Answering some comments - Stories and Speed

Sparsely Occupied writes:

"Will, can you extrapolate on "The more detailed a projection of the future, the less likely it is to come to pass"? While this makes sense from a rational position it seems that in debate rounds it is important to provide the most detailed scenario for impact comparison."

You've already solved the problem.  Here's a good heuristic - whenever you notice a difference between a rational-decision making paradigm and the way things generally are resolved in the world of debate, what you have discovered is an absurdity - a glitch in the matrix.  There's another aphorism that I listed that gives you some idea of the way to proceed when you encounter an absurdity.

Further, this should give you some pause when you are constructing an argument with a slew of internal links and other long causal chains.  If you think of every link in your argument chain as having an independent probability of being true, as you add links to your chain your argument becomes exponentially more improbable.  So, keep it simple - find the shortest, clearest way to access your impacts.  Iterate until there is nothing left to take away.

If you are looking to read more about the danger of stories and the biases we have towards narrative decision-making, I think Tyler Cowen does a good job of going over it in this TED speech, and Nassim Taleb goes into a great amount of detail about the problem in The Black Swan.  There is a massive gulf between what we find persuasive and what is actually probable, and that is a gulf that you should be exploiting whenever you can.

Dave Zimny writes:

"I'm interested in your aphorism, "If you can't win a fast debate slowly, you aren't ready to debate fast." I take this to mean that a competent debater must master argument analysis and strategy, and without these skills simple speed won't win. In recent posts you've suggested several things nonspeed teams (a category I'd like to see more of!)can do to hold their own against speed teams. Could you give some general guidelines for nonspeed teams who want to hold their own at the highest level of college competition?"

1. Be as topical as possible.  Top teams are usually excellent at debating topicality.  When you hit a top team, your temptation will be to avoid the topic somehow and squirrel out of it.  Resist this temptation - good teams will have an immense amount of practice debating topicality and framework, but this round might well be the first time they have ever debated the topic in question.  If the topic says invade Syria, and you are a newer team, you should invade Syria.  It's defendable - explain how massive the problem is, explain why you solve it, and no matter how good your opponents disads are they will have a problem winning the debate.  Fortune favors the bold.

2. Be the judo master - find a point of leverage in the debate round - a specific argument that the other team MUST win to win the debate, and concentrate a large number of offensive arguments there.   Treat your opponent's speech as a puzzle that you need to solve, not a technical feat that you need to match blow-for-blow.  

3. Don't let yourself be intimidated - bad teams will often walk into a round ready to fold and lose without a second chance.  Everyone in the community is beatable, no matter how invincible they may seem.  If you don't understand things, that's not your fault, but it is your job to rectify that problem.

4. Communicate with your partner, even during your speech.  Debate is a team strategy game, and this is not Bridge where the rules preventing communication are integral to making the game challenging.  As a team you need to assess where your opponents are weak and exploit that weakness, as well as make sure that you are not conceding poison-pill arguments (no value to life! extinction inevitable!) that will make it impossible to win.

Annotations on an implicit ballot

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Better to make a bad decision than to refrain from making one.

If the alternative is magic, the permutation won't save you.

Better to use absurdities to your advantage than to explain why they are absurd.

Better to explain why they are absurd than to scoff.

Debate is a game.  If you can defend it as such, you shouldn't lose framework.

If you want to change the norms of the community, win debates under the current set of norms.

If you want to win on framework, you have to demonstrate that it's not just about you.

Debate is competitive dream architecture.

The more detailed a projection of the future, the less likely it is to come to pass.

The LO and MG are playing Tetris.  The PM and MO are playing chess.

Good debaters make stupid arguments too.

A self-righteous, defiant, losing debater is a losing debater.

Make arguments for reasons.

If a debater tells you they think a category of argument is stupid, and that argument is not spec, read it against them.

There's no bigger time suck than a true, strategic argument.

If you can't win a fast debate slowly, you aren't ready to debate fast.

The last thing a talented debater wants to have to do is win an argument.

Arguments that annoy me: Political Capital

If the words "political capital" are present in your politics shell, you're doing it wrong.

In policy debate, the politics debate is limited by the available evidence that can be found from major news wires.  On balance, this is a good thing, as it limits the extent to which debaters can govtrack.us their politics disads, creating some level of predictability.  The one downside is that on the whole, most Beltway Journalists™  write trite and boring pieces with very little insight.  Being completely incapable of actually assessing the motives of legislators in a nuanced manner, they discuss the notion of "political capital" as though it were a thing that actually exists.  Because they frame the passage of legislation as requiring the "expenditure" of  "political capital" out of the "Scrooge McDuck Political Capital Bank LLC," policy debaters use political capital arguments in their disads.  "Hey, it's not just me, look, Joe Klein said it!"

