Daily Archives: May 8, 2009

New Affirmatives and Source Credibility

In the first post on his blog (which finally inspired the creation of The3NR.com, an idea that had been milling around for a while), Roy criticizes the recent trend toward breaking many poor-quality new affirmatives at the end-of-the-year national championships. He concludes:

I … hope … everyone agrees that it is becoming increasingly more common for affirmatives to be afraid of defending their “house.” We do a disservice to the debaters and the quality of the debate if we allow this to continue. If you are a coach challenge your kids to find the best possible aff and learn everything about it. If you are a student, work hard, debate is most satisfying not just when you win but when your pour your heart out defending something and the work you’ve done translates into overall success. Judges, be willing to disregard bad evidence, be sympathetic to good smart arguments made by a team even if not evidenced. Winning is obviously an important function of debate, but if debate becomes a race to the bottom of crappy affirmatives what is the point? We change topics yearly to learn about different arguments and issues, why then do some of the most important rounds and major tournaments ultimately get decided on generics that can be read year round vs unsustainable new affs?

I agree 100%. One thing that I feel is important to add is that teams are far too afraid of negative teams finding the silver bullet negative strategy, especially at a tournament like the TOC where hired gun researchers are given way too much respect in terms of their ability to change the game. If you have been read an affirmative before and you are confident that it is based on sound arguments and quality evidence, chances are good that other squads have spent some time researching it, too. Between your research and theirs, it seems exceedingly likely that the “silver bullet” strategy would have been uncovered if it did indeed exist. If you haven’t found it and you haven’t heard another team read it, the most likely reason is not because the collective research ability of the high school community is poor but because no such strategy exists.

What is the silver bullet strategy against an RPS affirmative? Is there really something written that Sovacool and the other aff authors just haven’t thought about and therefore haven’t written a response to? If you read the journals every month and subscribe to RSS feeds for the major search terms relevant to your case, do you really think you’re going to miss the big new thing that came out and which the negative will catch you unprepared for?

The only reason to be afraid is because you lack confidence in the quality of your preparation. Maybe you haven’t kept up with the journals and you haven’t read all of the latest articles about your case. If that’s true, then you don’t deserve to win affirmative debates against negative teams that have worked hard to prepare to engage your case… maybe you should be reading stupid new affs that the other team will be unprepared to debate. But that is the debate equivalent of the trick play and an explicit admission that you are not as good as your opponents and that they have outworked you. If that’s an admission you’re willing to make, then so be it. But every team should strive to be the most prepared team possible when it comes to their affirmative(s), and you should feel a sense of shame and disappointment with yourself if you don’t think that’s the case.

This is decidedly not an argument “against” new affirmatives. There are times when it makes sense to try to catch the opposition off-guard with a case that you haven’t read before, and sometimes it even makes sense to read a new affirmative only once based on the teams that you are debating. But breaking new affirmatives that lack the credibility to survive even minimal negative research is an unfortunate but growing trend. If season-ending championship tournaments become battles between terrible new affirmatives and generic critiques and process counterplans, what does that say about our activity? Instead of pushing our students to become experts in the issues that they discuss throughout the season, it seems in many ways that we are telling them to forget what they’ve learned because, as critics say about Billy Beane, “that [stuff] doesn’t work in the playoffs.”

The obvious rejoinder to this line of reasoning is that the poor quality of these new affirmatives should make it easy for the negative to win. While I agree with this principle in the abstract, it doesn’t seem to play out that way in practice because of the approach that a majority of judges take. As Roy argues:

Debaters are not good at calling people out for reading bad evidence and judges have become too comfortable saying “Yeah well I agree it might not be qualified, it might be from a random blog, but I mean they’ve got a card.” It used to be only at the NDT in college that judges would use the “well they have a card” guise for making decisions, but this has now reverberated to almost every debate judged. We’re told not to believe everything we read on the internet, but it seems like in debate rounds a place for intellectual discussion on issues we often settle for evidence from people who are less qualified then the kids debating on the issue. Debaters CALL OUT TEAMS FOR BAD EVIDENCE read. Judges BE WILLING TO SAY THAT DESPITE HAVING A CITE, TAG, AND URL, THE TEXT READ IS NOT EVIDENCE.

I’m probably one of the best judges one could find for these kinds of approaches/arguments (“their ev is garbage,” “this doesn’t make sense,” “prefer qualified academic scholarship,” etc.), and I constantly tell students that they would be rewarded if they were more diligent about taking this kind of approach. Even “mainstream” cases (e.g. not stuff about alien invasions of Iraq to steal antigravity technology) often contain “evidence” that I would gladly disregard out of hand if only the negative challenged it. The Bearden card? If the neg says “he is unqualified, he said it is already too late, and he said that our only hope is zero point energy,” then it goes away. “Still evaluate his warrants” is stupid in the worst sense of that word and an excuse for judges to avoid making judgments (which, of course, is the function of the judge) about what counts as evidence and what sources should be relied upon when crafting policy.

