Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate

https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-critical-theory-is-radicalizing

by taeric • 3 years ago

374 513 3 years ago

slowboring.com

klooney2• 3 years ago

This was ubiquitous back when I was doing debate, around 20 years ago. The ship sailed long ago.

cushychicken• 3 years ago

Same. The kritik and topicality argument forms were everywhere, and typically pretty fucking boring.

It was rare that any negative team would take the time to present counterarguments to any discrete part of the affirmative plan.

These, plus the shotgun, rapidfire delivery style, dominated policy debate, and made it pretty un-fun to participate in.

I ended up switching to extemporaneous speaking and enjoying it a lot more.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

I never debated, but it was explained to me that a key aspect was talking as fast as you can to introduce as much argumentation to your point as possible (newspaper scoring, kind of).

"I guess misdirection from deconstructionistism would be an entertaining alternate tactic. Yes you have introduced 122 points in your favor, but alas the very foundation of your arguments is undermined by my simple deconstruction."

The world/life is insane. It is far too large to understand, and even if you did, so unpredictable to be predicted anyway. Thus logical argumentation is subject to nihilistic nullification by a sufficiently skilled / pedantic debater?

klooney2• 3 years ago

I mean, debate is Calvinball, so you could go either way. I've seen people win arguing that a K is too generic/doesn't link to the affirmative team's case, and I've seen the affirmative's response get nailed the same way.

There's also more performance than people admit to, if your responses seem more competent, that goes a long way. A slow talking K that gets responded to by a team speed reading their prebuilt, 20 point "Foucault was a wanker" folder is probably going to lose.

imbnwa2• 3 years ago

In the 00s alone, I can remember: Fort Hays State winning CEDA Nationals on engaging indigenous rather than Western thought; New York University winning CEDA Nationals on Zizek's 'letter of the law' paradox as a warrant to trying George W Bush at the International Criminal Court for war crimes; Kentucky-Louisville winning CEDA Nationals on the racial and class bias of policy debate. I can't recall if a Kritik ever won the NDT, but much like the TOC, the judging pool is much more a closed loop of the inside circle the competition.

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

I can't recall if a Kritik ever won the NDT

Emporia SW won the NDT which was covered heavily in mainstream media

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

This has been going on for a long time. Im 15 years removed and made a hard U turn back to STEM after high school, but nihilism never left me. I blame some of it on debate, and some of it on doing salvia (with people from debate)

Guvante• 3 years ago

Isn't the entire point of debate to restrict how you can argue in order to provide a similar creative structure to artists using arbitrary rules?

Doesn't allowing adhoc attacks on semi related structures effectively bypass that structure?

Also given the notes in the article it sounds like the judges are too generous with blue sky proposals. "It would be neat if" does not make good policy and shouldn't make good debate.

Policy and by extension debate should focus on changes small enough that the outcome of the change is predictable. "Capitalism is terrible" is easy to show but an off ramp to anything else requires more than an hour of explanation...

welshwelsh• 3 years ago

Yes, but a more important function of debate in school is to expose people to new ideas and to question assumptions. Unfortunately, debates are often structured in a way that forces students to accept some ideas and prevents them from expressing others, which is a problem.

For example, whether you argue to raise or lower the minimum wage, either way you are still implicitly accepting the wage system. By framing the debate in this way, the teachers prevent students who oppose the wage system from having an opportunity to express their views.

Another example - as Noam Chomsky wrote about in "Manufacturing Consent", after the Vietnam War, the New York Times discussed many different theories for why the US didn't "win" the war. But it never considered the obvious - that the war itself was a mistake, and the US was wrong to be there in the first place. Framing the debate in this way is a way of silencing the opposition, by presenting two "sides" that are actually both on the same side and only disagree about trivial details.

If you opposed the Vietnam war, then it would be against your interests to follow the rules of a "debate" about how to win the war. The correct course of action in this scenario is to take the opportunity to argue for what you believe and to undermine the debate itself, even if it results in you "losing" the debate.

morelisp13• 3 years ago

Yes, but a more important function of debate in school is to expose people to new ideas and to question assumptions.

While this is definitely the overall goal of teaching debate, it's not clear to me this is actually how policy debate in school should operate in order to teach that. For one thing, I think other events (congressional is more persuasive and iterative, group discussion more freeform and collaborative, L-D more moralistic) have the potential to do this better. Policy's structure is really meant to force you to defend an evidence-based position in depth. Basically inherent the format is that at least 50% of the time you won't agree with it.

