The 3NR

This is a post written by my former college debate partner Stephen Chaudoin (Emory alum 2006) Phd Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

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In academia, the term “evidence” means “observations about the world that may or may not be consistent with the hypothesis they’re designed to test.”  In debate, the term “evidence” means “some shit somebody got published.”

Observe the difference…

Professor: “I think that X causes Y and as evidence I have measured X and found it to be correlated with this measurement of Y.”

Debater: “I think that X causes Y and as evidence I present to you this article from Foreign Affairs that says ‘X causes Y.”

It isn’t hard to tell which one I think is actual evidence and which one is paraphrasing someone else’s publication that may or may not contain evidence.

It isn’t accidental that debaters use the second interpretation as opposed to the first one:

Reason 1 (not debate’s fault):  Debate is about prediction.  “I think if you do policy X then Y will result in the future.”  It is not about empirically testing hypotheses.  “In the past, did policy X tend to result in Y or Z?”  It is hard to predict the future and doing so with empirics necessitates certain assumptions that may or may not be “true.”  This is a fundamental problem that is not debate’s fault because assumptions aren’t testable.

Reason 2 (sorta debate’s fault, but not really):  The core principles of debate do not lend themselves well to in depth evaluation of evidence or to in depth research sources.  In 8 minutes, I can probably summarize the theory and evidence in a Foreign Affairs article.  (Actually, I could probably explain the entire volume with “none and none” but I digress).  I would be hard pressed to do the same with American Economic Review article.  Google scholar some and see if I’m wrong.  I could give you the tagline like “Risk aversion explains behavior in a first price auction laboratory settings better than prospect theory” but I would not be able to cover the theories involved or the evidence, at least not so that you could reach the same point on the research frontier as the article.

I won’t say speed or emphasis on taglines are bad.  They most certainly are not.  Conciseness and organization are just as important as depth.  (I vaguely remember some cards about speed and memory, irony much?)  But realize that the setup of debate ensures a ceiling on the quality of evidence debate.

Reason 3 (probably debate’s fault):  I’m going to assume the 3NR is at the frontier of debate thought both because I know (two of) the authors and because it seems pretty darn astute.  Bill, I’m sure you rock; we just haven’t met.  But even the frontier minds emphasize only one half of theory testing: logical consistency.

A theory can be evaluated in (at least) two ways:

1) Logical consistency:  I start with these assumptions.  I derive this prediction.  Logical consistency asks “does this prediction logically follow from these assumptions?”

This is the one that debate focuses on almost entirely, probably because we all possess good logic skills and that’s part of why we selected ourselves into the activity.

2) Empirical consistency: Are real world data consistent or inconsistent with the hypotheses derived from the theory?

There are two words to look at, “data” and “consistency.”  Bill and Paul’s responses to Roy’s Toulmin revision get at this nicely.  “Data” refers to observations from the world used to measure a certain concept.  “Consistency” refers to the way in which you think about sets of observations to determine whether or not they are consistent with a theory.  Some potential objections are “the researcher didn’t measure something correctly,” “the researcher did not account for this other thing,” etc.

Two easy solutions:

1. Focus on implementing the Chaudoin method (I don’t know who Toulmin was, but he has the word “tool” built in and he’s probably old and won’t care if I steal his method’s spotlight.)  After reading evidence as a debater or judge, ask “does the claim follow logically from the assumptions used to generate it?”  Next, ask “how convincing are the empirics used to test this theory?”  I would be willing to bet that 50% of debate “evidence” fails the first test and 95% fails the second.
2. Cut longer cards.  You don’t gotta read it in the round, but the judge probably will afterwards.
3. Read journals that are more academic:  Google something like “political science journal rankings” for a list of the top political science ones (APSR, AJPS, IO, etc) or do the same for economics (AER, QJE, JPE, etc) or for any other relevant disciplines from sociology to biology.

Implementing the Chaudoin method will win you 50-60 more rounds next year.

Full disclosure: I debated competitively for a long time before moving on to a PhD program in Political Science.  I study empirical methods and game theory which for sure affects my opinions on this subject as well.

Also, I’m trying to get Roy to put me on as a guest writer on the 3NR, so maybe commenters should back me up.