In parliamentary debate, you are liberated from this stupidity.  Because you aren't forced to actually have "evidence" for your arguments (muahahahahaha) you can do things like analyze the motives of the specific individuals responsible for enacting a given policy, and articulate how their motives might change if the affirmative is enacted, even if you don't have a Beltway Journalist™ to glean insight from.  An example:

In late 2009-early 2010, health care reform was THE politics disad.  Sarah and I read it, primarily because I enjoyed torturing Sarah with arguments she found boring.  But our link argument actually had some nuance to it.  Remember that the bill was just barely going to pass with 60 Senators voting for it.  Well, I read about a poll that said Ben Nelson's poll numbers had dropped by 20 points after he had voted for the first version of the bill, that he would be facing re-election in the fall, and that he would be required to vote for the bill again when it came out of committee.  No more than that - just the existence of this poll and the reconciliation vote.  For our link argument, we extrapolated that Nelson would want to reverse the polling damage, but that he couldn't just flip-flop on the issue without looking like a craven hypocrite.  He needed a reason, a rationale for breaking with the liberals.  And…your well-intentioned plan, whatever it was, gave Nelson the rationale he needed to vote against health care reform.

Try and turn that.  It's not fun.  You can probably win some defense against it (in fact, a lot of defense against it) but it's so specific as to be insulated from most of the generic crap people throw at it.

And if they say "political capital high"  in response?  LOL.

Now, "political capital" can occasionally be meaningful, if, for example, one is equating "Obama's political capital" with "Obama's ability to influence the congress."  Sometimes Obama needs to call in favors, exert some level of pressure, etc.  And there may well be a limit to the amount of pressure he can exert on his own side or on the GOP.  But realize that when we talk about politics in this way, most of the metaphors that are associated with political capital are simplistic or totally irrelevant.  And when people read political capital links against XO plans?  "Today, President Barack Obama spent his whole day in closed-door meetings with President Barack Obama in order to try and persuade the President to sign the executive order on his desk.  In other news, the Secret Service is currently readying a padded room for the President at the local mental hospital."

Good politics disads resemble every other type of good straight-up argument - they talk about what human beings will do if the plan is passed, and they use our shared understanding of human behavior as the basis for warrants.

Read a book, read a book...

Most of you are probably wrapping up finals (except for my former quarter-system charges at Oregon and others elsewhere, sadface) and are eagerly anticipating freedom from academic work for a few months.

Not so fast!  Assuming you are going to be debating next year, summer is the time when you get the chance to improve.  If you weren't in the top ten overall teams last year, you probably have a significant amount of work to do over the summer if you want to have a shot at the title next year.  I have a few humble suggestions.

1. See the title. 

You have been liberated from the requirement of reading what your teachers want you to read.  Now you have three months where you can be in full control of your reading list.  If you haven't developed a reading habit, now is the time.  The most important thing is to be consistently reading books over the next three months.  If you find yourself getting stuck on one book, pick up a different one and start reading that one.  But read, every day.

Books have a way of teaching you a few concepts very, very well.  Books are repetitive - most of the time they will contain 2 or 3 major arguments, and then spend 300 pages or so applying those arguments to diverse situations.  That repetition is a good thing.  If you hear an argument once, you will easily comprehend it, but you will have a difficult time truly understanding it.  Seeing an argument applied in a myriad of ways will give you an ability to use that argument when it comes up in a debate round.

Books are also a way to become more cynical, something that is key to the success of anyone who is going to rely on winning straight-up debates.  Let's face it, at this point you've been marinated for roughly 13-15 years in progressive, hopeful ideology (unless you are lucky enough to be studying at a Christian school, in which case you've been marinated for roughly 13-15 years in a progressive, hopeful Christian ideology.)  You aren't going to be reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker in your critical theory class, nor will you be reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley or The Delinquent Teenager by Donna LaFramboise in your environmental studies class.  Your psychology class won't contain anything like Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, or Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.  Hell, your economics professor probably forgot who Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt were, and they certainly won't include Liberalism, Economics in One Lesson, or Individualism and Economic Order in their syllabus.  Your peace studies class probably won't touch on Thomas Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict or Edward Luttwak's Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.  And your political science class will surely ignore Taleb's The Black Swan, Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations, and Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter.  

I try to be subtle.

2. Practice.

I'd go to policy camp, if I had the time and money to do so.  My favorite analogy for NPDA/CEDA is Japanese Baseball/Major League Baseball.  Clearly, if you were playing in the Japanese baseball, there might be some quirks about your sport that major leaguers won't understand, but if you got the opportunity to go a MLB training camp you wouldn't pass it up.  The policy community is much sounder and better at explaining theory and the K debate - if you are having trouble with those areas, policy camp is the place to be.  

Moreover, learning how to cut a card and assemble arguments is really, really useful for parliamentary debate.  When you get used to seeing different arguments as pieces on a chessboard that can be combined in different ways, as opposed to distillations of truth that come from on high, you'll do better.

If you can't go to camp, you should try and find a policy coach in your area and work with them.  I speak from personal experience when I say that this is extremely valuable.