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

The point of extra-curricular high school debate is there is a topic and there are norms that we are here to discuss the topic. The argument about creativity is a good one - the point is that if someone starts talking about how "capitalism is terrible" then you can make that argument. 'They should lose because they are not talking about the topic which means we lose out on that creative structure. I have to take some ridiculous side like "racism is good" if I want to oppose them. It's bad for the structure of debate, etc. etc.' You can make and win on those arguments in-round.

I'm very familiar with high school debate and happy to discuss in detail.

prohobo• 3 years ago

There was a period where people were claiming that critical theory is being pushed in schools, while school board members refuted the claim as nonsense. Then it became clear that the students aren't being taught critical theory at all, but are being subjected to critical pedagogy - ie. teaching methods influenced by critical theory.

So, the school board was correct!

morelisp13• 3 years ago

What? Especially ca. 2005 all the coaches I knew hated Ks. The influence was often from the judges who were not teachers, but former policy debate kids now at university.

api• 3 years ago

It reminds me a bit of when a new class of exploit is discovered, like in the early Internet when buffer overflows became popular. You have a period where the exploit gets abused widely until countermeasures are developed and deployed.

In this case it seems to be out of context use of cultural critique as a way to throw off the opponent and change the subject. If the debate were actually about these topics that would be another story.

This one must be more popular in academic settings. Online the most popular exploit I see is the “Gish gallop.”

I only regard debate as having much value when both sides are debating in good faith. Use of thought stopping tactics reduces the whole thing to a mere sophistry contest with no value beyond testing how powerful the LLM is between each debater’s ears.

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

These arguments have been around for a while and there are effective generic counter-arguments commonly used.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

If the debate were actually about these topics that would be another story.

It is. Kritiks are not new, they've been around forever, and they're incredibly important. They have to directly "link" to the Aff plan or speech, or to the Topic. There are plenty of generic shells to run about "K-Aff that links to squo is unfair/cannot solve/abusive/etc".

This article is pushing a political agenda, and using just enough cherry-picked and misrepresented jargon to bamboozle non-policy debaters.

onychomys• 3 years ago

My partner and I went 36-4 in our senior year* in policy debate because we continually argued that the federal government was inefficient and corrupt and we should instead just give block grants to the states. In the mid 1990s in Montana, that was a nearly unbeatable strategy. It's always been about finding the one argument that the judge will be unable to ignore instead of about the actual evidence you have for all the rest of it.

*we lost the state championship to a team from Hardin, MT, population about 4000 and guess where the state championship was held that year?

philsnow• 3 years ago

In the mid 1990s in Montana, that was a nearly unbeatable strategy.

We won a lot because we knew the judges

we lost [...] to a team from Hardin [...] and guess where the state championship was held that year?

We lost because the judges knew them

tekla14• 3 years ago

These alt debates were well around 20 years ago. It was incredibly rare that they succeeded because:

a) most judges didn't really like it when the debate becomes some weird meta thing.

b) most teams that ran this were NOT good at debate.

What seems new is Judges completely throwing out the substance of the debate and relying on their own political views for the round.

kurthr• 3 years ago

If, by political views, you mean boredom with a well worn artificial meta argument that makes a farce of whatever rules do exist in debate. It was funny/interesting once.

projektfu2• 3 years ago

Now that you say that, it reminds me that there was a term for it at least 25 years ago. Something like "dark policy"...

morelisp13• 3 years ago

b) most teams that ran this were NOT good at debate.

Yep. Everyone on my team who ran Ks, especially neg, were the people too lazy to do actual research against multiple plans.

nrfulton8• 3 years ago

No, all of that is still true at most tournaments.

The author's piece is a description of the national circuit, and perhaps of a very few regional circuits that heavily overlap with the national circuit. All of her statistics are for an invite-only championship tournament (TOC) for that national circuit. Note: it's not the national championship, which does exist. It's a championship for competitors in a national circuit.

Most kids attend tournaments close to home. Not only do they not attend the TOC -- they don't even attend a national circuit tournament that would allow them to qualify for the TOC!

eiiot7• 3 years ago

That's not entirely true. A lot of Parli is concentrated on the coasts, and most of the West Coast encourages tech debate, so most West Coast debaters end up attending "tech" tournaments. Also, most "close to home" tournaments still give NPDL points.

