less clear than the above two paragraphs (digestion of new ideas takes time, after all), the affirmative signaled some abundantly clear displeasure.

In the course of the ensuing post-debate debate, I was struck by something, something that ties in a lot to what I see as unfair in debate.  See, I’m a sleeper.  I look and sound like an aristocrat.  I went to Milton Academy and then Harvard.  Some of that polish rubbed off on me.  I have a comfortable intellectually-oriented job that carries a salary well above that of your average teacher/coach — another unfairness.  But those things are layers of paint, covering but not changing the shape of a kid who grew up on some rather mean streets in a fading paper mill town in central Massachusetts.  I’m also apart again, due to being gay, one of those minorities that is as visible as the individual wants it to be (and in my case, isn’t hugely so).  So I understand stacked decks and institutional  unfairness, even as I don’t look or sound like someone  who does.   The other three people in the room were the negative, who if he isn’t a Muslim from the Bible Belt, must certainly get mistaken for a Muslim kid often enough in his Bible Belt home so as to understand.  His coach is white, but through choice of dress and style deliberately sets himself off as an Other, which despite my white bread looks I understand is valid, and sympathize with — you should meet my youngest sister if you doubt me.  The third person in the room was an observer, a young African-American lady, presumably a debater who wasn’t debating this weekend.

The Aff debater looked (and this is a dangerous judgment, proven by myself, but the pattern is there) like your typical scion of a wealthy program in a wealthy town.  He  left the room very upset and not understanding my decision at all.  Partly he was too angry to hear, and partly I was not capable of fully explaining it, and I knew that, so I took my blows and my yells in silent acceptance.  However, I did notice that as I tried to explain how my decision came to be, the other three people in the room were nodding.   The young woman was my best barometer; after all, coach and neg debater had written this position, so they clearly understood it long ago.  But she hadn’t heard it before, and didn’t get to read it afterwards like I did.  But she got it.  There were concepts buried in the decision that I didn’t need to explain to her, to the neg debater or his coach, or to myself.  But I did need to explain them to aff, and failed.  They are hard lessons to hear, and harder still when mixed into the disappointment of a loss, even an  insignificant  one (the debaters were not in contention to break).

It’s an important lesson to learn, though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t able to teach it, and that he won’t learn it from me now — if ever a round ended with a resolution to strike the hell out of a judge soundly and permanently, that was it.  It is far from his alone to learn; we struggle with it in our own program.  (Jai ho!)  The vast majority of people in debate are in the same boat as the aff, operating with only one standard of fairness because many others are hidden from them, and growing uncomfortable when confronted with it.  Having your world shaken is something we all flinch against.  In that one room, that one round, for about 60 minutes, those who understood temporarily outnumbered those who did not.  Usually in debate, and in life, it’s the other way around; and those of us labeled outsiders don’t often get as upset, because we’re used to it.

The Project, as it’s called — and what a loaded word that is — is trying to bring these types of issues to the fore, mostly in policy debate.  A representative of it was top speaker at the TOC last year.  I saw him debate in Emory finals: he’s a very good debater.  The project struggles against a few things.  One is receptiveness to the very idea, naturally.  Another is that the resolution and topicality, one of the few guideposts we have in debate, rarely ties cleanly into the conversation that the project wants to have.  But they believe, not without reason, that the unfairnesses built into how debate is done, and the assumptions it operates under, have to be answered before the effective and open debate that we’d like to take for granted is even possible.

I have some sympathy for the view.  The question it begs, which this post does as well is: why participate in an activity that you believe unfair?   Debate is clearly biased to exclude people based on wealth, which given the wider unfairnesses in our country, therefore also excludes based on race.  So why play that game?  It’s just a debate round; aren’t there better venues for social justice efforts?

Well, life’s unfair.  America can be unfair.   Every society is stacked and tilted in some way or another.  The answer’s not to leave it behind.  If you want no inequality in your world, may I suggest living in the Yukon, far from anyone else.  If you believe you live in a world without substantive and unfair inequality, may I further suggest that you are simply at the  receiving  end of the benefits of said inequality, and thus are psychologically set up to not see it.

