The 3NR

While the previous two installments of the “Bad Cards” series highlighted popular but low-quality impact cards, this is not the only way that awful evidence is used in high school debates. In the third edition of the series, the issue is not the credibility of the evidence’s author or the veracity of its content so much as the context in which it was written—a blog about a high school debate topic written by a part-time coach and former debater whose goal was to improve the quality of debates about the legal system, not produce evidence to be cited in contest rounds. Debaters should discontinue their use of this evidence—the “Harrison ‘05/’06” cards—on the grounds of both fairness and education.

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Many of the pieces of evidence that students frequently read in debates are unquestionably terrible. Often, the desire to bolster an impact’s magnitude and raise it to extinction-level leads debaters to rely on evidence with a host of problems including but not limited to:

• evidence used to advance arguments outside its intended context;
• evidence citing unqualified, (functionally) anonymous, or even nefarious authors;
• evidence culled from (typically internet or tabloid) sources that are at best unedited and at worst contemptible;
• evidence advancing hyperbolic arguments supported by vitriolic and/or over-the-top language;
• evidence so old that it no longer makes sense given subsequent events or changes in the topic it discusses; and
• evidence which must be liberally interpreted in order for it to be used to support the desired conclusion.

The “Bad Cards” series is an attempt to highlight some of the most egregious examples of poor-quality evidence that is nonetheless commonplace in high school policy debates. It is not the author’s intention to “scold” or “shame” those who have read these pieces of evidence in the past or who will do so in the future. Instead, it is an attempt to influence the way that evidence is selected for inclusion in debate arguments by arming opposing students with the tools they need to defeat bad cards.

OVERVIEW

A common terminal impact to terrorism advantages and disadvantages, the Corsi ‘5 card is used to support the claim that terrorism is an existential threat to humanity. There are many problems with this so-called “evidence,” but the bottom line is this: it outlines a fictional account of a specific sequence of events dreamed up by a discredited and indeed contemptible author that—even if true—is not relevant in the vast majority of debates in which it is deployed.

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In 2005, Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks authored an article in the journal Cultural Studies that has been used by debaters to criticize the ethical and political implications of “switch-side debating” at contest round tournaments. Entitled “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” the article has been excerpted to support “critique” and “project” arguments by establishing the harmful effects of traditional debate pedagogy. In particular, quotes from Hicks and Greene are leveraged to argue that the switch-sides methodology contributes to the creation of “exceptional subjects” whose personal convictions are neatly separated from their public statements and who therefore contribute to the ideological maintenance of American exceptionalism.

Debaters wishing to respond to this argument must defend the virtues of the switch-sides model of contest round debating. Below the fold you will find three pieces of evidence that should be helpful starting points for the construction of a persuasive response. I have left the cards untagged and ununderlined: I encourage debaters to read the original articles and to consider the best ways to package their answers to Hicks and Greene. Feel free to use the comments to begin a discussion—consider this another “crowd-sourcing” experiment in the construction of compelling debate arguments.

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It might come as a shock to you all that I am the one posting this because afterall who needs K answers when you have the Murray card.  But as I was perusing the journals at Borders yesterday I found this article / response to Zizek.  It uses many big words and incoherent babble, but the gist of it says don’t listen to Zizek.

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An interesting article discussing a new book from Brookings:

Creating an Opportunity Society begins by showing that, especially for the poorest children, this is something of a myth. By international standards, intergenerational mobility in the US is quite low. This will surprise few who have ventured into a US public housing project or troubled inner-city school, but many middle-class Americans never have. The figures show that US children born in the lowest and highest quintiles of the income distribution are more likely to stay there than in Britain, for example, and much more likely than in countries such as Sweden and Denmark.

But what to do about it? The book confirms a finding well established in the literature, that transition to the middle class is all but guaranteed for poor children if they do three things: finish high school, work full time and marry before having children. The US underperforms as an opportunity society because so many of its young people fail at one or more. The book focuses on these areas.

Education, as the Obama administration recognises, is pivotal. The book calls for gradual increases in spending on early education programmes for the poor, an exceptionally productive investment according to all the research.

So I have some google wave invites and was thinking about how to dole them out in a just manner and I thought perhaps a little bit of a contest. The rules and description are below.

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http://green.foxnews.com/2009/11/09/japan-to-beam-solar-power-from-space-on-lasers/

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.

It’s important that you debate the warrants within evidence and not the tags to the evidence. For example, “free trade solves war” could be the tag to a piece of evidence, but it would be wrong to assume that every card with this tag makes the same argument. While interdependence is certainly a major warrant for this argument it is not necessarily the only one, and to assume it is would be a blunder.

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For a variety of purposes

http://www.countercurrents.org/mcpherson290909.htm