Yes: frequently resolving a particular claim is impossible without making an independent assessment regarding evidence quality, and quals are part of that. But the goal of any judge should be to reduce this as much as possible; some intervention is inevitable but minimizing it puts the debate more into the hands of the debaters. As I said originally, I am far more comfortable telling someone that they should have made an argument that a card was bad for whatever reason than I am independently deciding a card was bad, but clearly circumstances sometimes force the latter. This is obviously not unique to qualifications, but I raised the objection because a unique benefit to verbal delivery of quals was presented as involving the judge in the process in breaking down the hermeneutical wall between the arguments presented and qualifications. While I don’t think there is actually much of a relationship between VERBAL presentation of quals and a judge’s interpretation of an argument, to the extent that one exists, it’s negative and not positive. I do agree with Bill that qualifications can provide context and grounding for warrants. However, I don’t think that this is always the SOLE grounding and I don’t think qualifications always accurately reflect expertise: there is a debate to be had and warrants shouldn’t be summarily dismissed. That’s why I think these issues should be debated by the debaters themselves and that judges should seek to remove themselves from inserting their own independent judgements about these as much as possible.

Time tradeoff is a real argument, not everyone is as fast as you were. The time taken to read quals cumulatively has an impact. Some quals are longer. I’m surprised you aren’t sensitive to this given that you debated with Cyrus. And if the quals are both abbreviated and read so fast that they can’t be digested anyway, what is the benefit to verbal presentation? I don’t think there’s normally a real benefit that isn’t fully captured by having quals available for every card. But in a situation where quals are just a blip that are probably impossible to flow for the majority of cards, I don’t think there could possibly be a chilling effect or any other advantage.

If I thought a verbal presentation requirement would actually increase the quality of qualifications debates, I would retract everything I said above. I used to strongly encourage debaters I coach to read quals aloud, and I did it sometimes when I debated. Qualifications are sometimes determinant in decisions I’ve made. But I’ve judged a fair number of debates that have started with verbal presentation over the years, and I don’t think a single one changed the quality of qualifications debates and I don’t think a single outcome could be traced to verbal presentation.

You don’t like that “critics of arguments” would insert themselves into debates on the issue of quals:

True or false- when you judge a debate you often decide the quality of evidence read independent of arguments made by the debaters in the round?

Time tradeoff cannot possibly be a real argument here- “prof. of economics- yale” takes less than 1 second to say- not 3-4.

Some of my points were directed at Bill’s original post: the judge philosophies bit, quantity vs. quality, and the judge intervention part. I don’t think you really understood my argument regarding judge intervention, but I probably wasn’t clear enough either. The “critic of argument” he quoted and the part about the judge requiring verbal presentation to independently evaluate arguments to me is a call for greater intervention, not an explicit one, but it is the logical implication. Bill said that reading quals verbally involves the judge in the debate differently than having evidence available after the round. If this is true, it can only be true by making the judge more actively involved in scrutinizing arguments regardless of what the other team says about them. This is also my understanding of the “critic of argument” school of judging. I agree that intervention is sometimes necessary, that judges are sometimes required to make independent judgements about evidence because claims are otherwise unresolvable, but less is best.

Similarly, I don’t think I ever defended the “people will have to present bad quals” argument, that was not the point I was making. My claim was limited to saying that encouraging judges to independently assess quals is bad, and that some judges will dismiss evidence solely because it’s from a lobbyist or the Heritage Foundation. Yes: they can do that now, and sometimes have to given a lack of debate and an otherwise unresolvable situation, but my point is less intervention is better, and that we should not encourage the judge to be MORE involved in assessing arguments that weren’t made by debaters.

My experience is that the 2 greatest sources of unqualified evidence are critiques and politics disads. This obviously doesn’t indict all or even the majority of evidence for either of those two areas, or ignore that reporters or professors are qualified; as I said, I think the vast majority of evidence read in debates is qualified. But the debates I’ve judged that involve the most egregious lack of qualifications usually involve those areas: “LOST is at the top of the agenda” or “capitalism is ending now, the rev is coming” for example.