Speed shouldn't be the priority.  I think it's important for people to know how to go faster in the abstract - I found myself frustrated by the fact that my coaching staff seemed to treat my slowness as something that was intrinsic to my debating, rather than something that can be fixed.  Most debaters now have to do a lot more work improving their word economy before they can really get anything out of physically speaking faster.

3. Anticipate and block out useful arguments.

I can tell you write now that the block "Romney and Obama are identical," if crafted properly, will be incredibly useful to you in the fall.  As will the "Romney is a diabolical demon/Romney is the coolest ever" blocks.  As will the "Greece leaves/doesn't leave the Eurozone" blocks, as well as a few others.  Think through these questions.  Read about them.  Go exploring on Wikipedia and on both sides of the pundit-osphere.  More than the writing of the blocks is the "headwork" that goes along with writing them.  The more you war game out different situations in your spare time, the less work you will actually have to do in-round to generate the arguments you need to win.

(FWIW, I'd start with Haidt, Ridley, Kahneman, and Liberalism, and then go on from there.)

Better Blocks vs. Better Templates

Mastermind writes:

Can you post something about how to work on writing efficient blocks? It seems like when I give MG's and LOC's I make arguments that come out disorganized. When I realize it's happening I re-explain it which really slows me down to a point where I look like a dumbass and almost makes it so the argument wasn't worth making. The judges with super tight flows don't have a problem with it but plenty do and I'd like to get better speaks and win more rounds. I don't think in a very linear fashion in debate rounds or in real life so I was wondering if you had any tips for how to get into that mindset or just how to get in the practice of distilling an argument down to its most important components.

I think in some ways the way you have framed the question is very revealing.  The urge to find a way to write the perfect block is understandable.  If, before the debate, we could come up with a set of slayer arguments that applied to any disad or any criticism that might come our way, then we don't even have to think in round!

Clearly the goal is to give a more organized and efficient MG, but there's a radical leap from that to the assumption that simply having better blocks will lead you giving more organized and efficient MG's.  The problem you have identified is one of technique, and not necessarily one of preparation.  Even if you had the best blocks in the world, if you were using them in a haphazard way, your speech would still be massively disorganized and inefficient.

Obviously there's nothing better than practice to help you get more efficient and organized, but there are certain ways of approaching the MG that lend themselves to efficiency.  My argument is that MG's should practice thinking in templates.  Instead of focusing on content, try to focus on form.

For example, let's take topicality.  While I never formalized this anywhere, this was the way I responded to T:

1. (Optional) - We Meet
2. Your interpretation is bad (Counter-Standards)
a. Reason 1.  Impact to resolutional precision and predictability and/or the division of ground.
b. Reason 2.  Same.
3. Counter-interpretation
4. Answer their standards using one of three basic arguments
a. Your standard sucks ("You say we need to be telepathic: no, we don't, actually.)
b. Our interpretation captures your standard better ("You say grammar - we are more grammatical")
c. Our counter-standard controls the internal link to your standard ("You say predictability - we've demonstrated above that field contextuality is the internal link to predictability.")
5. (Optional) - Don't vote on T

This isn't a block.  It's not a set of pre-scripted arguments that I would have read come hell or high water.  It is a mental model - a way of approaching an argument.  Templates like this do a couple of things for you.  First, if they are good, they lead you to focus on the most important, highest-value arguments that you can make.  On T, you know that your thumper argument is going to be one of two arguments - either a "we meet" (because they blundered with their interpretation) or "your interpretation is terrible" (because if you did your job in prep time, any interpretation that you violate should have an obvious problem.)  The second thing a template does is it prevents you from wasting time on stupid arguments.  You should treat your templates like a checklist - complete every item satisfactorily, then move on.  Don't linger on arguments that are low-value.

Templates can be as simple as a 2-part case turn model - where you first establish uniqueness for whatever claim that you are trying to make, and then make it.  It can be as simple as the 4-part refutation model, or SPOT on counterplans, or any number of different things.  All these are just basic heuristics to make sure that you are doing what you need to do, in an order that puts the priority where it should be.

The secret to giving monster MG's is to combine a rigid adherence to your basic argumentative templates with a lot of creativity and flexibility with regard to the content of your arguments.  When you have a pre-prepped block of arguments that you are going to read no matter what, those arguments are almost certainly low-value because they are unlikely to be precise in any way.  And when you are just throwing blocks at the flow hoping that something sticks - well, that's the disorganized, inefficient MG that we are trying to avoid.

That isn't to say block-writing isn't useful - but it's usually not useful for the reasons that most people think it is.  Most of the blocks you write won't really be that great, except for the most common theory blocks.  The primary value of block-writing is that it forces you to think through the way a question can be resolved in a debate round.  If you've thought about a specific question (capitalism/hegemony/climate change) and the way arguments shake down on a question more than your opponent, you probably aren't going to lose the debate on that question.  Moreover, if you've, I don't know, read a book on the topic in question, you are probably going to have smarter things to say about it.  My capitalism blocks didn't just appear magically out of nowhere - they were the product of a lot of thought and a lot of reading.  (And I lost plenty of debates on capitalism too, more than I should have, because while the content of my arguments was excellent, the template I was using to respond to the criticism was very, very poor.)