Instead of retreating, I try where I can to push the low end higher.  You don’t have to push the high end down; this isn’t a seesaw.   That’s because debate is education.  You don’t lose your education for others gaining it.  In fact, your education grows more valuable the more that others are educated: none of my high tech skills would command half a plantain if I were translocated into the Amazon rainforest and told to live among the hunter-gatherers.  Our country’s colossal  failure to properly educate the sons and daughters of the poor, much of it motivated by racial prejudice, will hang around our neck as one of history’s great lost opportunities.  Debate is education.  Debate’s job is to engage in hard topics, and hash them out.  That makes it a pretty good venue for this discussion in my book.  Unfairness is no reason to leave debate; debate itself is a good platform to engage it and expose it.

Just don’t flinch if you get burned by something hotter than you expected.  After all, it’s just a debate round.

*Thinly (if you’re a debate person) concealed nicknames preserve the identity of minors, ala Menick.

On Fairness

We’d like debate to be fair.

We’d like our tournaments to be maintained and run impartially, distantly, and to follow the covenants made with the attendees ahead of time, both those spelled out and those generally understood.   We’d like students to advance or not based on the merits of their arguments and the quality of their work, instead of their coaches’ influence, their position in the community, their identity along whatever spectrum identity can take, or those moments when random events blunder into the debate round.   We want the winners to deserve their wins, and the losers to learn from their losses.  We want debate, ultimately, to be a paragon; a paragon of education, of competition, and of intellect written larger than you can find in usual high school activities.

It’s an adolescent kind of fairness.  A typical high school with a strong debate team is a place where we can dare to dream the world is  perfectible.   The unfairnesses at such places are small, irritating, and finite; students come to believe that given enough work and fighting, surely  unfairness can be eliminated outright.  A good high school is built to be fair; grades are mostly given to those who earn them, and students who   work hard and do well in school are uniformly rewarded with great colleges and bright futures.  Students who don’t work or lack talent are relegated to lower tiers.   Unfairness and mistakes tend to be minor and exceptional; the general rule is a gradient of work mapping to achievement and rewards.

Where you stand is a direct reflection of who you are.

To such students, geared and groomed and pointed Ivywards from a young age, the greatest nightmare is that someone — that I — should stand lower than earned.  One way to stand lower than you earned is if someone unworthy should step in line ahead of you.  If a kid with poor grades gets into Columbia through influence & connections, or membership in a favored group, another student with better grades goes to their safety school instead.  To those aimed Ivywards, that fate is terrifying; they’ve been told if they work hard and grow smart, they’ll do well.  Education pays off.   So these kids will react violently in times when they see someone earn a prize, and yet not receive it.   The great terror is that they’ll be smart enough to get into Columbia, but end up at NYU.  And they save a special place in hell for the interlopers who cheat the system, and thus cause it.

But debaters, and high school students at schools without debate, tend to undercount their unearned blessings.   They can’t help it; everyone they know shares in those blessings. Does a fish notice the water?  The fairness of their worlds is itself uncommon, and unearned.  The rarity of debate speaks to a wider problem, the rarity of a good education, the kind of education that only money and resources can truly provide.  In America, we save that good education for a select few students, who can penetrate the barriers of property values that are raised around great high schools.   And the bare truth is, you gained entry to that high school on your parents’ achievement, not your own.

There are places where hardworking students don’t go to college.  There are schools where nobody at all goes to the Ivy League, not the best, not the worst, not the most connected.  There are high schools where more students have children themselves than go to college.  There are high schools where the best and the brightest end up in gangs and often then in jail, not because they are weak and didn’t listen well enough to the anti-drug and anti-violence programs, but because gangs offer money, protection, and support, and their schools, families and neighborhoods offer none of these things.  The boundary between school work and life is much thinner, in places where families are one illness away from disaster, where children go to school hungry and tired, where home isn’t heated in the winter or cooled in the summer, where the day to day insecurity of life makes people snatch and grab for whatever stability they can find.   There are entire school systems where students dread vacations and snow days, because school means seven hours of heat and lunch, and days off mean neither.

These students get Ds in math and English.  But that doesn’t make them lazy.  Or stupid.  Or undeserving.  The difference between them and you, my debater friends, is the legacy of accidents.  Of where they were born.  And to whom.