Debaters would be pleasantly surprised by the reception they would receive if they made a bigger deal out of source quality in their debates. While there is certainly a segment of the judging pool that adheres to the “but they’ve got a card” school, I do not think that it is the majority (or even close to it). In front of most judges, arguments about source quality and author credibility will receive a very favorable listening—in many cases, you will be preaching to the proverbial choir. Remember, judges are the ones who have to listen to terrible evidence over-and-over again. After not very long, it gets old. Take advantage of that and challenge your opponents to justify the evaluation of the things they submit as “evidence” and you will win a lot more debates.

The Meaning Of "Offense/Defense: There's Only A Risk"

Debaters say a lot of things in debates that are not arguments in themselves but which contain cues that trigger meaning in the minds of their audience (their opponents and, most importantly, the judge). As Roy discussed in an article about “Defense”, one such cue is used to frame the way the judge approaches his or her evaluation of the debate. In many 2NRs or 2ARs, the debater starts with something like this:

Evaluate this debate through an offense/defense paradigm—they only have defense so there’s only a risk that we outweigh.

In many cases, the opposing team does not refute this framing of the debate. In a few cases, they respond by insisting that the judge not evaluate the debate using an offense/defense paradigm and then extend their defensive arguments.

But what does it mean to evaluate a debate using the “offense/defense paradigm?” Distinguishing between offensive and defensive arguments is easy enough; categorizing arguments this way is indeed one of the most helpful ways for new debaters to conceptualize a round. Put most simply, offensive arguments are those that provide a reason to vote for you while defensive arguments are those that provide a reason not to vote against you. Easy enough.

Deploying this distinction between offensive and defensive arguments as a decision-making calculus, however, is a little more complicated. As Roy argues, too many judges use “they’ve only got defense” as an excuse not to make judgments about each teams’ arguments. If the negative goes for a disadvantage and the affirmative goes for “this disadvantage does not make sense (because it is missing internal links, is empirically denied, links more to the status quo than our plan, etc.)”, it is nonsensical for the negative to implore the judge to employ an offense-defense paradigm and therefore exclude consideration of the affirmative’s responses to the disadvantage.

“Offense/defense—there’s only a risk” is not a reason to only evaluate offensive arguments. Offense/defense is a way of categorizing arguments, not resolving them. In the vast majority of debates, it does not provide any helpful guidance for judges as they evaluate the two teams’ arguments.

Instead of reciting this line at the top of the 2NR or 2AR, debaters should explicitly compare the offensive and defensive arguments made by both sides. If one’s best shot of winning is to minimize the importance of defensive arguments against a high-magnitude impact, one should make those arguments explicitly instead of relying on the “offense/defense” crutch. Separating out offensive from defensive arguments is a helpful way to approach a rebuttal, but it does not obviate the need for debaters to win their framing of the impacts… it is a starting point, not the destination.

This should seem obvious to many readers, but it is important to unpack the meanings that we imbue upon certain phrases. “Offense/defense—there’s only a risk” is by no means the only instance in which a few words have come to mean much more than that, but it is certainly one of the most frequently used.

The bottom line is that debaters should strive to make their impact arguments and framing of debates more sophisticated and judges should be leery of assigning meaning to utterances that do not fully communicate a complete argument.

Defense-

Too many times after asking my kids or others at tournaments how their round went I get an answer like, “We lost we didn’t have any offense on the da.” So??? Not having offense on a DA should not mean an auto aff lose. While with some (read most) judges controlling things like issue specific Uniqueness makes it easier to win a bigger risk of a DA, the lack of offense does not mean a negative victory.

Now before I explain how to effectively utilize defense to win debates I will say this, offense is good, its good to have link turns or an impact turn to a disad. An ideal situation is combining your offensive and defensive args together to beat a disad. Seldom should the 2ar straight turn the disad, straight turns should be utilized earlier in the debate to either make the debate smaller, or stick a team to an argument you have the goods on.

Defense and the meta-game.

Lots of different people discuss the “meta-game” and how it relates to debate (and I’m sure I will write more about the meta-game and other debate topics) but a safe way to define meta-game is big picture thinking. The debate is not multiple sheets of paper that function independently of each other but one big multi-headed hydra that needs to be addressed in conjunction with each other. If the 2nr goes for states cp and politics da, while those are 2 independent positions they make up ONE strategy and must be addressed as ONE strategy not TWO separate issues.

