Who could object to that? Thou shalt not bear false witness. Tell the truth, and shame the Devil. Transparency, management-speak for honesty, is put forward as the answer to most of today’s ills. But the truth of the matter—honestly—is that this would lead to disaster, for lying is at the heart of civilisation.
Author Archives: Scott Phillips
Answering some reader Q's
I have been a little lax responding to email related to some recent posts, so I will attempt to knock them all out right now.
Dropbox Teams
You can now get a team dropbox account, so that your debate files count towards the team accounts quota, not the individual members.
Joint 3nr/View From Tab Podcast This weekend
At the Meadows tournament this weekend we will be recording a joint podcast with The View From Tab. If you have questions you would like answered, put them in the comments here.
Last of the Flo-hicans: on the death of tabula rasa judging-part 3- about the offense/defense paradigm
I started this post a long time ago but the draft got deleted and I never really came back to it. Recently, however, I have been annoyed again by the chatter about how stupid the offense defense paradigm is. So, I am going to attempt to part explain/part defend the theoretical usefulness of seeing things “offense/defense”.
Kids Today…
Kids Today will be a new feature where I don my corduroy pants, cardigan and slippers, grab a Werthers original and complain about why debaters today are terrible and everything was better back in the day.
Some Good cites
An interesting new study about Util and public policy makers that is going around the blogosphere:
Most of us seem to be placing too much value on the wrong characteristics. Our preferred candidates are able to “connect” with the public. We want to like our leaders; we favour candidates who we’d be comfortable having a beer with. But according to the study, this isn’t the type of candidate who will give us utilitarian outcomes. If we really want the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we should be electing psychopathic, Machiavellian misanthropes.
Since it seems implausible that we are best off governed by Machiavellian psychopaths, I take the findings of Bartels and Pizarro–that those attracted to utilitarianism tend toward the psychopathic and Machiavellian–as prima facie evidence that utilitarianism is “self-effacing,” that it recommends its own rejection.
And some global conflict U for K debates
(all pilfered from the dish)
Judge Philosophy Guidelines
As the season begins, there are many people who will begin judging for the first time. There are also many people who realize they are terrible judges and want to improve. As such, people will be writing and posting new judge philosophies. I wanted to try and put together a guide for people approaching this task to help guide them through the process. These insights are gleaned from my years in debate looking at judge philosophies and from many revisions to my own philosophy and the effects I saw it have on debates I judged.
I will update this post a few times before Greenhill, but a few people asked me about it so I wanted to get the bare bones out there.
Updated 9-14
Opening tournament prep
There are many factors that go into how you should prep for the beginning of the year: the size of your squad, how much time you have, what tournament you are going to etc. For the purpose of this series I will assume the following:
1. Your squad has 2-4 people (coaches or debaters) who can reliably be counted on to produce useful debate work
2. You will be making your debut at Greenhill or a similar large TOC tournament
3. You have a decent chance of making it to the doubles (4-2 record or better)
Debate Central Digest
You can find it here– its a recap of all their recent content. There are several good articles, an organized collection of camp lectures and more.