The 3NR

Central to almost every high school policy debate round is the concept of causality: one event is said to cause a second event, either good or bad. Debates are laden with the language of causality: “X is key to Y” is the most popular phrasing of taglines, as in “deficit spending is key to the economy” or “military readiness is key to hegemony”. But what does it mean for one thing to cause another? Philosophers have been discussing this very question for millenia and there is no easy answer, but the concept of necessary and sufficient conditions is one way to make sense out of claims of causality.

What is the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition? And how can debaters use these concepts to improve their debating?

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One of the things judges say frequently is that one side or the other had a chance to draw a distinction, often a round winning one, and that they missed it. When I debated, frequently I had no idea what these judges were talking about. Having judged for a while now I can see to a larger extent the importance of drawing distinctions and the major effects they can have on decisions.

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Preface: I was both a 1n and 2n in college, anything I write in defense of the 1n comes from the unbiased perspective of helping the negative win more debates.

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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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In the video below the fold Christopher Hitchens, who not surprisingly is a bit of a hero of mine, debates the idea that morality must be founded in religion. I don’t know that this argument is relevant to many high school debates outside of Nietzsche, but in college a few teams work this into their shtick.  There is some argument about human nature in here though that may be more useful. But more generally, I think emulating Hitchens’ style would be a good form of judge adaptation for lay judges. He has a very good blend of high brow academic remarks and low brow humor that blends together into an entertaining format.

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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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One of the things judges/coaches beat into debaters heads over and over again is that they need more explanation of things. Instead of explaining the importance of this instead I thought I would post some examples of how to explain things better.

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While I am a true believer that 90 percent of debate tournament success comes in pre tournament preparation (good research, practice speeches, effective organization and block writing etc) the remaining 10 percent is obviously vital to your win/loss record and shiny speaker awards.

This post is designed to help you be at your best for those 3 or so days you are at the tournament.

1.)    Sleep- Sleep is the most valuable commodity at debate tournaments.  Most people don’t usually get enough of it and it shows.  Your goal should be to get 7ish hours of sleep a night.  Your most important debate rounds are usually at the end of the day so your energy and focus needs to be there 12 or so hours after waking up.  If you feel so inclined to pull an all nighter (not saying I recommend it) I would do it the night before you leave for a tournament so the night you get to the tournament you can get to sleep at a decent time.  In general there are two types of people who don’t get enough sleep at tournaments

A)    People who are up late card cutting/blocking/highlighting- While your intentions are noble you are hurting yourself immensely, the benefit of blocking X cards or highlighting misc updates versus another hour of sleep are huge.  At 7am when you are on your way to the prelims you’re not going to be ecstatic about what you did last night, but groggy and sleepy.

B)    The people who are fooling around in the hallways- you all are categorized by slamming doors after midnight into those locks that you leave out so you can get back into your rooms.  I won’t talk much about you all, I don’t expect to see you all debating on elim day and neither should you.

2.)    Bring decent snack food- Often lines are really long for getting food and even then you’re likely to get some fried greasiness of something.  While I fully enjoy the benefits of fried greasy sustenance they do not always go great when mixed with debating.   Powerbars, some type of granola, fruit etc are all easy to put in your bag, not too messy and quick.  I don’t think that red bulls or other energy drinks are particularly great for you while you’re debating but that is obviously more person dependent.  A safe bet is a big bottle of water, or Gatorade/powerade.  I really haven’t ever read anything scientific about carbonated beverages and speaking but let’s be honest the caffeine doses in diet coke are so negligible that if it could possibly hurt your speaking why risk it?

3.)    Bring 3-4 timers.  2 for you, one for the judge, and one for the other team.  Always have 2 timers while you are speaking as a team.  Timer snafus (btw spell check definitely fixed that) happen all the time, you don’t want to be another causality.   Keep your timers safe, there are always klepto timer people at tournaments.  Writing your name on a timer is not enough; having a name on it just means they know who they stole it from.

4.)    Have a copy of the judge philosophies on your computer or phone.  The philosophies are available at debatecoaches.org or if you have an iphone there is an app called idebate that has a timer and all of the judge philosophies + a timer.

5.)    Practice speaking in the morning before you go to the tournament- while this might make you wake up 10-15 mins earlier to do some speaking drills, the benefits of not sounding like a word that rhymes with mass definitely outweighs.

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Not an exhaustive list, but some of the ways to compare evidence and the reasons they are important.