I was looking at the St. Marks invitation on JOT and noticed that in honor of Ross Smith (RIP Ross) that the St. Marks tournament would be moving to the 100 speaker point system for its tournament in 2 weeks.    In a podcast and probably in some other diatribes I’ve been known to go on I’ve discussed some of my concerns with the 100 speaker point system.

Let me make this clear I am strongly in support of a more expansive speaker point scale. I think there are differences between 28s, and 28.5s and the current system does not allow a judge to differentiate between the quality of those speeches. My fear with this scale is that in a 6 round tournament (which is the norm in hs) this system has the potential to “mess up” who clears and speaker awards in general.    I feel like the community does need to do a couple of things to make this work (not just for this tournament but to transition away from the 30 point scale in general).

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A good K overview should be like a good movie trailer- it should give me as the judge some idea of what is coming but still leave enough to keep me interested. Bad movie trailers either tell too much (and reveal all the funny lines in the movie) or give you no idea what is going on in the movie- and K overviews usually do one of those 2 things as well. Formulating a good overview is like having a good haircut- it frames the rest of the things you are going to do and establishes expectations. Its a place where you don’t need to be bound by having evidence or even rational thought- you are free to express yourself artistically and tell your own story. Sounds easy right?

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- Winston Churchill

I’m sure that everyone at some point during their time in a history class has heard the Churchill quote used to discuss the importance of learning from past mistakes and moving on.   While the quote might seem lame or cliché since we’ve heard it so many times before, the moral of the quote is true: if we fail to evaluate or reflect on the past we are destined to repeat these errors.

Now that I’m done with my quote of the day what does any of this have to do with debate?   A lot really;  Most of this post will deal with how what happens right after a debate round and when you get home from a tournament can have a larger effect on your development as a debater (and win / loss of course) then whether or not you have the newest health care cards from today or not.   While some of you all do some of these things well incorporating all of these tips to your debate routine will drastically improve your learning curve.

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Ryan Ricard–author of the excellent debate blog Lucy does some ‘splaining–has posted a wonderful article about the dilemma that we all face as high school debate coaches.

The more I coach debate and talk to others in the activity, the more I come face-to-face with a disconcerting reality. You, me and everyone else who coaches debate is about to be hit by a bus.

By “A bus” I mean any one of the long list of eventualities that could suddenly force you out of the activity. Between new jobs, grad school, law school, funding cuts, and even the actual miniature human beings that are in the care and protection of some of us, our lives as debate coaches is short. Even for the lucky ones of us who are able to make debate part of our “day job,” our activity is subject to forces far out of our control.

In some ways we as a community are victims of our own success. As we give students the tools to advance in debate, we also open up access to far-off schools, high-power careers, and the kind of fulfilling life that is incompatible with coaching debate. Of course this is a natural process, the very reason that we are willing to do so much for the activity in the first place. It’s a good problem to have.

Unfortunately, it means we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction. we can’t ignore this reality, and absent some major changes to the public education system we can’t make it go away.

The conclusion that I’m becoming convinced of is that we need to embrace it. We need to embrace the bus that is careening toward us and do everything we can to help the activity before it hits us. I’m not entirely sure what this means yet, but there are already a few things that I’ve started to see differently about debate.

I don’t really have anything to add… Ryan nailed it. Read the whole article.

Forward:

I thought the title was innovative, and being a curmudgeon (or so I’m told) this could be a new 3nr series that I might get too busy to continue but hey who knows.

Bill: I didn’t mean to be a (hill)TOPPER and post this during your tournament.

I promise you’re more likely to laugh below

Actual Post

I feel like I’ve talked about this growing epidemic in our community with some of you all; its rapid proliferation across the community makes swine flu outbreaks seem like a walk in the park.  It is a silent killer of time at debate tournaments and if unchecked could cause who knows what.  The issue I am writing to you about is the hand or (mis)-handling of evidence in between speeches.

