The 3NR

Since back in the day when I started sp debate kids have been saying the same thing over and over again

“Oh sp, your a genius and I totally agree with XYZ, however judges don’t like that so untill judges change I will just keep doing the losing thing that I have been doing kthnxbai”.

Most recently Anshu’s sock puppet echoed these sentiments in regards to making arguments about evidence. So lets clear this up once and for all: this is not a chicken/egg thing, debaters drive change- not judges. Let’s look at this logically with 2 examples: K’s and CPs. Here is how debaters caused CP’s to happen

1. Debaters on the neg hated losing

2. They thought “hmm, let me see… how can I … “counter” if you will… all these aff plans…

3. They read some CP’s

4. Judges were like “uh this is weird, don’t know how I feel about this”

5. Bad ass debaters were like “tough I am gonna keep reading this”

6. Judges were like “ok”

Read more…

The discussion of new affirmatives and Scott’s most recent post about the SPS article controversy intersect at the issue of how we are teaching students to evaluate evidence. I will write more about this over the coming days, but I wanted to chime in with a few thoughts about this meta-issue before discussing more about new affirmatives or about the SPS article controversy in particular.

My agreement with Roy’s initial post was not intended as an indictment of new affirmatives. Instead, I think the proliferation of poor-quality new affirmatives at season-ending tournaments reveals something important about the state of our activity. In particular, the following questions come to mind:

1. What does it say about the way we are teaching our students that breaking new affirmatives is seen as so strategic at end-of-the-year championships? Why is it that students feel that they have a better chance of winning when they break even a poor-quality new affirmative than they do when reading one of their existing affirmatives?

2. Does this represent a positive or negative trend? What should we be doing to nudge the competitive advantage toward a style of debate that rewards engagement with the topic literature and the opposition’s arguments more than evasion and trickery?

I don’t think it was Roy’s intention to “call out” those teams that consistently broke new affirmatives at this year’s TOC or to discourage teams from reading new affirmatives in the future. As I have written, there are certainly strategic benefits to breaking new cases and it is good to encourage students to invest the effort required to write a new case and prepare to defend it.

Read more…

In the first post on his blog (which finally inspired the creation of The3NR.com, an idea that had been milling around for a while), Roy criticizes the recent trend toward breaking many poor-quality new affirmatives at the end-of-the-year national championships. He concludes:

I … hope … everyone agrees that it is becoming increasingly more common for affirmatives to be afraid of defending their “house.” We do a disservice to the debaters and the quality of the debate if we allow this to continue. If you are a coach challenge your kids to find the best possible aff and learn everything about it. If you are a student, work hard, debate is most satisfying not just when you win but when your pour your heart out defending something and the work you’ve done translates into overall success. Judges, be willing to disregard bad evidence, be sympathetic to good smart arguments made by a team even if not evidenced. Winning is obviously an important function of debate, but if debate becomes a race to the bottom of crappy affirmatives what is the point? We change topics yearly to learn about different arguments and issues, why then do some of the most important rounds and major tournaments ultimately get decided on generics that can be read year round vs unsustainable new affs?

I agree 100%. One thing that I feel is important to add is that teams are far too afraid of negative teams finding the silver bullet negative strategy, especially at a tournament like the TOC where hired gun researchers are given way too much respect in terms of their ability to change the game. If you have been read an affirmative before and you are confident that it is based on sound arguments and quality evidence, chances are good that other squads have spent some time researching it, too. Between your research and theirs, it seems exceedingly likely that the “silver bullet” strategy would have been uncovered if it did indeed exist. If you haven’t found it and you haven’t heard another team read it, the most likely reason is not because the collective research ability of the high school community is poor but because no such strategy exists.

What is the silver bullet strategy against an RPS affirmative? Is there really something written that Sovacool and the other aff authors just haven’t thought about and therefore haven’t written a response to? If you read the journals every month and subscribe to RSS feeds for the major search terms relevant to your case, do you really think you’re going to miss the big new thing that came out and which the negative will catch you unprepared for?

The only reason to be afraid is because you lack confidence in the quality of your preparation. Maybe you haven’t kept up with the journals and you haven’t read all of the latest articles about your case. If that’s true, then you don’t deserve to win affirmative debates against negative teams that have worked hard to prepare to engage your case… maybe you should be reading stupid new affs that the other team will be unprepared to debate. But that is the debate equivalent of the trick play and an explicit admission that you are not as good as your opponents and that they have outworked you. If that’s an admission you’re willing to make, then so be it. But every team should strive to be the most prepared team possible when it comes to their affirmative(s), and you should feel a sense of shame and disappointment with yourself if you don’t think that’s the case.

This is decidedly not an argument “against” new affirmatives. There are times when it makes sense to try to catch the opposition off-guard with a case that you haven’t read before, and sometimes it even makes sense to read a new affirmative only once based on the teams that you are debating. But breaking new affirmatives that lack the credibility to survive even minimal negative research is an unfortunate but growing trend. If season-ending championship tournaments become battles between terrible new affirmatives and generic critiques and process counterplans, what does that say about our activity? Instead of pushing our students to become experts in the issues that they discuss throughout the season, it seems in many ways that we are telling them to forget what they’ve learned because, as critics say about Billy Beane, “that [stuff] doesn’t work in the playoffs.”