So yeah.  Technique over truth, and templates over blocks.

Arguments that annoy me, part II: Resource Wars.

It's not so much that resource wars are inconceivable.  Sure, it's possible that if resources got really scarce, and there were major moves towards protectionism and nationalism around the world, countries might get so focused on securing their own resources that they might fight each other.  Maybe.  Possibly.  People usually don't provide examples for this argument, so it should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

The incoherent argument is the one that says recessions will lead to resource wars.  I probably hear this impact argument three to four times a tournament, maybe more.

Remember folks - recessions are slowdowns in economic activity.  They are the result of businesses being unable to sell their products, cutting production, and firing people.  They are a product of people wanting fewer natural resources.

See that 2009 drop?  That's the recession.  People might have been inclined to fight over oil during the boom, but they sure as hell wouldn't have fought during the bust.   In fact, people are probably a lot less likely to engage in resource wars during a recession.  They might engage in nationalistic, jingoistic, patriotic wars, which tend to distract people when they would otherwise be angry at their leaders about the economy.  But that's not the internal link people are going for.

How To Lose

A bit of a digression, perhaps.  Nominally this blog is supposed to show you how to win parliamentary debate rounds.  But, try as we all might, eventually we'll end up losing one or two along the way.

So, let's set the scene.  You come out of a debate round brimming with confidence.  You walk back into the room.  "I vote for (not you.)"  How should you proceed?

1. Assume that the judge is right.

The first reason that you should assume the judge is right is that if the ballot went against you, and your name isn't Tom Schally, odds are you lost.  Might as well get used to that fact early on.

The second reason that you should do this is because one of the most underrated skills in debate is the ability to empathize.  If you cannot put yourself in the judge's shoes, how on earth can you expect to persuade them?

Finally, assuming the judge is right means that everything you do in the next 5 minutes will have the proper tone - one of honest inquisitiveness, as opposed to arrogant belligerence.

2. Reconcile your view of the debate round with your critic's.

To do this, you must listen to the RFD carefully.  Does the RFD sound anything like your side's rebuttal?  If not, the rebuttal was a failure.  Even if it highlighted the right arguments, it was not a clearly communicated vision.  Your rebuttals should be clean enough that a 10-year-old can figure out why you are winning.

If the critic's RFD doesn't account for an argument that you considered important, ask them how they evaluated that argument.  The answer should give you some insight - did they have the relevant argument flowed?  Did your side emphasize it appropriately?  Did it go over your critic's head?  Was it impacted appropriately?  Does your critic have an IQ of 70?  Etcetera.  Ask how they evaluated an argument, get an answer, rinse, repeat.

Again, the skill that you are trying to develop here is empathy.  Debate is about communication, communication is a two-way street, if you ignore your critic, then you're missing the whole point.

3. Extract strategic insights.

I'm a huge fan of asking the following question after a loss - "What needed to happen in my speech for us to win this debate round?"  Most good critics will have a pretty clear idea of what they think you should have done.  Sometimes they'll say something really valuable.  I lost a round against Long Beach at the Loma Round Robin, asked this question, got an answer, and had a much better win rate against the K in future debate rounds.

Notice that nowhere in the above list includes yelling, bitching, whining, etc.  Losing a debate round is a non-event.  A tiny, insignificant moment that nobody in the fucking world will care about.  You could be a five-year-old starving in the desert somewhere, you aren't, be grateful, and figure out how to win the next time you are in front of that critic.

Awesomeness and Fragility

As a debater I found that understanding uniqueness was a difficult challenge.  The phrase "the uniqueness controls the direction of the link" went over my head for a long time.  Part of the problems is that unlike the other elements of a disadvantage - the link, internal link, and impact, uniqueness is not a particularly descriptive term.  It's sort of intuitive what a link is - a connection between the plan and the disadvantage.  An impact is, well, an impact.  But uniqueness?  Like, what makes the disad special?

Right.  A lot of people get taught that uniqueness arguments are just arguments about the status quo.  Of course, that's partially correct, but when novice debaters hear this, they generally take it to mean that their job is to list off a bunch of random facts about the status quo, some of which have exactly zero bearing on the arguments at hand.

To really grasp uniqueness, we have to take a step back, and think about our intuitive understanding of debate in general.  For most people, it's not difficult to understand link-through-impact debate: when we talk about policies in our daily lives with our friends, we are used to arguing about what would happen if a certain policy was passed.

What we aren't used to debating about is "what is the world like right now?"  This is because, intuitively, we don't consider reality as something to be debated about.  Reality is…real…out there…an actual thing, that exists, and is something we "ought" to have a shared understanding of.  The idea of debating about whether or not it is raining outside or sunny outside is asinine.  This intuitive assumption that reality is not something that is up for debate is what makes uniqueness so difficult for many novice debaters to get a handle on.