Here’s how this crisis plays out in debates across the country (probably in a debate going on RIGHT NOW). Timer goes off speech of team “AB” ends.  Y of team “XY” announces,  “Before prep I need all the evidence that you read and I need all of my evidence back.”  2-3 mins of dead time elapses as these kids who appear to have just emerged from an F4 tornado look for the scattered sheets of white paper often finding flows, timers, and lost treasures prior to finding the horrible Uniqueness evidence on Health Care that the team actually wants .  Nevermind that team XY had a total of 90 seconds of prep left for their 2nr, but this 2nr is content on looking at EVERY piece of evidence rather then use that time more constructively.   In honor of National Pirate Day (yes that is for real and it is today) ARRRRGGGGGGGh.

This happens in every single debate  seemingly after every speech.  And maybe its because at debate camp I noticed this , it has become  like that stain on a shirt that once you notice you can’t stop staring at but debate after debate this drives me crazy and is raising my blood pressure just thinking about it.

I feel like this wasn’t an issue when old timers like myself, scott and bill debated so this is obviously a more recent development.  I’m not sure there are perfect solutions to the problem but here are some tips to saving easily 10 mins per debate.

1.) Take only the evidence you actually need- for some reason debaters now interpret “can you flip to the right” to mean we need to take every single piece of evidence that clown read for 8 mins and hold onto it.  The flip and gathering evidence was designed to make it easier for you to get access to the cards you needed specifically, if you take every single card that they flip to you you’ve kind of defeated the purpose of gathering evidence.  Also considering the amount of evidence comparison I see in most debates, I’m frankly confused what you’re doing with their evidence.   Hoping if you have a nose bleed you can use their evidence and not yours?  Take the cards that you need and leave the rest.

2.) After you are finished with a speech don’t sit back down, pick your nose and ask your partner “how awesome was that speech huhh.”  Stay up there, gather the evidence from 1nc,2ac, 2nc, 1nr whatever, organize it, cross hatch it, separate it by issues.  If you are a 1n, you should do this for your whole 1nr  so if the 2nr goes for what you took you can have it cross hatched and ready for them to prep/ reference in the 2nr.  It also helps solve the next issue…

3.) Manage your debate real estate (DRE)  Your areas are beyond messy.  I’ m not sure who taught this to you all but much like not flowing this is a fad that will hopefully be out of style soon.   Your desk areas look horrible, you don’t know where your evidence or their evidence is, you have no semblance of organization.  I frankly don’t care if you choose not to keep your stuff organized at all but when you tell me we need to use the judge prep or take an officials’ time out to find the evidence then that is where you’ve got it wrong bucko.  Judges have served as enablers for this little addiction you have and much like crack, this is wack.   Keep your area neat and you’ll know where your business is.

I am considering instituting various measures to solve this crisis because in reality it garners both / at least one side some unfair free prep time.  So maybe timing the amount of dead time and then dividing that number by 2 and taking it off both teams prep time OR if one team seems to be at fault charging them with the whole amount of time OR maybe even having it effect speaker points, after all this is another way you all as debaters conduct yourselves.  If you are intentionally stealing prep or too lazy to clean your area, give back evidence etc that reflects on you as a debater.

Bracewell & Giuliani partner Scott H. Segal dropped some weighty material during last Sunday’s closing session of the National Debate Development Conference (NDCC) held at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Segal, former Emory debater and now one of the Beltway’s top “Hired Guns” cued conferees’ attention to the “Speech or Debate” clause of the U.S. Constitution:

Article I, Section 6: “The Senators and Representatives […] shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.”

Segal announced plans for the NDCC alumni networking working group to lead an effort aiming to establish a “Speech and Debate Caucus” in the U.S. Congress, beginning first with surveys of members, proceeding to formal enactment of the caucus. This represents an exciting development for American academic debate communities, something that would give us a formal political presence in the nation’s leading deliberative body. What exactly might this mean? Segal hinted at the possibility that a Speech and Debate Caucus would be positioned to advocate for Urban Debate League funding, and press to restore the federal government research assistance program, where in previous years the Government Printing Office would publish a detailed sourcebook on that year’s high school and college debate topics.

But this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Segal also referenced an important U.S. Supreme Court case, Gravel v. United States (408 U.S. 606, 1972). Here, the Court broadened the scope of the Speech or Debate Clause by extending its coverage to legislative aides (not just members of Congress):

PROCEDURAL POSTURE: Defendant senator filed motions to quash subpoenas in a grand jury criminal investigation, asserting that requiring witnesses to testify violated his privilege under the Speech or Debate Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, ß 6, cl. 1. The United States Court of Appeals for the First District affirmed the district court’s denial of the motions but modified the protective order. Plaintiff United States appealed.

