Monday, January 30, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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