So, to take the obvious next step, the uniqueness debate is indeed a debate about the status quo, and further, your arguments have the ability to shape what the world looks like for the purposes of the debate round.  In debate, "reality" is a lot more like the Matrix, and if you want, you can be Neo, shaping the world in such a way that it is favorable to your side of the debate round.

How do we do this?  Well, it depends on which side you are on.  Let's think intuitively.  If you are the negative, you want reality to be awesome.  The world should be an amazing place, with bunny rabbits and rolling green hills.  Why?  Well, if the world is an awesome place, the rationale for action is obviously not that strong.  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it, etc."

Further, as the negative, in addition to wanting the world to be awesome, we also want it to be fragile.  If the world is robust to various changes, then it's unlikely that the affirmative's policy will be particularly destructive to the way things are.  On the other hand, if the world is like a beautiful Ming vase perched on a very thin pedestal, well then we wouldn't want to do anything at all, would we?  Don't touch the vase!

Conversely, if we are on the affirmative, we want the world to be a terrible place.  If it's ok at the moment, that needs to be a temporary illusion, with Voldemort lurking around the corner, his arrival inevitable.  If the world sucks, then even if the plan might not work, or might have some unintended consequences, the rationale for doing something, anything at all, is extremely probable.

We also want the world to be fixable (which is actually similar to fragile.)  We want our plan to be able to change the status quo in a positive way, and we can't do that if the world is robust to the type of change we want to make.

If you internalize these concepts, you will understand how to construct uniqueness scenarios.  You aren't just listing off random facts about the world.  You are trying to paint a picture of reality that serves your interests.  If you are negative, you want to paint a picture of a world that is awesome and fragile.  If you are affirmative, the world needs to be terrible, but fixable.

More on this later.

Arguments that Annoy Me, Part 1: Phytoplankton

This is a really obnoxious argument that has found its way into parli and needs to die.  Usually the argument goes something like - Phytoplankton, the micro-organisms that live in the oceans and other waters and are at the base of the food chain for most species on earth, are extraordinarily temperature-sensitive and will go extinct if the earth warms one or two degrees.

I mean, just intuitively, this is wrong.  For chrissakes, how much temperature variability do phytoplankton experience in a given year?  Now, realize that life has been around for...a really long time.  Imagine the worst, hottest year in the last few hundred million.  Hot, right?  Yeah.  Phytoplankton survived that.  And the Ice Age, and the medieval warm period.

Oh, and the study that launched that scare - turns out the methodology was bullshit.

Pro tip: if you are losing a lot of substantive debates, maybe you should focus a little less on trying to win the impossible-to-evaluate debates on top-level uniqueness, and instead focus on reading a little bit of intutive, obvious, and true impact defense.  Like the fact that a slight increase in temperature won't destroy all life on earth.

Speaker Roles and Complementarity

Apple is awesome.  I own almost their entire suite of products, and odds are that you do too.  They just recently eclipsed ExxonMobil as the most valuable business in the entire world.  Now, clearly, there are a lot of reasons for their success, but today I'll focus on one - the notion of the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI.)

Steve Jobs made a point of ensuring that there were no "committees" at Apple.  Groups were never responsible for any decisions.  The organization may have been enormous, with hundreds of different projects going on, but there was always one single person responsible for any given project or sub-project.  The Directly Responsible Individual.

The DRI had complete say about what would happen on a project, and what the people under him or her had to do - but if they failed to deliver, they would cease to be the DRI.  It seems failure was fairly rare.  When the options were deliver or be fired, individuals delivered, because there was no one else on your committee to hide behind.

How does this relate to debate, you might ask.  Simple.  While Apple is a giant corporation and debate partnerships have…two people, the notion of having a DRIs for each debate partnership is equally important. 

The question of who should be responsible for what is a tricky one, but I believe that it comes down to this: Which speaker actually wins the debate?  On the negative, the debate is almost never over after the LOC.  It's just the opening - arguments are shelled out, but not developed, and it's rare for case responses to be totalizing.  The MOC is normally where the debate is won or lost, with the LOR having some ability disrupt the PMR and pre-empt potential affirmative visions, but little else.  On the aff, the debate is sometimes over after the MG, if the LOC is particularly weak, but most of the time, the PMR has to make the big decision about what arguments to go for and figure out where the win is. 

The MO and PMR are the control roles.  Their job is to win the debate.  And when we think of talented MOs and PMRs, the same suite of skills seems to pop up: round vision, a willingness to make big strategic decisions and strong collapses, and an ability to communicate a clear and coherent vision of the debate round.  Speed, technique, and line-by-line skills are not as important for these speeches, because the job of the PMR and the MO is not to respond to every argument, but instead to identify the most important arguments and win those. 