It is comforting for students at great high schools to tell themselves the world is fair.  If the world is fair and they sit atop it, then surely they have worked great deeds to enjoy their privileges, and should have no guilt over the benefits.  The poverty and problems that other, distant people experience  are the consequences of those people’s actions, and so are deserved.   If you ask, most privileged people will of course say they don’t believe that poor people deserve what they get, and many will vote solidly for tepid Democrats who promise to parcel off small margins of wealth towards poor people somewhere.  But by and large, they live and act as if the world were fair, and they deserved to sit atop it.   And so react very strongly when an event happens which threatens the balance.

Debaters are largely such people.  And so, debate rejects petty unfairness, but pays very little attention to the grand unfairness around us.  A student without a bid is going to the TOC — shock!  Scandal!  And worst of all, another one-bid kid may have to miss the TOC to accommodate a no-bid kid.  Gasp!  Terror!   The worst thing that happened all year!

There is an unfairness here.   The fact is that the no-bid student isn’t one of the top 80 debaters in the country.  I know this, because I acknowledge a reality most in debate prefer to forget: none of the students attending the TOC is one of the top 80 debaters in the country.  They’re just the top 80 students who have the chance to debate on the circuit.  For every kid who breaks, there are a hundred kids who are more talented and have more potential, but do not have access to debate, or anything like debate.  The same three dozen schools are at the TOC year and again; but there are about 18,000 high schools in the US, with over 14 million students.  Given that ratio, do any of you imagine you’re truly among the most talented 80?  The most hardworking?  The most moral and righteous and deserving?

Or do you choose to protest the advantages someone else was given, and neglect to see your own?

Debate isn’t the exclusive province of the wealthy.  There are a handful of schools that do well, despite drawing from student populations which face daunting real life challenges.  But everyone who debates is privileged to do so, whether it be by virtue of wealth your parents earned, or luck & happenstance of living near a school or a coach that values debate enough to offer it despite the daunting challenges of affording it, or the even rarer chance of having stumbled into debate without a program at all.

That’s the unfairness of debate that matters.  The unfairness of a bid round with an unfavorable panel pales next to the unfairness of millions of students living in poverty, never seeing a whiff of a debate round or even a stable life where their hard work could be rewarded or even recognized.  In a small way, debate realizes this, because we talk a great deal of helping new programs, and of outreach.  We know it should be done.  But we never do it.  We tell ourselves we don’t have time, but if it were important to the community, we’d make time.  After all, the amount of time we spend on debate has gone up a lot; when I started in LD, nobody wrote more than two cases, one on each side.  Tournaments were shorter, and had fewer rounds.  The amount of time debaters spend on debate has gone up, but the amount of time spent on new program outreach and accessibility has stayed flat.

So next to these injustices, I find it hard to get worked up about a no-bid student joining us in Kentucky to the exclusion of one-bids who stay home.  A vast horde of students is staying home with that one-bid kid, never having heard of a bid in the first place.  Debate itself isn’t important enough on its own merits to call this a tragedy, but these students represent vast untapped potential, for their talents are tied to less productive uses, their happiness and chance for a good life are subject to whims and mercies they cannot control, and their hopes of a fair life are long ago forgotten.

So tell me, is that fair?  If we’re looking for unfairness to fight against, isn’t that far more worthy of  struggle?  Can’t we do more about that than join Facebook groups claiming we’re “one million strong for the cause of the week?”  Is it worthwhile to spend hours on a VBD thread dissecting the TOC, and then claim we don’t have time to help new programs launch?

And should I have sympathy for those who ignore grand injustice but get pissed at small ones, if injustice it was to let JA in?   Simply because the grand injustice is a harder problem doesn’t merit ignoring it.   Hard problems need more work, not less.

You shouldn’t apologize for your privilege.  You didn’t earn it, so you can neither be blamed or praised for it.  But you shouldn’t ignore it either.   And you should never let small unfairnesses eclipse your understanding of larger ones, just because the small ones are pointed in your direction, and more immediate.   Your world isn’t the whole world, and ignoring that just reinforces the role privilege plays in our community and world.   And that is a terminal impact we all should avoid.

Weighing it out

If a debater can learn only one skill, I would choose for them to learn weighing.   To progress beyond saying “You are TOTALLY WRONG and I am TOTALLY RIGHT” and instead say “These six things you say are right, but I feel that these four factors I’m talking about are more compelling still” is a hallmark of mature thought, in my book.   It’s all the more a shame that political discourse takes the form of TOTALLY WRONG and TOTALLY RIGHT.   One of my main objections to Public Forum’s format is that the brevity makes thoughtful weighing in an mature manner a losing strategy.   One of the hallmarks of the case wiki discussion has been that we’re all weighing and carefully so.     I wish all discussions of forensics policy could be done so.