1. Recency- certain uniqueness arguments, like the economy, can change rapidly. Having the most recent card on an issue is important if some event has occurred that will change forecasting or indicators.

Lets pause of a second and discuss the types of uniqueness evidence:

A. Snapshot- this is the world as it is right now. There ARE 60 votes for healthcare now is a snapshot.

B. Trend- how are things moving- in what direction. There WILL BE 60 votes for healthcare come vote time.

Now obviously you can have comparisons between Snapshot and Trend as well- and arguments about which to prefer. In general, dates affect both kinds of uniqueness, but snapshot in a larger way. The stock market may fluctuate from day to day, but those fluctuations do not necessarily deny that the TREND is going in a particular direction.

What does a complete argument using this look like? Unfortunately most people stop at “our card is newer and thus better”. This is a claim without a warrant. A complete argument would be something like “Their healthcare won’t pass evidence is prior to the death of Kennedy, his death has created a movement to get reform done, prefer our more recent evidence because it takes this pivotal event into account”.

2. Qualifications. There are basically 3 ways a piece of evidence can be “qualified”

A. It is written by an expert in the field- the field being what the card is talking about.

B. It can quote someone who would pass the test established in A. This is dicier- many cards quote someone qualified and then go on to make unqualified conclusions based on that quote.

C. It can site data-this is similar to B but the card is not necessarily “quoting”someone in the sense of having a sentence uttered by another person in the card. Instead it reports on data published by an individual or organization.

Both B and C are also prone to mis-reporting. Quotes can be taken out of context, data misreported or misused etc. So similarly to “primary” vs “secondary” sources, many scholars would say A is better than B or C. One thing debaters do frequently is to get a piece of evidence that is very qualified to make claim X, but then primarily use the piece of evidence to make claim Y, for which there is not a qualification. So qualifications arguments made by both sides should be scrutinized heavily.

The types of qualifications arguments:

A. Experts vs non experts- this is simple- your card comes from a staff writer, mine comes from a Nobel prize winning economist.

B. Biased vs unbiased- your evidence is written by someone with a financial or political agenda and is therefore suspect.

C. Reverse biased- my author has an incentive to say the opposite of what this card says, therefore that they is saying it proves it must be more true

D. Peer reviewed- similar to expertise but also separate- here an expert has been reviewed by other experts and had their conclusions (and more importantly their methods) found to be accurate.

3. Indicts and prodicts

These are arguments about whether a person or organization is qualified/unbiased in their assessments of things. These are obviously related to 2, I separate them out because they present their own set of arguments.

A. Ad Hom- X person is stupid or their organization sucks- the most common type of indict read. These are basically warrantless and I personally don’t think should be given much weight, particularly because if someone is taking a position on something they are going to generate a certain amount of hate mail.

B. structural- the school this person attended or the organization they work for structurally biases their claim. Examples of this would be “The Shock Doctrine” and its critique of Chicago school economics. These are generally better than A, but fall victim to the “this doesn’t indict the specific thing we have used this author to say” criticism.

C. Conduct- this is not really A or B, but close to both. Basically an author or institution has done something that would cast doubt on its objectivity- like accept oil money or some such thing. While accepting oil money does not in and of itself definitively prove that an organization is incapable of objective reporting on the issue of global warming, for most it does cast some doubt.

D. Methodology- probably the best kind of indict. This does not directly refute the claims made in a piece of evidence, but instead says that the way the author went about researching/testing those claims is flawed, and therefore their conclusions are also flawed. This is the most “academic” kind of indict because it requires someone to invest the time to dissect the claims of another.

E. Explicit refutation- this is the rarest form of indict and usually only occurs when someone writing evidence is sufficiently famous in their field to garner detractors. This would be something that says for example, “Zizek’s arguments about metaphoric condensation are wrong because…”

Prodicts generally follow the same logic

A. General props- this author is legit.

B. Structural props- they went to X or work for Y which have good reputations.

C. Conduct- they have won awards

D. Methodology- this study was sound

E. Specific praise- Their notion of XYZ is true and wonderful because….

Now if you read a prodict and the other side reads an indict, you want to similarly make comparisons about the class of arguments you are making, something along the lines off:

“Their indict is just an ad hom- it has no academic basis. Extend our prodict- this author has won numerous prizes for their economic writing. Prefer the prodict- it is very difficult to win awards like these, whereas we all know there are haters everywhere we go.”

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This post will be in more 1AR form than nuanced explanation.

