Category Archives: Evidence/Research

How Not to Ask for Help

This is a pretty funny exchange between a debater trying to find author quals and an author pretty reasonably responding to their rudeness.

 

It reminded me of this classic when a debater emailed a think tank leader to ask if they had published a good card just to affect the outcome of a debate tournament. The responses from Friedman are pretty hilarious, and imo pretty dead on.

 

Main topic authors are often bombarded with emails from debaters/coaches. Most often they are emailed questions that could be answered with 5 seconds of googling, and often the emails are in the form of a demand, not a polite request. I have emailed many authors and so I offer some general tips for what you should do

 

1. Be polite.

2. Don’t say you are a debater- they don’t care. Also if you say you are a debater and then be a moron you are tainting the rep of every debater who follows you.

3. Write an intelligent email. Emailing someone and saying “you give realism cites plz? kthanxbai” is not likely to get a good response because who wants to respond to a moron. Use proper English/spelling/punctuation (in other words do as I say not as I do)

4. Explain why you are emailing them specifically-i.e. “I am emailing you after reading your article about platypus extinction in the International Journal of Platypai…”

5. Their time is valuable. If you can form questions that have short, direct, easy answers to give they are more likely to respond. If you ask an IR prof  to teach their class to you through email, they are less likely to respond.

 

Debating Politics Impacts- Focus on Evidence/Bias

There are many reasons politics is a popular disad on every topic, one of them is that it is generally a quick way to get to nuke war. No matter what the issue is, if its on the presidents agenda its a safe bet there will be people making hyperbolic statements about it. While most disads/advantages are always exaggerations, the impact evidence selected to read for politics is generally some of the worst.

That the evidence is bad, and more specifically that it is often biased, is an issue frequently brought up, less frequently focused on, and even less frequently a round winning issue. It should be.

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Some Notes on Impacts

I’m somewhat baffled by many of the debates I see lately (as well as with the decisions of other judges when I listen to them) with the strange focus on terminal impacts, both in what percentage of time is spent debating them, and then even after a lot of time is spent arguing defense to them with how large of a “risk” judges assign them. Especially with people who I have had conversations with about how to debate or adjudicate impacts who when they are then in a debate seem to disregard/not employ the views they had previously expressed.

So below the break are some thoughts on what is going wrong in these debates and in the deciding of said debates.

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Bad Arguments

An interesting real world discussion over a recent op ed recommending Obama announce he will not seek re-election in order to foster bipartisanship.

This was less of a problem in the bad old days, when powerful gatekeepers to the opinion industry weeded out the non-mainstream viewpoints. Of course, the best and the brightest of the mainstream had some galactically stupid ideas too. I’m not suggesting we return to that world — it’s neither possible nor desirable.

When it comes to policy debates I’m always on the side of John Stuart Mill — the best way to deal with stupid arguments is to counter them with better arguments in the public sphere. That said, there’s a serious cost to this philosophy in a world in which the stupid ideas can command the policy agenda. The opportunity cost to the inordinate amount of time that is spent swatting away these ideas is that less time is spent debating policies and ideas that have a real chance of being enacted. Furthermore, sometimes the dumbass idea just goes into hibernation among a few die-hard believers until a propitious moment arises for its zombie revival.

In the end, I think Mill still carries the day. Still, every once in a while, it sure would be nice not to have to waste the energy and the attention on stupid policy ideas.

Full Text Disclosure: Good, Bad, or Ugly?

The winners of last year’s inaugural 3NR Spirit of Disclosure Award—Bronx Science’s Zack Elias & Andrew Markoff—set a new standard for comprehensive disclosure in high school policy debate. Instead of posting only the tags, citations, and first-and-last words of the evidence they read in debates, Bronx disclosed the full text of their evidence on the NDCA Wiki. While others feared that doing so would put them at a competitive disadvantage, Zack and Andrew were pioneers that racked up an impressive array of accomplishments despite raising the bar for openness and transparency. By winning the NDCA Championships, reaching the quarterfinals of the TOC, and finishing fourth in the Baker Award standings, Bronx put to rest the notion that a top-tier team can’t stay competitive using an open-source-after-the-fact model.

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Affs at Ghill RR

As listed on the wiki now

Carrolton- Japan BMD

Hooch- Afghan COIN

Dallas Jesuit-Japan

Damien- Japan

GBN-TNW

Ghill- Japan

Gulliver- End counter narcotics in Afghanistan

Homewood Flossmoor- Afghan COIN

Kinkaid- Korea

Lexington -Afghan COIN

Mountain Brook- Afghan PMCs

St. Francis- Korea

Westminster- Afghan COIN