So we’ve been talking about this disclosure idea, in its myriad angles.   Jim remains skeptical, I remain skeptical and even somewhat nervous about it, but many, including Aaron Timmons, remain thoughtfully for it, and will drive it forward.   He believes that the harms are potentially strong, but the link to debate is remote, which is a fair opinion.   I think the link is somewhat stronger than he does, and I don’t weight it against the existence of a case wiki itself.

First, the link: the nightmare scenario has happened already in college debate.   Twice.   The first is the YouTube rant by a policy coach at CEDA nationals that sat idle for several months, until finally emerging, hitting the news, and famously leading the college to fire the coach and disband the debate team.

A better link comes from APDA, the parliamentary league that most of the Northeastern “elite” schools belong to.   APDA would publish videos of a number of high quality elimination rounds.   In one, a debater argued for the teaching of masturbation in public school.   APDA’s format meant he had choice of neither topic area or side in this round; he was just following the rules of the game.   This video also sat online and unheralded for a while, until the student graduated and became the Republican candidate for a New York State Assembly seat on Long Island.   The video was seized upon, and his candidacy was done.   He was a long shot candidate anyway; unlikely to win.   However, if he had thoughts of moving into public office in the future, in races where he had more of a chance, those thoughts are gone now.   He’s now Pro Masturbation Boy forever.   The APDA video website has since been scrubbed of much of its best material.

So the link isn’t entirely nonexistent, empirically.   However, there’s plenty of space between videos about a coach’s ill-advised rant or an extemporaneous form of debate on an unserious topic, and an LD case wiki.   As Timmons says, Policy has had case wikis for a long time now.

However, today’s internet is different.   We’re at an inflection point as searching becomes commonplace, not the realm of teenagers or geeks.   Five years ago, no one Google searched prospective employees; now everyone does.   The first class of students with Facebook access throughout their high school careers just graduated last June.       The CEO of Google recently speculated that high school students should change their name upon graduation, to leave behind the legacy of their immature years locked up in search engines and online archives.   Google, of course, is the reason this online presence persists, but that’s what search engines must inevitably do: they’re the magnet that pulls the needle from the haystack.   Search engines, boundlessly useful, also change the nature of information: a lot of data used to be nominally public but impossible to filter and sift for what you wanted.     If Menick wanted to see what my house looked like, he’d could satisfy his curiosity only by driving to Boston; now he can hop online and take a look for himself in minutes.   The barrier to entry is a lot lower.   The appearance of my house was always public, but now it’s public and searchable.   And that makes all the difference.   A search can turn up anything about a student; Facebook photos, former dates, and yes, bizarre (to non-debaters) Marxism negatives and nuclear terrorism speculations in debate cases.   It hasn’t happened before, but we’re in a moment where it’s more and more uniquely likely to happen.

Finally, I’m weighing this possibility not against the benefits of the case wiki itself, but a publicly available case wiki.   I think a case wiki can achieve many of its aims by simply being private and password protected, and dumping it at the end of a topic run.   The password can be something simple, and it can circulate among debaters freely nationwide, though it should also change reasonably often too.   It can get emailed out to NDCA members whenever it does change, and they can in turn pass it on to anyone else.

A semi-private password is a very porous barrier; anyone with determination could defeat it.   That’s the point.     First, it would keep out casual views of the case wiki.     Outsiders to debate wouldn’t be able to just stumble upon it and see what was there; to gain access you’d need to be trying.   Second, and relatedly, it would keep out search and archive engines.   A Google search on a student’s name would not turn this material up, and later removals would be real removals; the information wouldn’t linger on in the Wayback Machine.   There’d be no more lurking time bombs.

I don’t pretend to know what effect a case wiki will have on the rounds itself.   I suspect, in my uncharitable moments, that it’s being driven by large programs that long ago reconciled themselves to doing extensive scouting.   Now, those same coaches who gave up on judging several years ago are suddenly forced to actually watch rounds again, for scouting purposes, and they don’t like it.   The solution?   Disclosure.   More seriously, I worry that it may make debate less accessible, or at the very least the decision of whether to continue to use disclosure won’t truly weight accessibility in the final calculus.