As far as my points about warrants vs. qualifications: I agree that qualifications are important, but expertise is also important. I think expertise can include things like secondary research. I am not suggesting that Dan Brown or that Caldwell guy are defensible, they seem like clear examples where their lack of qualifications do matter. My argument is that there are many examples of evidence that lacks qualifications but nonetheless reflects expertise in an area and therefore arguments made are important and should not be dismissed. The best example is evidence from a guest commentator or op ed that isn’t at all qualified but contains judgements based upon data that the author has researched. Gulakov’s example of the gristmill blogger who wrote more informed pieces than anyone else on the topic is a good one: Gulakov could recognize his expertise based on his own topic knowledge despite not being able to find qualifications. I think a lot of evidence is like that, and frequently unqualified evidence contains references to studies, interviews or other data to support their arguments. My reference to “formal” qualifications doesn’t just include education; my argument is that some authors have expertise based on research they did that isn’t reflected in qualifications debates.

Having said the above: I think debates about qualifications are good. I agree with your claim that qualified people generally write more intelligent and informed articles. I think qualifications can be an important basis to prefer some evidence over others. My arguments in the preceding paragraphs are just reasons why I don’t think all evidence should be summarily dismissed because of a lack of qualifications. There are instances where it should be, certainly, but it also depends in part on the reasoning behind the argument made.

Qualifications debates are good, but verbal presentation isn’t necessary, and, always involves a time tradeoff. In my opinion it is a thoroughly unnecessary time tradeoff. Most evidence has qualifications, and frequently when it doesn’t, the debaters are prepared to defend that now, ie “the requirement of qualifications is capitalist”. Requiring verbal presentation for all cards when the vast majority of cards read won’t be challenged because they actually are qualified is a waste of time, and involves a substantive tradeoff. Encouraging debates about a professor vs. an assistant professor seems pointless. I don’t think verbal presentation will increase the number of debates on qualifications over what occurs now by very much, if at all.

The only new argument I saw from your post was the “chilling effect” argument. I don’t think this is persuasive: the egregious examples of unqualified arguments you list, like aliens or spark, all have authors with qualifications attached to them, and debates about qualifications for these arguments are inevitable and occur now. Debaters won’t stop reading unqualified evidence, they will email the author for what college they attended, or otherwise find stupid things written about them on the internet that will sound like qualifications. All evidence will be minimally qualified, but the content of the arguments won’t change much. Corsi and Nyquist, for example, are horribly unqualified to make the arguments they make, but debaters won’t have a problem finding “qualifications” for the purposes of verbal presentation. Verbal presentation of these qualifications is completely irrelevant, what matters is whether the qualifications are actually debated.

Changing judging philosophies is one way to change. I agree with Bill that changing judging is a prerequisite to changing norms. Debaters do make qualifications challenges now, frequently without much effect, but verbal presentation isn’t really related to the reason these qualifications challenges fail. Changing a judging philosophy at least tips them off that they won’t be wasting their time pursuing those arguments, even if they will frequently choose not to. It is better than any alternative I’ve heard at least.

The appropriate comparison should not be “reading qualifications ” to “reading full cites” – rather a norm expecting qualifications to be read in the 1NC is comparable to the norm expecting evidence to have Years read in the cite. The current norm is that a Name and Year must be read, but it is worth asking why we read the year and why do we read the name, because the answers are different. Why do we read the name? Without the qualifications, the name is not relevant to the round – it is just a name. The Reason we read the name is to Identify the card later in the round when we refer to it – a footnote number would accomplish the same thing. But the year, we read that because it is a point of comparison between evidence – a way to compare cards. This may be the most trivial or superficial of comparisons, and it definitely the most overused one. But the reason Years are expected to be read in the round is to facilitate evidence comparison. Reading the full date would only marginally improve that comparison – usually only in politics uniqueness debates, and in many of those cases, the full date Is read aloud when the evidence is first presented. That is exactly parallel to reading qualifications – qualifications are a method to compare evidence. The difference is that reading the year takes less than a second, and reading qualifications takes 3-4 seconds – 6-8 times longer. In my opinion, the only reason why we read one point of comparison and not the other is because reading the qualifications would take much longer than just reading the year. This helps to draw the distinction between the two different time pressures. The first – the time spent in the constructives (when most of the evidence is read) reading the qualifications. The second – the time spent in rebuttals and the bloc comparing qualifications.