OVERVIEW: The U.S. petitioned for certiorari challenging the ruling that aides and other persons could not be questioned with respect to legislative acts and that an aide to a member of Congress had a common-law privilege not to testify before a grand jury with respect to private publication of materials introduced into a subcommittee record. The senator also petitioned for certiorari seeking reversal of the court of appeals’ decision insofar as it held private publication unprotected by the Speech or Debate Clause and asserting that the protective order of the court of appeals too narrowly protected against inquiries that a grand jury could direct to third parties. The Court held that the Speech or Debate Clause applied not only to a member but also to his aides insofar as the conduct of the latter was a protected legislative act if performed by the member himself, but did not protect illegal conduct. The Court noted that the courts had extended the privilege to matters beyond pure speech or debate in either house, but only when necessary to prevent indirect impairment of such deliberations. The Court vacated the court of appeals’ judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings.

OUTCOME: The Court vacated the court of appeals’ judgment and remanded the matter to the court of appeals for revision of the protective order in accordance with the Court’s opinion.

Consider some implications of the “indirect impairment” doctrine established here. Does this doctrine mean that any person or organization taking actions that indirectly impair speech or debate in the U.S. Congress are potentially violating the U.S. Constitution? How far would this extend? What forms of injunctive relief might be available? Such questions are certainly ripe for research and reflection. While these are fascinating abstract issues, a more concrete aspect of the issue involves a resolution adopted later in the day at the NDDC conference:

The NDDC endorses the establishment of a U.S. Congressional Speech and Debate caucus and encourages that caucus to foster debate research and scholarship, including the publication of a CRS topic area packet, and support of a participatory design process oriented toward refinement and development of an open source digital debate archive.

This resolution reflects NDDC conferees’ sense that a digital debate archive (facilitating a transition to paperless debate and generation of “authority 3.0″ metrics) should be built with open source code, using a participatory design process. These objectives may conflict with other plans soon to be unveiled, as rumors circulated during the NDDC conference that a commercial entity may be on the brink of releasing proprietary software designed to deliver archive functionality to academic debate communities. It is likely that such a commercial venture would feature “Big Design Up Front” development, conforming to the “Waterfall model” of software engineering.

It is perhaps even the case that patent protections held by the corporation commercially marketing digital debate archive software could establish a legal basis for exclusivity, potentially blocking development of the participatory design process called for in the NDCC resolution. To date, commercial debate ventures utilizing electronic archiving (e.g. Planet Debate, Evazon) have not advanced aggressive exclusivity claims to quash open source efforts that might infringe on its patents. But this day may be coming soon, especially if a new profit-driven commercial entity enters the playing field. Members of the academic debate community would do well to start deliberations regarding this contingency, which would likely shape the trajectory of speech and debate in contexts far beyond the U.S. Congress for years to come.

[Cross-posted on eDebate]

The State of Evidence Evaluation In Debate

The recent discussions of evidence quality in high school policy debate have highlighted the need for debaters, coaches, and judges to revisit the prevailing assumptions about the proper role of cited material in our activity. While a drastic shift in the community’s approach to the evaluation of evidence remains exceedingly unlikely, there is an emerging consensus among debate educators that improving this facet of our pedagogy is both possible and necessary.

What is the problem? In short, the explosion of content enabled by new media has shattered traditional constraints on what constitutes “published” scholarship. While debaters in past decades were limited in their research to published books, journals/magazines, and newspapers, the debaters of today have access to a nearly limitless stream of information—all at their fingertips, and searchable in ways never before thought possible. As Gordon Mitchell describes in “Debate and authority 3.0,” the resulting information abundance has created a need for new ways of separating the good from the bad.

Publication, previously a one-to-many transaction, has become a many-to-many enterprise unfolding across a complex latticework of internetworked digital nodes. Now weblogs, e-books, online journals, and print-on-demand book production and delivery systems make it possible for a whole new population of prospective authors to publish material in what Michael Jensen (2008), National Academy of Sciences Director of Strategic Web Communications, calls an “era of content democracy and abundance.”