Also, TOC is the national championship. (NPDL Nationals Exist, but they are a relatively recent addition, and aren't highly respected in the community)

projektfu2• 3 years ago

I debated in the Lincoln-Douglas format (policy wasn't big in my area) and would sometimes try arguments from deconstructionist points of view. The judges never really understood them and without their understanding, the arguments couldn't remain strong. In L-D having better analogies often was a stronger method than being clever.

I suppose that's something that was different in policy debate, where as I understand it, nonsense can be debated so long as the other side responds to it? Also, which approach leads to nuclear war? Calling the frame of the debate legitimate or illegitimate?

RugnirViking2• 3 years ago

Thats always been the problem with competetive debate - you're supposed to argue a position that often has significant culutural weight, meaning its unlikely anything you say will change anyones mind. I was once asked to debate a pro slavery stance in debate class despite obviously everyone being against it. I felt our team did pretty well and the other team did barely anything and yet everyone voted for the other side. Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.

mikepurvis• 3 years ago

You see that even on sites like this one (or reddit), where the etiquette page beseeches everyone to vote for comments that are useful, insightful, or well-argued, rather than just what they agree with (especially already agree with).

But it never really seems to play out that way; it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour.

rahimnathwani3• 3 years ago

  it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour

Interestingly, my most upvoted recent comment was one stating a position that was opposed to ~all of the existing comments on a thread.

threatofrain• 3 years ago

If something is an interesting debate then most people don't have the expertise to engage meaningfully with the facts and arguments being put forward. Experts can bullshit you all day and no amount of critical thinking is going to pull you out of a deep well of ignorance.

Pannoniae• 3 years ago

This website isn't even that bad compared to literally almost anywhere on the internet. From what I've observed with my comments, my "popular opinion" and "unpopular opinion" comments aren't that far apart in terms of comment karma.

One-liner trivialisms and cheap baiting usually gets flagged here, not upvoted regardless of the topic, which is a very positive thing. I am very grateful to the site's admins and users for this lovely place, it's truly a unique thing.

jayd16• 3 years ago

Maybe HN is in an endless September now but it used to be that a joke or repeated comment would get downvoted.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

Disagree. The best threads are the highly contentious ones where I'm upvoting everybody.

WarOnPrivacy3• 3 years ago

Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.

Winning seems like a low-value goal here. Classroom simulations exist so students can be exposed to the reality of consequences and outcomes.

I feel better goals here would be how to immerse yourself in an unfamiliar/unwanted position and how to understand the dynamics of a scenario with competing, entrenched positions.

RugnirViking2• 3 years ago

I agree! Which is why I think it's a shame that this is an activity where the best way to win is in fact to not do that at all :(

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

What this article is leaving out is that you do need an extremely deep understanding of the opposing arguments to be a good K-debater. There are tons of tools to defeat Kritiks, and if all you can do as the K debater is say, "but thing bad", you won't actually win.

On the contrary, there are a lot of non-K policy debaters who want to be able to parrot the same generics at each other each round, and they don't know how to engage with Ks precisely because they don't understand their own position well enough to argue why the basic assumptions it relies upon are the way they are (or aren't what the K is proposing they are).

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

The one time I've been to a debate they asked everyone's opinion on the topic before and after the debate, and then the winners were the ones who persuaded the most people to change their minds. So you can still win even if you're arguing for an unpopular opinion.

It was such an elegant metric I assumed all competitive debates used it. From this article it sounds like they just have judges that vote for the winner though? Crazy.

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

Intelligence Squared does this but I think most debates suck anyways.

CrazyPyroLinux• 3 years ago

I think this is called an "Oxford style" debate.

thesohoforum.org puts on a lot of good ones.

lupire8• 3 years ago

Competitive debate is a joke. It's verbal form of runaway selection like the evolution of the peacock.

mbg7214• 3 years ago

Opponents of abortion would argue that the same "this isn't really a human" tactics that the Nazis used are still alive; if everyone is comfortable, it sounds like there's a lot of "at least we're not the baddies" going on.

photonerd• 3 years ago

I mean… they might try to, but that line of reasoning doesn’t hold up to even cursory examination.

The position itself—about othering certain groups—would hold up by itself of course. Unfortunately for those you mention it’s most often employed by those on their side of the debate about groups they dislike (Muslims, gay, trans, etc).

