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.
