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.