If the MO and the PMR are the control roles, the MG and the LO are the support roles.  This is not to denigrate them - they are not more or less important than the control roles.  They are just different, and designed to be complementary.

Since the debate generally cannot be won by the MG and the LO, their job should be to facilitate a round-winning speech by their partner.  Speed, technique, and line-by-line responses are much more important for the LO and the MG - it is essential that the LOC lay out a complete strategy that maximizes the options of the MO, just as it is essential for the MG not to concede a bunch of arguments so that the PM can communicate a winning vision in the PMR without being point-of-ordered every three seconds. 

Now for the most important point.  I believe that most dysfunction and disharmony in partnerships can be explained by this theory of speaker roles - more precisely, by the failure of one or more of the debaters to embrace or understand their role. 

When an LOC operates independently, under the assumption that they are the controlling debater, the opposition will consistently have difficulty winning important debate rounds.  Because while the LO might come up with some brilliant arguments, if the MO does not understand those arguments they cannot be used to win the debate round.  The same applies with brilliant MG arguments - if they are not explained or phrased in a way that the PMR understands them, they might as well be black holes.  It is almost impossible for an LO to prompt and MO through their speech, or for an MG to prompt a PMR, without the prep time available in policy.  If the MO doesn't get it, the opp loses, because the MO is when the debate is won. 

In properly functioning partnerships, the MO captains the opposition strategy.  The off-case positions are ones that the MO is comfortable winning - politics or criticisms that the MO is well-versed in, or disads written by the MO during prep time or during the PMC.  The LOC is not a robot, certainly; but to the extent they are generating arguments independently, their goal has to be to make those arguments as clear to their own MO as possible, and as close to the MO's knowledge base as possible.  And, most importantly, whenever there is any disagreement between the LO and the MO during the round, the MO wins.  Even if the MO is wrong, it is better to defer to the MO and their vision of the debate round, and try to resolve the communication problems outside of the round.

The affirmative requires slightly more balance between the PM and the MG.  The PM is still the control role, and the MG is still the support role, but due to the fact that the MGC has to be more extemporaneous by its nature, the PM has to surrender some level of control over the specific arguments that the MG is making.  Still, the goal of the MG is not to win the debate round on their own, but to neutralize negative arguments and lay the groundwork for a winning rebuttal in a way that the PM understands.  And, again, if there is a disagreement between the MG and the PM, then the PM wins.  The PM is ultimately responsible for making the big strategic decisions and "winning" the debate round.  Good MG's will check in with their partner on a regular basis while going down the flow, saying "anything else?" at the bottom of any position that they respond to, to give the PM a chance to prompt an MG on a single argument they think is compelling, or to ensure that an important argument is responded too. 

The nature of these roles means that most partnerships work best with one debater as the PM/MO and the other as the LO/MG, in order to ensure that each debater is responsible for the same role on both sides of the topic.  A double member/double leader partnership is trickier, because the debaters have to alternate between control and support, which can create some tricky interpersonal dynamics - but it's doable, as Sarah and I can attest to.  But, still, right now, if you look at the top 4 teams in the NPTE rankings, all four of them split speaker roles in the same way - Testerman, Warren, Campbell, and Heckendorn take the control roles and the primary strategic responsibilities, and Donaghy, Smith, Selck, and Morton take the support roles and primary technical responsibilities.  It's not about being better or worse - it's about being complementary, and embracing the responsibilities inherent in your speech and your role in getting the ballot.

Entitled to Understand

Let's face it: NPDA Parliamentary Debate is an extremely strange format of debate.  It was designed almost 20 years ago, and it was designed to be a slow, non-technical, non-logocentric type of debate.  20 years later, the activity has little to no resemblance to what its designers intended it to be, but we are still using the same structure.

The best demonstration of this is the lack of cross-examination, with points of information as a supposed substitute.  Obviously they are very different - points of information are isolated questions, where as cross-x is a sustained period of questioning.  But more important than that is the fact that during cross-x, the questioner is in control, whereas with a point of information, the questioned is control.  This creates an obvious problem - what if the speaker does not want to take questions?  There is no rule that would prevent them from doing so (SIU-style procedurals notwithstanding,) and it would seem to be strategically advantageous NOT to take questions - you can make more arguments, and your opponents don't understand your own.

In old-school parli, this wasn't as much of a problem - since style and ethos were paramount, you would take 3 questions, because doing otherwise was "bad form."  Further, because that event was slower, the need for clarification was almost nil - points of information were a chance for witty banter, and rarely used to understand opposing arguments.  Obviously in modern parli., this isn't the case.

You'll notice something about most top-level parli debaters.  They feel entitled to understand their opponents' arguments.  So entitled, in fact, that they will badger their opponents with questions after the plan text to make sure they know what's going on.  In effect, they are breaking the rules, and creating a sort of quasi-cross-x, where the questioner is in control again.

