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They are about to debate going to space in case you aren’t watching

Andrew Sullivans comment from the dish

8.56 pm. I’m sorry but space policy puts me in an instant coma. But they all sounded fine. I can’t imagine anything they are now saying will have any impact in even the tiniest way on anything in the actual world. The best answer was Santorum’s.

I recieved the following email from a reader on a subject I feel strongly about so I wanted to post the answer here.

At a debate at the Glenbrooks a team got angry with me for having several, maybe 6 or so, cards in the 2AC speech document that I didn’t read, and to be fair it was at least 1 per block. The way I usually organize blocks is with debate synergy headers, and I just transfer the whole block over to the speech doc. Do you think this is a problem/if it is, what do you think is a good solution?

Another similar problem is that teams will like, answer an add on that was in a 2AC speech doc that I didn’t get to… is this something that needs to be addressed in CX/after 2AC should I tell them/just explain that in the 1AR. Seems a bit awkward when teams spend a minute of reading asteroids defense against a non-existent add on.”

Answer to 1- The other team should flow. Period. They should know what you read, this isn’t an issue just with paperless debate. When debating on paper people would bring up more than they got to or just read 1 card of a page with multiple cards etc. It’s the other teams responsibility to pay attention. Usually when I say something like this someone will say “but the other team could add a million things to the speech doc to confuse us/waste our time”. True, but someone debating off paper could bring a million extra sheets up to confuse you as well. They dont because it makes finding what they DO want to read harder. And if you have a good flow you can sift through things pretty quickly. If it’s really a problem start of CX by saying “mark what you read” and get a new speech doc. This should take under a minute. Judges have a problem with this when debaters want time like this to not come from cx/prep but instead to be “free” time, and rightly so. This should come from the team who didn’t give the speeches prep since they are the ones who need clarification. “But now they are wasting our prep…” Flow. You can win 99% of your debates by preparing in advance and flowing well WITHOUT ever reading the other teams evidence so quit complaining.

As for part 2 I think there are really 2 answers. From a strict “fairness” perspective I don’t think you are under any obligation to assist the other team when they make a mistake. Again, flow. But there is also the “don’t be a douche” standard, and from that perspective you saying “didn’t read that” would certainly help your debate karma. So chosing between the 2 is a personal choice, and I would probably decide based on the other team- if they were bad at debate or nice I would tell them. If it was a competitive round and they were jerks I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

This arises out of a few things, one of which is a post I made earlier about judges speaking up during debates. Another is this college thread about judges following along with evidence in a round.

If we take the premise of both threads to be true- judges can follow along with evidence during the debate, and can speak up during the debate, would rounds be better if debaters could interact with judges during them(after all, judges do now have the right to choose)?

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Statistics… suffice to say- not my strong suit. But one thing I know about debating them is that they are usually BS. The way I often teach students to think about statistics is that they are generally calculated in social sciences using a 95% confidence interval- which in shorthand is a way of saying “we are 95% sure this is correct” (obviously not the technical definition).

If we conduct 1,000 studies and publish the results, and 95% of them are likely to be correct, that means we will have 50 studies that are probably incorrect. These studies make up the oddball news items like “drinking soda makes you live longer” and other weird things you see that have “statistical” support.(Credit to Sklansky on this one)

Those 50 also probably make up a disproportionately large percentage of statistics used in debate. The reason is obvious- they are crazy and debaters gravitate towards crazy arguments. As people are taught more and more to rely on peer reviewed quality sources it should be remembered that just because something has some math behind it doesn’t necessarily mean its “true”.

In that vein here is an interesting link

At long last, regressions were run and… no result. No relationship between price shocks and conflict, even in the most generous scenarios. I shrugged and thought, “Well, so much for that.” My committee said, “Huh, what about that child soldiering project we told you not to do?” And off I went on my career as micro-conflict man.

In the meantime, lots of papers that did see an impact of economic shocks on conflict or instability did get published. The conventional wisdom grew: Rising incomes made the state more attractive to rebels as a prize, and falling incomes made it easier to recruit rebels. No matter that these two ideas ran in apparently opposite directions.

Meanwhile, I met other academics that had run the same regression as me. Famous ones you have probably heard of. Their reaction was the same as mine: “Oh, I found that result,” several said, “but I’m worried there’s nothing there because my data have problems, and the specification wasn’t quite right. So I left it out of the paper. I’ve been meaning to get back to that.”

Let’s follow a simple decision rule: run your regressions with inevitably imperfect data and models. If you get the theoretically predicted result (any of them), publish. If not, wait and look into your data and empirical strategy more.

The result? As in the natural sciences, most published research findings are probably false.

Kids Today will be a new feature where I don my corduroy pants, cardigan and slippers, grab a Werthers original and complain about why debaters today are terrible and everything was better back in the day.

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boom

Who could object to that? Thou shalt not bear false witness. Tell the truth, and shame the Devil. Transparency, management-speak for honesty, is put forward as the answer to most of today’s ills. But the truth of the matter—honestly—is that this would lead to disaster, for lying is at the heart of civilisation.

You can now get a team dropbox account, so that your debate files count towards the team accounts quota, not the individual members.