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

Genuinely, in non academic competition often the best way to “beat” an opponent is to change the rules

Examples of this that are well understood are regulatory capture, where group A convinces a more powerful group B to enforce a new constraint on all competitors to group A. Generally the constraint is a marginal impediment to group A and so “levels the playing field” *wink*

So the idea that there’s some pure form of rhetoric that is actually worth practicing, given that human conflict (from the minor to the major) is rarely to never solved via this mechanism (even in formal legal proceedings) - it’s not clear what is actually being learned here

Other than later in life realizing how formal debate has almost no application and it’s all about how you refine and evaluate your own arguments.

gloryjulio2• 3 years ago

So called competitive debate is really just a joke about who talk faster. There is no positive feedback loops where either side should take a moment to think and gives feedback. Sometimes agree to disagree is the best option. You learn nothing from the competitive debate.

It's basically twitter debate before twitter exists where ppl talking over each other

tekla14• 3 years ago

Completely wrong. The fast talking is worthless if you don't have good arguments and anyone worth their shit can see right through that.

As it turns out the best debaters can talk fast AND make good arguments simultaneously.

If you can't think fast on the fly about how to refute a position, that's on you.

Retric• 3 years ago

It’s somewhat beneficial to lawyers etc simply because it exposes people to a different way of thinking. It’s roughly equivalent to science fairs, popsicle bridges, or math competitions for STEM students.

mythrwy• 3 years ago

Back when they had corporal punishment (i.e. "spanking") in US schools I had to debate against it in high-school.

One teacher, who used the punishment frequently, was the judge and simply awarded the debate to the pro paddling side and all my (sourced and referenced) arguments were ignored. I always knew it was BS. Then they banned the practice. And I quit the debate team in anger.

So, I guess I really kind of won the debate, it just took a couple more decades.

motohagiography2• 3 years ago

The problem with this type of theory is that you have to accept that everything is x-ist first, and then the speaker iterates on logic that seems internally consistent, after you have accepted that the axioms (and conclusions) of their system of reasoning are true. The problem is that since the axioms and conclusions are negatively defined, any statement within it can seem internally consistent, so it doesn't matter they just run down the clock and rope in the credulous.

The legitimacy of these critical theories seems to rest on Kripke's invention of so-called "modal logics," which I understand were initially presented as a progressive reaction in philosophy departments to the positive logics derived from maths. The criteria for logic is that it "adds up," or more accurately, our rules about logic and consistency (from Gödel, Russell, and others) were only deemed to represent reality if the logical system could represent arithmetic. Kripke seemed to propose that if you revisit and start with logics that cannot represent arithmetic, you still get consistent logical forms, which are sufficient for expressing a much larger range of phenomena. Because sure, if you produce nonsense, nonsense can represent anything. It's the definition of magical thinking, but within a couple of decades, it was being presented as the "formal" logical underpinnings for a variety of essentially marxist ideologies of different intersectional flavours, where they produce the same circular bullshit with only a few words changed, and with the same object in mind: dissolution of meaning and the destruction (neutralization) of discourse as a means to create chaos and to seize power.

It is a rhetorical system for protagonizing antagonists. We can sythesize these ideologies pretty trivially and inject them into naive minds that turn them into either activists, or neutralize any resistance to them because they're just baffling gibberish with the threat of political consequences. Nobody wants to admit they have been fooled or taken, and its easier to attack the people who point it out than to admit that you have been bullied and hustled by highly trained pros.

High school teachers judging middle school debate clubs aren't equipped to handle this, but theory is teaching kids to rhyme out ideologies that are entertaining, and even charismatic, but they're nothing but the same old tropes of the 20th century and its grisly consequences.

User23• 3 years ago

To me it sounds like you're just describing enthymemes[1]. You don't need modal logic for that, just plain old Aristotelian rhetoric. And rhetorically you can fly a whole lot of ridiculous premise under the radar in the unstated leg so it's a powerful technique. It works somewhat similarly to the technique of "assuming the sale."

I don't have much to say about CRT or whatever you want to call that rhetorical program today, but it doesn't take any great analytical ability to suss out the unstated premises. And if you do it becomes pretty clear that the whole enterprise isn't exactly intellectually honest.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme

cratermoon3• 3 years ago

An enthymeme is like saying "giving everyone free health care would be socialism!", and leaving out the unstated premise that socialism is bad. It's surprising how much garbage can be shoveled into an argument if it's anchored on one premise the audience believes without evidence.

techno_tsar2• 3 years ago

That's simply not true. Critical theories do not depend on modal logics, nor is your characterization of modal logics correct.