From the perspective of the governing body of NPDA, it's clearly time to institute some form of cross-x, so that this behavior can be brought within the rules.  But from the perspective of the debater, I think that this behavior is a necessary adaptation to an outdated rule set.   So long as your questions are clearly clarification questions, and not attempts to make arguments, go ahead and talk over the speaker to get your questions answered.  Not doing so, in my mind, is basically giving up the round - if you do not understand your opponents' arguments, how are you supposed to respond?  So go ahead, debaters - be entitled.  Just this once.

And an Aphorism

Be confident in the face of your opponents, and humble in the face of your craft.

Timeout

This guy speaks pretty fast.

Voters vs. Visions

I debated very briefly all the way back in 2004, at my local community college.  Like many of the other people debating at the time, I was taught that a rebuttal should be composed primarily of "voters": bullet-point style lists of reasons why my team should win.  Apparently this practice is still around, because occasionally when I go to a local tournament I hear teams begin their rebuttals with something like, "My first voter is: we have a plan."

Obviously this is a terrible way to give a rebuttal.  But, even you, the advanced debater, are probably not doing that much differently.

A proper rebuttal does not contain a list of voters and nothing else.  A proper rebuttal is an attempt to communicate a vision for the debate round.  You are trying to paint a picture of what the world would look like after the plan, given the way that arguments have shaken down during the course of the debate round.  What would constitute "voters" might well find their way into this type of rebuttal, but instead of being isolated bullet-points, they would be integrated into a cohesive whole, to prove one basic thesis about the round.

Most rebuttals I see do not do this.  They are just as line-by-line as the member speeches - people going down the flow, extending every argument they've won, and briefly impacted to the ballot.

Here's my question.

How exactly is this different than listing off twenty voters?

Right, it isn't.

Maybe your rebuttal should communicate a vision.  Or maybe you are comfortable doing novice-level rebuttals.

Your choice.

Be The Judo Master

Most of the rounds I have seen this year have played out via the following script:  The first two constructives are fast and detailed, but the LOC rarely interacts much with the PMC and relies on a generic counterplan or criticism to avoid the necessity of making line-by-line responses.  The member speakers attempt to race down the flow and cover every argument as fast as they can, the team that has less technical class inevitably concedes a few too many arguments, and the rebuttals do little except extend what conceded arguments they have.  Almost always, in this situation, the higher-ranked team will win, because all things being equal, the higher-ranked team is usually better technically than the lower-ranked team.

Nobody seems to realize that this is not a game you have to play as a lower-ranked team.  It certainly isn't the game you want to be playing.

Say you were playing football, and a 6'5, 350 lineman was racing at you.  You could try and block them, get in their way, match force against force, but if you are only 5'10 200, it's a game you will lose 99 times out of 100.  But it turns out, there is this other discipline out there.  Judo!  Instead of trying to meet force with force, you use your opponent's force against them, by applying all of your energy to one crucial point of leverage which sends your opponent flying into a wall.

You can see where this is going.  If you are every in a debate round against a more technically classy team, you should be figuring out how to use Judo.  Points of leverage are arguments that the other team MUST win in order to win the debate round. 

Say you know your opponents are very fast and technically classy, and you consider yourself to be a slow MG.  They read a procedural, Keystone XL Politics, a Courts CP with a substantial solvency block, and a slew of defensive arguments on case.  As the MG, you feel like even if you went at your top speed, you wouldn't be able to respond to everything.

If you find yourself in this situation, and you want to win, you MUST be strategic.  One simple way to be strategic is to use the following plan:

Answer the procedural
Concede Counterplan Solves the Case
Concede the case defense
Concede the uniqueness, link, and internals on the D/A
And...impact turn the d/a for 5 minutes.

Even at top speed, the LOC probably didn't spend more than 30 seconds to 1 minute on the impact level of the D/A.  Even your slowest 5 minutes will be more than adequate to fully and completely answer their impact arguments, as well as make your own impact turns.  And guess what - the MO is screwed.  They have to win this argument or they lose the debate, because by making strategic concessions, you've made the D/A the only distinction between the aff and the C/P, and thus the central question of the debate. To steal from Joe Dudek: the team that gets deeper, faster on the central questions of the debate round is the team that most likely will win the debate.

I'll let you in on a little secret.  Good teams don't like to actually have to win arguments.  They want you to make a major strategic error that lets them waltz to victory, or make a slew of concessions that means their rebuttalist don't have to think.  You can ask any top MO in the country, and they will tell you that the above scenario is an absolute nightmare for them, and the one thing they hope will not happen against a lower-ranked team.

Another reason this works is that while the rankings are usually excellent determinants of technical class, they are usually not a good indicator of the knowledge base of the debaters.  Of the three parts of the triad earlier (strategy, technique, and erudition) erudition is probably the least important of the three when it comes to actually winning debate rounds.  I've met plenty of top debaters who were strategic and technically skilled but not in the least bit erudite. 