In the first time expenditure, the majority of the time trade off is spent on reading qualifications for cards that won’t be compared. The vast majority of arguments made in the constructives that have cards attached to them won’t become controversial, yet the qualifications would still need to be read for all of those cards. In simplest terms, you would need to present qualifications for all of the disad’s cards – uniqueness, links, and impacts – even though the affirmative may only end up going for impact arguments, so the qualifications read for the uniqueness and links were not important to the comparison process. You could simply wait to find out that only the impacts matter and then only read and compare those qualifications.

The time spent on this is not insubstantial. I don’t think that it would be the 3-4 cards that BB mentions in the original article, and obviously it will vary based on the round, but the math done by Troy seems reasonable enough – 3-4 seconds per card. BB says that this might not be a bad thing, because we are too obsessed with quantity of cards, but that isn’t how we are going to react to a norm for reading qualifications. Instead, 3-4 seconds (8-10 words) will be highlighted out of each card. The fact that we are obsessed with quantity gives a pretty good reason why time spent reading qualifications would undermine the Quality of the cards being read, because the cards would be shorter. Alternatively, if cards were taken out, it may not be “quantity” that decreases – people would simply cut corners on shells – cutting out a step in the succession of links, so that the same number of positions are read, but they are less developed. I don’t have any Proof that this would be the result – but a historical example might apply. I was debating in college when the speech times shifted from 10-5 to 9-6. We all thought that this would mean fewer arguments in the 1NC. However, in response to having one less minute for the 1NC, most people simply cut down the number of cards in the shells or underlined more out of the cards – the number of positions and cards didn’t change much. I suspect that something similar would happen.

The Second time pressure is the “trade off” between time spent comparing qualifications and time spent comparing warrants. Troy states “Why exactly is it so imperative to shift debate away from a discussion of competing warrants (which is more or less the norm now, at least in the decent rounds) to a discussion of competing author qualifications?” David says “Encouraging debaters to focus on the arguments made is generally, though not always, better than encouraging a focus on qualifications. In many cases, a focus on qualifications is a distraction, and a verbal requirement will focus some debates on qualifications that will undermine the quality of debates.” When responding to David, Scotty says that we should do both – “you should debate qualifications AND quality. It’s not one or the other.” I think that BB phrased Scotty’s argument a little bit differently – instead of debating qualifications AND warrants, I think that BB was saying that, done properly, debates about qualifications ARE debates about warrants. A good comparison of qualifications IS a comparison of warrants. That when we don’t know how to debate qualifications, we make poor comparisons that are not relevant to the warrants in the evidence. If students learn how to debate qualifications, their comparisons will be Substantive, rather than just formalities like “He’s a Prof” or “She’s a lobbyist”. A better skill set would involve talking about whether the author is qualified to make the proofs that constitute warrants for their claim, Why the author would use the warrants that they do, or if the conclusion drawn by debaters from the warrants is the same way the author would use them. Obviously, qualifications wouldn’t resolve all comparisons between evidence, or even most, but the only way to prevent them from being “distractions” from warrant comparisons is to teach students how to make better ones that ARE warrant comparisons. Scotty’s best example takes one of David’s points and turns it around – being able to say “This person is crazy in spite of his credentials” requires thinking more in depth about what qualifications mean, which requires a better skill set than students currently have.