The obvious rejoinder to this line of reasoning is that the poor quality of these new affirmatives should make it easy for the negative to win. While I agree with this principle in the abstract, it doesn’t seem to play out that way in practice because of the approach that a majority of judges take. As Roy argues:

Debaters are not good at calling people out for reading bad evidence and judges have become too comfortable saying “Yeah well I agree it might not be qualified, it might be from a random blog, but I mean they’ve got a card.” It used to be only at the NDT in college that judges would use the “well they have a card” guise for making decisions, but this has now reverberated to almost every debate judged. We’re told not to believe everything we read on the internet, but it seems like in debate rounds a place for intellectual discussion on issues we often settle for evidence from people who are less qualified then the kids debating on the issue. Debaters CALL OUT TEAMS FOR BAD EVIDENCE read. Judges BE WILLING TO SAY THAT DESPITE HAVING A CITE, TAG, AND URL, THE TEXT READ IS NOT EVIDENCE.

I’m probably one of the best judges one could find for these kinds of approaches/arguments (“their ev is garbage,” “this doesn’t make sense,” “prefer qualified academic scholarship,” etc.), and I constantly tell students that they would be rewarded if they were more diligent about taking this kind of approach. Even “mainstream” cases (e.g. not stuff about alien invasions of Iraq to steal antigravity technology) often contain “evidence” that I would gladly disregard out of hand if only the negative challenged it. The Bearden card? If the neg says “he is unqualified, he said it is already too late, and he said that our only hope is zero point energy,” then it goes away. “Still evaluate his warrants” is stupid in the worst sense of that word and an excuse for judges to avoid making judgments (which, of course, is the function of the judge) about what counts as evidence and what sources should be relied upon when crafting policy.

Debaters would be pleasantly surprised by the reception they would receive if they made a bigger deal out of source quality in their debates. While there is certainly a segment of the judging pool that adheres to the “but they’ve got a card” school, I do not think that it is the majority (or even close to it). In front of most judges, arguments about source quality and author credibility will receive a very favorable listening—in many cases, you will be preaching to the proverbial choir. Remember, judges are the ones who have to listen to terrible evidence over-and-over again. After not very long, it gets old. Take advantage of that and challenge your opponents to justify the evaluation of the things they submit as “evidence” and you will win a lot more debates.

Debaters say a lot of things in debates that are not arguments in themselves but which contain cues that trigger meaning in the minds of their audience (their opponents and, most importantly, the judge). As Roy discussed in an article about “Defense”, one such cue is used to frame the way the judge approaches his or her evaluation of the debate. In many 2NRs or 2ARs, the debater starts with something like this:

Evaluate this debate through an offense/defense paradigm—they only have defense so there’s only a risk that we outweigh.

In many cases, the opposing team does not refute this framing of the debate. In a few cases, they respond by insisting that the judge not evaluate the debate using an offense/defense paradigm and then extend their defensive arguments.

But what does it mean to evaluate a debate using the “offense/defense paradigm?” Distinguishing between offensive and defensive arguments is easy enough; categorizing arguments this way is indeed one of the most helpful ways for new debaters to conceptualize a round. Put most simply, offensive arguments are those that provide a reason to vote for you while defensive arguments are those that provide a reason not to vote against you. Easy enough.

Deploying this distinction between offensive and defensive arguments as a decision-making calculus, however, is a little more complicated. As Roy argues, too many judges use “they’ve only got defense” as an excuse not to make judgments about each teams’ arguments. If the negative goes for a disadvantage and the affirmative goes for “this disadvantage does not make sense (because it is missing internal links, is empirically denied, links more to the status quo than our plan, etc.)”, it is nonsensical for the negative to implore the judge to employ an offense-defense paradigm and therefore exclude consideration of the affirmative’s responses to the disadvantage.

“Offense/defense—there’s only a risk” is not a reason to only evaluate offensive arguments. Offense/defense is a way of categorizing arguments, not resolving them. In the vast majority of debates, it does not provide any helpful guidance for judges as they evaluate the two teams’ arguments.

Instead of reciting this line at the top of the 2NR or 2AR, debaters should explicitly compare the offensive and defensive arguments made by both sides. If one’s best shot of winning is to minimize the importance of defensive arguments against a high-magnitude impact, one should make those arguments explicitly instead of relying on the “offense/defense” crutch. Separating out offensive from defensive arguments is a helpful way to approach a rebuttal, but it does not obviate the need for debaters to win their framing of the impacts… it is a starting point, not the destination.

This should seem obvious to many readers, but it is important to unpack the meanings that we imbue upon certain phrases. “Offense/defense—there’s only a risk” is by no means the only instance in which a few words have come to mean much more than that, but it is certainly one of the most frequently used.

The bottom line is that debaters should strive to make their impact arguments and framing of debates more sophisticated and judges should be leery of assigning meaning to utterances that do not fully communicate a complete argument.