In content abundance, the key challenge for readers and referees has less to do with finding scarce information, and more to do with sorting wheat from the proverbial chaff (the ever-burgeoning surplus of digital material available online). The pressing nature of this information-overload challenge has spurred invention of what Jensen (2007) calls “new metrics of scholarly authority” – essentially, new ways of measuring the credibility and gravitas of knowledge producers in a digital world of content abundance.

Policy debate’s “metrics of scholarly authority” have developed slowly—changes in dominant assumptions about what constitutes “good evidence” have occurred over decades based on the organic back-and-forth of the contest round. At the high school level, the influence of summer debate institutes and the trickle-down from intercollegiate competition have played a major part in this evolution. While regional differences remain, the vast majority of those that participate in policy debate on the “national circuit” hold remarkably similar views about what makes a piece of evidence “good”. Indeed, the dominant conception of “good evidence” has become so normalized that it is often framed as self-evident: good evidence “speaks for itself”.

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What is a legitimate source to cite as evidence in a policy debate contest round? Should forensic specialists publish material that addresses the topic area on which they are currently coaching? How can members of the policy debate community relate their simulation-based research to “real world” decision-making and analysis of relevant policy issues?

These questions about publicity and publication have received extended treatment recently on debate lists and discussion boards, with conversation sparked by specific events. On the high school level, controversy swirled in the wake of revelations that a high school coach apparently published a topic-relevant article using a pseudonym with fictitious credentials (Marburry, 2009). Then two Center for Strategic and International Studies analysts (CSIS JY, 2009, 8) successfully persuaded college debaters and forensics specialists to select nuclear weapons policy as the 2009-2010 intercollegiate policy debate topic area, in part by claiming, “there will be a demand for your expertise in the policy analysis community.”

Roughly speaking, the act of publishing entails preparing material for public uptake, and then announcing the event to facilitate circulation. For many years, this process was structured largely as an economic transaction between authors and printing press owners, with editors often serving as gatekeepers who would vet and filter material. Readers relied on markers of professionalism (quality of print and ink, circulation, reputation of editors) to judge the relative credibility of publications. In the academy, referees employed similar metrics to assess a given writer’s degree of scholarly authority, metrics that were rooted in principles of publication scarcity and exclusivity – that a scholar’s caliber was in part demonstrated by his or her ability to persuade editors to publish their work.

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For most of you all the debate season has come to its conclusion and with school winding down (or completed for seniors) you all have an abundance of free time on your hands.   While taking a break is definitely important to keep you sane and avoid burning out from debate, this time off can also be used to refine your debate skills.

A basis for this post comes from an email Naveen Ramachandrappa sent me before my junior year of college.  For those of you who don’t know who Naveen is, as a debater he was basically everything that was great about this activity.  He debated for UGA, was the hardest working debater I have ever met and was meticulous about how and what he did.  He produced this debate.uga.edu/research_guide/howto.pdf which is a PDF outlining how to create a debate template a must for cutting cards if you don’t already have one.

“Improvements in debate happen at the margin, disproportionately, and often long-term.  It is the combination of the little things that makes people better at debate”- Naveen

We all want to see the hard work we do translate into something tangible immediately.  Despite that, you cannot get infatuated with immediate improvement and drastic changes in your results.  If you work hard you will get better, it might be a slow progression or it could be a rapid spurt but you will get better.  There is no debate HGH that you can take that will drastically improve your skills, getting better is a function of the hard work you put in over the years.  It also means if you focus on the little things, all those little things will lead to big changes in how you do.

I like breaking down things into an hourly rate of sorts.  Assuming you have around 40-50 days before you head off to your debate institutes, if you just spent 1 hour a day working on debate that’s 40-50 hrs of prep work you wouldn’t have previously done.  Bump it to 2 hrs a day and you’re looking at 80-100 hrs of work on debate with little to no serious infringements on your other plans.  If you sleep for a generous 8 hrs of the day from the other 16 other hours you are awake you need to find 1 or 2 a day to do debate work.  Everyone spending their time reading this can commit 1/16^th or 1/8^th of their time to improvement.

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