I have a different frame through which I view this discussion – it is a Solvency lens. What constitutes a nudge by the Change Architects? Should that nudge occur in judging philosophies or in Decisions? Should a judge identify this as a decision criteria in a round absent students making the argument? Should judges nudge the changes in norms, or should students drive them? Most of the questions so far have focused on what would be fair for the round at hand. They ignore Solvency questions – would this norm Solve for nudging the community toward better qualification comparisons? Here, I have more questions than opinions. The first question is whether a norm of reading qualifications with evidence would encourage qualification comparisons? Would such a norm improve the Quality of qualification debates? Certainly having the information about the qualification is a necessary precondition to making a comparison, but reading it aloud is not the only way to get that information. Going back to my earlier comparison, an expectation that debaters read the Year with the card has NOT lead to intelligent comparisons between cards based on date. I agree that Not reading the qualifications Symbolically denigrates their importance, but I am not necessarily convinced that Reading the qualifications will Symbolically convince people to emphasize their importance. I don’t think that this is simply reverse causal.

As to the question of How to emphasize that importance, I definitely agree with Scotty that putting comments in our judging philosophies would be nearly trivial. Both BB and David are saying “Say it in your philosophy” – BB is saying put “I assume that evidence without qualifications read to be unqualified” in his philosophy, and David is saying put “I place a high priority on qualifications for evidence comparison” in his philosophy. I am completely unconvinced that these would “nudge” the community. I think you have to Vote on it, and tell teams that you Voted on it after the round. I could put in my philosophy “I am more easily convinced than most that probability outweighs impact size” all I want, but until I vote on that argument, several times, and after the round say “I voted on the probability of solving poverty harms over the impact size of the politics disad” – until I do that, I don’t think that I nudge anyone. I think that it is more important for judges to Emphasize Qualification comparisons as an important, Decisive part of their reasons for voting after the round. If enough judges do, then that can nudge communities.

Well, that then raises a Whole Lot of hypothetical situations, which get to the central concern of some in our community of Identifying Judge Intervention. Should judges ignore all other comparisons in a round, and make qualification arguments when debaters don’t and then say so after the round? I doubt that that would come up too often. Should we collectively change our norm to emphasize qualifications in our decisions? I don’t think of it as much of a change – I think that most of us already agree (Mr Sanchez’s principled objection noted) that qualified evidence is good for debate and that we prefer qualified evidence over other evidence. Is Scotty right that we are already making these decisions using these criteria anyway, because most evidence comparisons are done poorly now? In that situation, it is simply a matter of what we choose to highlight in our discussions after the round.

How does this implicate reading qualifications when the evidence is presented? Take this hypothetical situation: The Aff doesn’t read qualifications on evidence, although their evidence Is qualified. Neg does read qualifications. 2NC says “Our qualified evidence is better – they don’t read qualifications”. Aff rebuttals say “Here are the qualifications from our evidence – it is just as qualified” – would you feel comfortable saying “I evaluated the negative’s evidence as more qualified because the aff did not present qualifications until the rebuttals – there wasn’t time for the Neg to respond.” Now, certainly the neg had time to respond – they could have checked the qualifications in CX or prep and made the appropriate comparisons. But the Aff didn’t make the argument until rebuttals – “Our evidence is qualified – here is the qualification” is an Argument, not an external fact. What if the same situation happens as above, but the 2NR is the first time that the neg says “Prefer our qualified evidence because they haven’t read qualifications” Has the negative initiated this argument sufficiently in the constructives by reading the qualifications? Do they have to make the second part of the comparison? I probably would be comfortable with saying that in both situations. (I would also probably gain Substantial perverse pleasure in saying “You have to read qualifications in constructives – your qualifications are New in rebuttals.” I Probably wouldn’t actually do that, but can enjoy imagining it…)

Second hypothetical: Aff doesn’t read Qualifications on evidence, although their evidence Is qualified. Neg does read qualifications. Neither side makes a Comparison. The warrants are also not compared (or at least not compared well) such that the evidence is roughly equal. Would you feel comfortable saying “I preferred the negatives’ evidence because I was certain of its qualifications because they were read in the round. I didn’t have any other way to compare the evidence.” I probably would be comfortable with saying that as well.