Lets face it, the negative is usually going to win some risk of the disad (assuming they don’t totally concede some arguments in which case you probably did not lose on no offense), so assuming they do win some risk of their disad the job is now to discredit the relative risk of the disad.

Disad vs Case

In this 2nr, the 2nr is almost always investing serious time going for reasons the disad turns the case along with some solvency takeouts or some impact defense. As a 2ar this 2nr strategy usually made me nice and cozy inside. Your aff is good (presumably) you’ve got some big beefy impacts with some solid internal links. Another benefit the affirmative has is that judges are usually aff leaning in the context of case arguments. This means that for the negative to mitigate the impact to the case they need to do significantly more work beating up the case then the aff does defending the case.

To contextualize this better lets assume the AFF is RPS with competitiveness (hege and econ impacts) and warming versus a health care politics disad with a bioterrorism (Steinbrenner) and economy impact.

Assuming I could not win a link turn to the disad (who are we kidding, of course I could) assuming YOU cannot win a link turn to the disad smart defensive arguments you can and should be making to mitigate the disad

1.) Non-Unique- AE being debated now / will be debating inevitably

2.) No Ev of a specific health care bill

3.) Obama has already spent PC on energy and didn’t lose

4.) Timeframe for bio terror is a joke

5.) How health care solves for bioterror is a bigger joke

6.) Steinbrenner assumes a huge new influenza being used as a weapon, swine flu proves an outbreak of new virus’s won’t be deadly

7.) No bio terror (no motivation, not feasible any thing in this arena)

8.) Aff’s I/L to the economy is significantly bigger then the disads.

If you had ZERO cards on the health care disad assuming you won a decent risk of your case these arguments if executed well could be enough to win your aff o/w the disad.

Its also particularly important to do this when a team reads a new politics da because its NEVER an issue at the top of the agenda and the negative is always going to tell you to default to issue specific U, which is basically always garbage. Obama saying he supports something does not mean its at the top of the agenda. You almost never hear a president say I don’t care about X issue. The vaguer the da the worse the ev and i/l ev for it is.

Its all about the packaging

Anyone who tells you otherwise is clueless. If you want to win big debates you need to be the one telling the more convincing story.

If I was giving the 2ar in this spot I would make sure to start off discussing how the risk of the Warming adv or competitiveness advantage was larger then the risk of a mitigated disad and why my internal links to the economy and hegemony were larger then that of the disad’s and EVEN IF they won that the plan was contentious in congress there was no guarantee the plan would derail a health care bill that may or may not exist and that things like bioterror were much more improbable then our warming impact and how that systemic impact out weighed the risk of a bioterror attack that hasn’t been proven feasible or even an extinction level impact.

This is obviously a rough rubric for what a 2ar should do in that spot, but the point is this, aggressively extending these defensive arguments in the context of discrediting the disad at the U, Link and Impact level raises a significant doubt to the disad vis a vis the aff. If you can prove to the judge that it is a bigger stretch for the negatives impact claim to be true then it is for your affs to be true, you will win.

Disad + CP vs Case

Now the existence of the CP obviously makes it harder for the aff to beat then the disad vs case alone. In this context the 2ar needs to focus on how the Magnitude of the Solvency deficit to the CP O/W the risk of the disad (explaining all the problems with the disad)

Tips for executing this in the 2ar

1.) Use the 2nr prep time to write this stuff out, its free prep time for you, figure out what you think they are going to go for and explain how your aff’s i/ls access it better or why its mitigated

2.) DO NOT give the 2ar overview where the 2nr did their impact work, consider doing it on the adv flow you are winning. Have it separate and distinct, the only thing you should do at the top of the 2nr’s impact assessment is answer the disad turns the case arguments. The reason for this is that when you give it on the 2nr’s work you invariably spend too much time to trying to mitigate their work and not enough time selling the impacts your aff.

3.) Start off the 2ar with this work, too many times debaters wait till halfway through the 2ar or 2nr to do their impact assessment / work. Doing it at the top gives the judge the big picture story you are selling 20-30 seconds into the speech not 2:30 into it. It helps make your 2ar and 2nr sound better. You are a used car salesman in these 2 speeches and how you sell it will determine if the judge is buying or not

4.)Point out how dumb a strictly offense/defense based system is for evaluating disads- taken to its extreme if those were the only answers I made on the health care da the 2nc could group it say no offense in the 2ac on the da evaluate from offense defense perspective extinction boom. While an argument might not be an offensive reason the plan is good, if it discredits the thesis of the negative’s claim it should mean the judge should diminish the probability of their arg. Many times the aff loses because the 2nr makes an arg like evaluate it from offense defense if we control the direction of the link there’s only a risk the plan causes something bad. The phrase only a risk is usually code for we don’t have much here so hopefully this works.