But I think that a public and open to the world case wiki is just very poor informational design; especially when you sacrifice so little to make it just private enough to keep out most of the long term harms and risks.   And I think that the exposure to a tournament that requires use of a public disclosure wiki isn’t nonexistent either: witness that Shanahan’s rant destroyed not just his own job but his school’s debate program too.

And that’s what we don’t need, in a shrinking activity in a world of ever drying public funding for education.   That’s what we don’t need, at all.

Caselists and privacy

I remain mostly unconvinced of the safety of the case disclosure lists.   I think people are taking the legal side of this query too seriously to the exclusion of the real meat of my concern, which is the long term impact of putting a large body of students’ work on the public internet under their own name.   It’s not a question of “can”, it’s a question of “ought”.   “Can” is a question for lawyers, which we are not; “ought” is a question for educators.

In my dayjob, I’m an IT director.   I’m perhaps more sensitive to information security issues than most debate coaches, but then I’m more educated about them as well.     And, in my experience, information on the public internet can spiral out of control very quickly.

We understand the context that debate cases are written in, but Joe Internet does not. It wouldn’t take much for a single innocuous case/page to be blown beyond proportion in the wrong hands.   Once you mix in the nether realms of political theory with “protecting the children,” the resulting hysteria can cause a lot of collateral damage. And has done so, several times.   A school board looking to cut programs without political fallout would love to find a debate caselist wiki. They’d be nearly guaranteed to find a pretext that could be trumped up at will.

The trouble with this sort of danger is it sits and waits; it could crop up next month or next decade.   The benefit is immediate; the threat is long term, and continual.   It could have long term effects on the children themselves — the vetting process already for appointees and candidates is unimaginably invasive, and the private sphere is following the political one more quickly than you think.   It could have equally difficult repercussions for the debate programs that sponsor them.

I’m harping on this issue because no one’s addressed it directly.   Aaron Timmons did give it an aside while concentrating on the legal aspect; the legal stuff was valuable, but was never the main focus of my query.   I’d say his example of Obama’s admission of drug use is not especially applicable; I live in a state that voted 65-35 to decriminalize marijuana a few years ago; the press may care but voters do not.   But there are plenty of ways to blacklist yourself, and the permanent nature of the Internet means that we can do it without even meaning to. Expressing sympathy for Islam online might not have seemed a great political risk before 2001; plenty of Americans joined the Communist party in the 30s only to lose their jobs in the 50s as a result.   These are only the big historical examples.   Their number will only proliferate as the internet becomes a medium of record.

The chances of a caselist wiki hurting students or programs may seem remote, but as someone who’s had to anticipate and deal with the fallout of this very sort of issue several times, I can assure you the odds are higher than folks seem to believe.   For every case of the internets exploding in a meme that you hear about, there are dozens more that never make the news outlets but are damaging to the parties involve all the same.

So I believe that the only responsible way to run a case wiki is to make it private; open it to debaters only and dump it once the topic is done. Prevent it, as much as possible, from being indexed and captured by archive and search engines.   And understand, by imposing a caselist, you’re exposing yourself and your debaters to the worst kind of risk: a nebulous, ill-defined and unpredictable one.   That approach, of course, reduces some of the benefits; you don’t get cross-tournament access or wider community education.   Again, I mourn for the lack of effective national governance that might fill that gap, providing us a national infrastructure by which we could grant debaters and only debaters access to such resources, but that’s just Lear raging against the storm.

We live in a very open age.   Kids and adults alike are posting everything and anything to Facebook profiles and whatnot.   It’s easy to believe that the trend will continue, that we’ll live in a society ever more open and comfortable with public exposure.   But we’re only a few backlashes away from being taught swiftly and harshly the price of exposing too much information on the web.   Once the long term risks grow clearer to all, I believe there will surely be a retrenchment, a pulling back.   We owe it to our debaters to be ahead of it, or at least to give them the option of staying ahead of it.   Risks seem minimal in new fields because people point to the dearth of prior examples; but “it never happened before” is no barometer of danger when you’re breaking new ground.   Caution is merited here, but I fear it won’t be taken until it’s too late.