Another way to Nudge the community is through our position as Coaches rather than Judges. As a lab leader, do you require students to put the qualifications in the part of the cite that gets read? Do you highlight, underline, bold or box just the name and year? Do your cites read “Name, Year, Quals” or “Name, Quals, Year” – the former Substantially increases the odds that the quals won’t be read aloud.

Those are my thoughts.

“For example, anyone with formal qualifications that says solar power will be cost competitive nationally or that renewable energy will decrease electricity prices should not be taken seriously.”
Of course they should be taken seriously, and taken seriously means responded to with comparably or better qualified evidence that makes good arguments.
“My point is that qualifications are not always intrinsic to the arguments being made; they are frequently, though not always, distinct from the argument.”
This is silly dave, on average do people with good qualifications
A. make more sense
B. Make less sense

Than the average moron? Yes there are absent minded professors out there who have great quals and write nonsense- they are the EXCEPTION, not the rule.
“I do think that some degree of EXPERTISE probably is intrinsic to an argument, but expertise isn’t accurately reflected by formal qualifications”
I assume by “formal” you mean “school”. I don’t think anyone at any point said this. Obviously if someone works in a field for a long time that is a form of qualification. Creating a website and writing stupid cliff hangers like a Dan Brown novel about how XYZ is necessary to prevent extinction is not a qual.
“and measuring the amount of expertise necessary to make an argument is frequently impossible. “
So is assigning a percentage based risk to a disad. People do it, its not that hard. This is a partial information game, deal with it.

“An argument, or warrant centric approach that evaluates the credibility of the argument is implicitly also an attack on a particular author’s expertise.”
This sentence is nonsensical. Please explain.

“This is not to say that qualifications debates are bad to have, but that they are one of many strategies that should be employed in the process of evidence comparison.”
This is our point.
“Requiring verbal presentation to me is like requiring verbal presentation of the full date as opposed to the year, or requiring the specific names of the studies evidence is based on, or requiring all of the ununderlined parts of the evidence to be read.”
This is not even close to true. Reading a card about whether or not zero point energy works you don’t think the authors background in say, physics vs creative writing, is more important that 9-1-08?

“It may be that a full date, the name of the study, or the ununderlined parts of evidence are relevant, that they could impact the judge’s perception of an argument as much or more than qualifications, but the point is that these should all be options for debaters to decide how to attack or defend evidence, rather than having the judge dictate it for them.”
This misses the entire point. The purpose of making people read quals is it will have a chilling effect on nonsense cards. Reading dates would not do that unless people were currently reading cards on “x impossible” from a date after which X actually happened- at which point that would obviously be good too.
“The criticism to this first point might be “debaters can have qualifications debates now, but they don’t”, but I think amending the judge philosophy the way I described above goes some distance to change this. Debaters will do what works, if they think that judges are receptive to qualifications arguments, they will certainly make them.”
Seriously can we all just agree amending judge philosophies is a silly idea to spark change- dave how many absurd CP’s have you judged after amending your judge philosophy to say absurd cps are bad- the fact is none of these little amendments will outweigh your basic (and in my mind correct and unarguable)tenet of non intervention?

“A majority, I think the vast majority, of competing evidence is similarly qualified so as to make verbal presentation a waste of time.”
This is true because the bar is set so low everyone reads garbage.
“There is a fair amount of unqualified evidence in debate, but think it is the exception, not the rule, at least if you’re looking at evidence outside of politics disads and critiques. “
I will say you have this one exactly backwards. The people who write about politics are career political analysts- even the cliché “sac bee” cards don’t just make up facts- those reporters get them from the hill talking heads. Obviosly most of what they say is warped by debaters into the politics disads- but you can’t find a more qualed group. Same with the K for the most part- people who get published are prof’s etc who are experts in their field. I assume your quip is saying they aren’t qualified to discuss policy debate issues- but that seems to prove our point- this should be debated.
“The “focus on quality over quantity” response isn’t persuasive to me. “
I certainly never said no quantity, and I don’t know from my reading of BB’s articles that he did either. It’s not either or. Read 100 cards good, just say who wrote them.
“Reading qualifications on every card WILL decrease the amount of arguments in any given debate, “
Perhaps minimally at the margins, people could say be more efficient, stumble less, take out one nonsense card, or repeat themselves less to make up this time. Giving good impact calculus will also decrease the amount of arguments. It’s a tradeoff sometimes.