But if you use the following strategy, you neutralize the strategic and technical advantages of better debaters.  If the debate is about one central question, they can't be crafty and exclude you from the debate, and if you get a massive time tradeoff on the other positions in the round, their speed and efficiency won't be able to make up for it.  So then the debate comes down to: who knows more about this one specific issue?  I guarantee that is your best shot.  Even if you hit a team that is well known for being erudite, you can easily hit them on a topic that is their weak spot; after all, college students don't exactly know everything.

Be the Judo Master.  Try it, you'll like it.

Impact Calculus is Impact Comparison

This is a concept that seems simple, and yet it's one that a huge proportion of debaters get wrong on a regular basis.

The way that most people deploy the concepts of timeframe, magnitude, and probability is hopelessly inept.  Most attempts sounds something like "Our impact has a huge magnitude - it ends in a war!  And it has huge probability - we made a link argument!  And it happens soon!  We win timeframe!"

These arguments are meaningless, or at least, irrelevant in the context of impact calculus, because they are not actually comparing one impact to another.  It is not sufficient to demonstrate that your impact is very big, it is essential to demonstrate that your impact is bigger than a different impact in the round.  For example:

"Global Warming outweighs their small nuclear war on magnitude - if allowed to go on, warming will make the planet uninhabitable for all humans, which means extinction, whereas estimates of even the worst nuclear wars suggest that about 5% of the population would be alive after them."

The same thing goes with probability.  If you are making an argument about probability, you are not trying to say that your impact is definitely going to happen.  Instead, you are comparing the way the debate has shaken down on the link level on a couple of different positions.  For example:

"The disad outweighs advantage 1 on probability - they made exactly zero arguments on the link level of our d/a, but we have two strong defensive arguments on the link.  Even if you feel like they have decent responses to those defensive arguments, you should still be treating their aff as only having some chance of solving their impacts, which is not going to outweigh a 100% risk of the d/a."

Finally, timeframe.  This is probably the most botched aspect of impact calculus in the rounds I see.  Not only do people fail to compare the timeframe of two different positions, they fail to explain the relevance of timeframe in the debate.  And without this sort of explanation, timeframe is totally irrelevant.  Think about it - 1 million people dying today is pretty much equivalent to 1 million people dying 6 months from now, and you'd sooner take a hangnail today than a bullet in the head a week from now.  Timeframe is only relevant insofar as the speedier impacts change the way that other positions in the debate would operate.

The classic example of this situation would be an alternative energy aff that claims a warming impact against an econ d/a that ends in immediate economic collapse.

"And, the d/a outweighs on timeframe - a market panic will ensue within the next month, which is far sooner than alternative energy will be developed even under the most optimistic forecasts of the plan.  When the economy goes under, all the alternative energy companies will go out of business, which means that the aff won't be able to solve anything."

You'll notice that this sounds a lot like "d/a turns the case."  No kidding.  In a real sense, the tools of impact calculus are not "magnitude, probability, and timeframe."  They are "magnitude, probability, and turns the case/da." 

But this is a bit of a ramble.  The most important thing to notice about all of these examples is that they involve explicit comparisons between different impacts and link stories.  If you are not making an explicit comparison, you are not doing impact calculus.  Simple as that.

Strategy

What does it mean to be great at parli?

A great debater is erudite.  A good debater has a wealth of knowledge about the world, enough that they rarely find themselves stumped.

A great debater is technically classy.  Fast delivery, crisp articulation, an economical and efficient way with words, and a clean flow are the hallmarks of the technically classy debater. 

And finally, a great debater is strategic.

It's this last part that this post, and for the most part this blog, will focus on.  The other two elements of the triad are aspects of debate that you, the debater, will have to work on yourself.  If you want to become more erudite - read.  And then read some more.  At times we'll compare ways of increasing your knowledge base to find the most efficient, but for the most part your knowledge base is your own problem.

Similarly, you won't be able to become technically classy overnight. It takes practice to be able to flow high-level rounds, just as it takes practice to argue at a high rate of speed without verbal crutches.  We'll talk some methods for getting faster, and for understanding high rates of speed, but that won't be our primary focus.

So what about strategy?

Strategy encompasses a number of things that most debaters (and debate coaches) treat as isolated concepts - argument comparison, collapsing, round vision, etc.  But strategy is bigger than any one or two of these things.

I like to use Sebastian Marshall's definition of strategy: Strategy is simply doing things for reasons.  In the context of debate, the perfectly strategic speech is one in which the debater has a reason for making every single argument that they make.

You might say "well, that sounds easy - I already do have a reason for every argument that I make - because it's the best argument I can think of at the time!"  Not good enough.  The fact than an argument is good is a necessary, but not sufficient, justification for saying that argument in the debate.  If you ask a strategic debater why they made an argument, they will be able to explain why they thought that argument would help them win the debate round.

Too many debaters just make arguments - as fast as they can, as fast as they can think of them.  Stop doing that.  Make arguments for reasons.  Be strategic.