Extend our offense- pics artificially inflate bad disads by creating any risk of a link analysis which skews research and pre round prep focus. We’ll defend the whole plan, but forcing us to defend isolated parts in a vacuum is unpredictable and doesn’t reflect real world literature. There is no logical limit to pics- they can change the scope or implementation of the plan in unpredictable ways.

AT: Fix your plan

-no plan is immune to pics, you can’t just “fix” it. Fixing involves making the plan as vague as possible like “provide water africa” a la the hooch 2 years ago that are bad for education.

AT: You were just defending consult

-This is a blog about switch side debate.

AT: Who runs these 1 penny counterplans

-Lots of people run CP’s like grandfather 10% of the permits that the aff is never prepared for, they have solvency advocates and people win on them.

AT: Solvency Advocates check

-Empirically denied- judges are unwilling to firmly hold the neg to this standard- just having a link card is usually good enough. Proliferation of internet blogs (and law review footnotes) allow cards to be found for anything

AT:If solvency advocates exist and net benefits exist, then maybe it’s a real question in the literature.

-”real question” does not equal- far and good for debate. There are lots of “real questions” like how are we going to pay for this that in debate we chose to ignore

AT:The counterplan tests whether the Aff would be a better idea if done slightly differently

-If your disad is not enough to outweigh the case, it sucks. Why should we give the neg a mechanism to make crappy arguments round winners? Sounds a lot like you are defending a K JC…

AT:The damage to the 2AC strategy is done? What strategy are you talking about?

-a good 2ac will not read offense solved by the pic because that would be a waste of time, if the negative then has the CP go away due to theory the aff is left without some of their best arguments

AT:Reciprocal – they inflate the solvency deficit to the same degree. If you can’t win that this outweighs the disad it means either the CP isn’t competitive or you deserve to lose.

-This is false- its easier to construe a net benefit with an impact “including roy in the HC provided by the plan is unpopular” then it is to win a solvency deficit “providing for roy is key to solve”.

AT:A strong 1NC barrage of defensive case arguments and DAs that turn the case accomplishes the same effect

-Yes it does, it takes 10X as much time as reading a 1 sentence cp text which makes it different

AT:This argument also justifies banning all CPs because they force you to make certain solvency deficit arguments and not others

-False, you can use your whole plan as offense against non plan inclusive cps

AT: This neg ability to focus on a specific part of the plan is justified by the aff ability to set the focus of the entire debate

-It does not logically follow that because the aff picked X the neg gets to pick a subset of X-this is a claim without a warrant

AT: See above – aff gets to choose their side in almost every PIC debate. “penny saved” counterplans aren’t viable because the neg can’t win that the DA outweighs the solvency deficit

-This is empirically denied- gfather example above, font pics, word pics, exclude a state, exclude a sub group like natives the list goes on an on

AT: Roy’s counterplans are stupid for reasons other than that they’re PICs, they’re either only textually or not competitive. This logic is the equivalent of banning DAs because you think politics is stupid

- you are hinting at some standard for competition that “only allows the good ones” but you conveniently leave it out because it doesn’t exist. This is the classic problem with PICS, one out of 100 is good/fair/the center of the debate about that aff- the rest are nonsense.

AT: “Using a different mechanism” is the same as a PIC+an additional plank

-No-  USFG do cap and trade vs Japan inject iron oxide into oceans. I think you are trying to say “including the agent makes it a pic” which I think is arguable- it includes none of the plan ACTION. I don’t think if a cp that has a different agent doing a different action includes 1 word or 1 letter or is in the same font as the plan that makes it a pic.

AT: the alternative energy PIC is an example of a “different mechanism” CP.

-Its the exact same mechanism, it just uses a different name

AT:

Running the net-benefit without the CP is overly constraining – proving that the plan is sub-optimal and that a viable, competitive alternative exists negates the aff. To answer this statement you’d have to argue neg fiat bad, and that (or even just no PICs) would regress us to 1960s, Greg Varley era debate where the aff always wins.

-It “overly constrains” bad arguments with low probabilities, true. PICS bad does not logically rely on no neg fiat, you have no warrant for that claim.

AT:

(to use a real world analogy, the argument that the fact that the plan is an improvement over the SQ is a sufficient reason to merit adoption would hold no water. see the health care debate – rational policymakers don’t adopt policies if better alternatives that are smaller than the plan exist. If the public option PIC succeeds, Obama loses.)

-Yes look at the real world- these kind of minor counter proposals suck and guarantee nothing ever gets done. But more importantly there are constraints in debate like the topic and time which make this model a bad one to import.

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