“And, even horribly unqualified evidence like the Gregorian calendar or aliens authors DO have formal qualifications, “
Yes they do- which is why qualifications should be DEBATED. If people just look at the written quals and are like “oh snap, PHD national American university” and don’t say anything that is bad. Teaching people to debate quals means god forbid they may when researching the neg to that google that school and find out something about it.
“so I don’t think the verbal presentation requirement really solves much. In fact, in some debates where teams read low quality arguments like the above, they go out of their way to read qualifications now.”
Yes and because no one has practice debating them these BS quals sail by.

“I am uncomfortable of a world in which judges discredit evidence because they heard the verbal presentation of some author was that he or she was an oil lobbyist. “
So many things. First, I don’t know who said judges should start intervening, as far as I can tell no one. Second, judges do this kind of thing all the time now when debaters don’t give them a better way to resolve arguments. If you really think we have to defend an either or on quals/quality then yes its better for judges to break ties on author quals when deciding if terrorism causes extinction and reading muller vs Alexander.
Next- why do people keep repeating this BS arg that people will have to “present bad quals”. THIS IS A NONSENSE STRAWMAN!!!! Cut a better card is the answer, not “have to read that this author is biased”. I mean jesus, this is crystal clear. Related to that- sometimes these obvious “biases” that debaters scoff at are actually stupid and SHOULD be defeneded. If you read a card from the Perryman group yes you could say “oil lobbyist” when reading the quals, or you could say “nobel prize nominated economist, nominated for nobel prize for work done in the field of oil economics, and did I mention nobel?” If someone’s only qualification you can find is “gave money to senator on behalf of shell oil” then either
A. they are a moron and you shouldn’t read cards from them
B. Your research skills suck
Your alternative is not to encourage teams to read millions of cards from the shell answer man (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/26455) I won’t make the mistake of hyperbolizing your position so I know you will probably say “if they are already written down etc”. But seriously- that’s the squo as batterman points out.

“But part of your justification for verbal presentation seems to say there is a separate benefit to judges in evaluating evidence credibility REGARDLESS of the arguments made in the debate: in that you say this “Lucas” evidence would be evaluated differently if the judge knew it was from a clean coal spokesperson. I think that model is less educational. I am happy to tell a team that I thought the link evidence to a disad was obviously biased because they were from an industry lobbyist, but because they didn’t make arguments to that effect, I gave the link a higher degree of credibility than it should have had. But I think I’d be wrong if I discarded the link independently of the arguments made, particularly because, as you point out, there are defenses that can be made for industry lobbyists, or neocons for that matter.”
Dave this is silly- you intervene all the time when YOU decide a card is bad without the other team saying it. You have no problem doing that. That is judge intervention, just along another criteria. The criteria YOU in fact say is more important. This is pretty important and undermines a lot of what you have written here. I have been judged by you/judged with you countless times where you said something like “this link evidence is bad so I gave lower risk of disad”.

1. the wall between arguments and source credibility is frequently good. Encouraging debaters to focus on the arguments made is generally, though not always, better than encouraging a focus on qualifications. In many cases, a focus on qualifications is a distraction, and a verbal requirement will focus some debates on qualifications that will undermine the quality of debates. Unqualified people make good arguments and MANY qualified people make terrible arguments. For example, anyone with formal qualifications that says solar power will be cost competitive nationally or that renewable energy will decrease electricity prices should not be taken seriously. My point is that qualifications are not always intrinsic to the arguments being made; they are frequently, though not always, distinct from the argument. I do think that some degree of EXPERTISE probably is intrinsic to an argument, but expertise isn’t accurately reflected by formal qualifications, and measuring the amount of expertise necessary to make an argument is frequently impossible. An argument, or warrant centric approach that evaluates the credibility of the argument is implicitly also an attack on a particular author’s expertise.

This is not to say that qualifications debates are bad to have, but that they are one of many strategies that should be employed in the process of evidence comparison. Requiring verbal presentation to me is like requiring verbal presentation of the full date as opposed to the year, or requiring the specific names of the studies evidence is based on, or requiring all of the ununderlined parts of the evidence to be read. It may be that a full date, the name of the study, or the ununderlined parts of evidence are relevant, that they could impact the judge’s perception of an argument as much or more than qualifications, but the point is that these should all be options for debaters to decide how to attack or defend evidence, rather than having the judge dictate it for them.

The criticism to this first point might be “debaters can have qualifications debates now, but they don’t”, but I think amending the judge philosophy the way I described above goes some distance to change this. Debaters will do what works, if they think that judges are receptive to qualifications arguments, they will certainly make them.

2. A majority, I think the vast majority, of competing evidence is similarly qualified so as to make verbal presentation a waste of time. There is a fair amount of unqualified evidence in debate, but think it is the exception, not the rule, at least if you’re looking at evidence outside of politics disads and critiques. In my opinion, or at least in the debates I see, qualifications attacks ARE made against the exceptions: for example, anyone who said LOST was on top of the agenda was generally not qualified and I’ve seen the aff make those arguments effectively, or teams generally attack the credibility of terminal impacts in a new 1ac because that evidence usually isn’t qualified, or affs call out the authority of a professor of English to say all foreign policy ventures are doomed to fail. But the majority of evidence isn’t questioned because the majority of evidence has qualifications available for it.

The “focus on quality over quantity” response isn’t persuasive to me. Reading qualifications on every card WILL decrease the amount of arguments in any given debate, but I don’t think there will be an increase in quality: I think quality is already high in most cases, at least in most cases where qualifications matter. And, even horribly unqualified evidence like the Gregorian calendar or aliens authors DO have formal qualifications, so I don’t think the verbal presentation requirement really solves much. In fact, in some debates where teams read low quality arguments like the above, they go out of their way to read qualifications now.

3. The “critic of argument” school of thought is really just code for “increased judge intervention”. Judge intervention is inevitable, but less is better, in my opinion; it is more educational for debaters to make and defend arguments about quals on their own (the only circumstances where I’d defend active judge intervention are in instances of cheating). I am uncomfortable of a world in which judges discredit evidence because they heard the verbal presentation of some author was that he or she was an oil lobbyist. I am far more comfortable with debaters calling out the other team for reading evidence from an oil lobbyist: there is a debate to be had about that. I think a judging philosophy that makes it apparent that qualifications debates can be important will encourage qualifications debates like the above when they are appropriate.

But part of your justification for verbal presentation seems to say there is a separate benefit to judges in evaluating evidence credibility REGARDLESS of the arguments made in the debate: in that you say this “Lucas” evidence would be evaluated differently if the judge knew it was from a clean coal spokesperson. I think that model is less educational. I am happy to tell a team that I thought the link evidence to a disad was obviously biased because they were from an industry lobbyist, but because they didn’t make arguments to that effect, I gave the link a higher degree of credibility than it should have had. But I think I’d be wrong if I discarded the link independently of the arguments made, particularly because, as you point out, there are defenses that can be made for industry lobbyists, or neocons for that matter.

I know that your ideal world is that verbal presentation encourages the debaters to make all of the arguments on their own, with no or little judge intervention. But it seems to me that the underlying assumption of the benefit of verbal presentation is to change the “hermeneutical process through which arguments are understood.” If this occurs separately from arguments debaters make about qualifications themselves, it could only mean that a judge might assess a card differently than they would have had qualifications not been verbally presented. That, to me, is not a benefit: it is judge intervention that calls into question a judge’s own biases, and even in the instance where some intervention is required to resolve claims that were debated poorly, judges can make that assessment now, regardless of verbal presentation.