Critical theory and justifications for essentially Marxist ideologies have pretty much nothing to do with Kripke, who was writing within a strict Anglo-American/analytic tradition. Kripke didn't invent any kind of magical thinking. His contribution to modal logic was that he showed, formally, its completeness (as a teenager, too).

You seem to be pointing at a common critique of poststructuralist thinking as focused on the "dissolution" and "destruction" of meaning. This has a lot more to do with Derrida, who wrote strictly in a continental tradition. Critical theories do not rest on modal logics, since many of them are anti-foundationalist in nature, they would probably not rest on anything except works in the 'critical theory' canon (e.g. Marx, Adorno, Foucault, etc).

Ironically, and I mean this sincerely, but if you had actually read anything by Kripke (or critical theorists), you would realize that his most famous work after completing modal logic was restructuring semantics in a way that espoused scientific essentialism (cf. Naming and Necessity). That is something critical theorists would very likely be antagonistic towards.

calf5• 3 years ago

They're just dog whistling about racism, because if you read their comment at arm's length, you would realize that it itself is a negative "modal" argument of the exact form that it seeks to decry.

motohagiography2• 3 years ago

I was reading about Kripke's modal logics for applications in LLM's, so I will agree that my study of them wasn't part of the indoctrination they seem to be used for in cultural studies programs. I had first encountered him in the syllabus of some cultural studies programs where modal logics were used as the formal basis and justification for the a-logical aspects of some feminist critiques in the 90s.

Saying that a subset of post marxist theories are not marxist theories seems pretty standard motte and bailey. I'd refer you to James Lindsay's descriptions of how these critical theories fit together into the miasma of nonsense that is being taught to kids today, as he's done deeper work on the subject. My interest is in synthesizing it, because since it is just internaly consistent and so divorced from reality, there are likely infinite versions of it that could serve as an antidote to the pernicious indoctrination "educators," are subjecting children to.

My politics are unambiguous, they are anti-Marxist, as it is not sufficent to be neutral to it's variants, and one has to actively confront it when it pretends to be anything other than a system of deception.

dgs_sgd• 3 years ago

To question the premises of the debate topic rather than support a side seems like a huge cop-out. You don't have to do your research to support evidence based arguments and your opponent who may have done their research to support their arguments now has to argue against a completely different position for which their evidence is useless.

What is going to happen when these people wield actual power in politics and public policy and the conclusion policy debates is "society is rotten to the core" (example Kritik from the article).

cratermoon3• 3 years ago

To question the premises of the debate rather than support a side seems like a huge cop-out

No, in fact it is the beginning of wisdom. Contrary to your assertion that you don't have to do research, the ability to question the premises begins with understanding not only your argument but many other arguments as well.

zdragnar• 3 years ago

In my experience, it was a cop-out. In my day, it was usually centered on some grammatical error that turned into a game of semantics.

The whole point is to catch your opponent off guard and reframe the topic into an arena they hadn't prepared for. Debate rounds don't really allow time for thoughtful contemplation; you typically have at most a minute of prep time between speeches within the round.

sixo2• 3 years ago

It's the beginning of wisdom when you do it on your own, in your own time, and at whatever length it asks of you.

But another aspect of wisdom is to think intelligently about the problem at hand by choice. To refuse to do so, or not to be able to, is to not be wise.

woah• 3 years ago

They aren’t going to wield power because “talk fast and derail the entire conversation with unrelated arguments that appeal to far-left college students” isn’t going to convince any normal people of anything and is not a useful rhetorical technique. The most this style of debate might do is to cause left wing political cause to shoot themselves in the foot.

c_crank7• 3 years ago

In the real world, left wing causes seem to be making progress by means of college students anyway.

dundarious2• 3 years ago

There is an argument that "debate" in the manner performed by these clubs primarily trains people to think only in the ideological terms/framing given to them by their "betters". "Debate" in this sense is intellectually impoverished. Call it "rhetorics" if that's all you want -- it's useful, but it is more akin to Toastmasters than politics or political debate.

If there is to be any actual political thinking involved, then some challenge to the given framing must be allowed, or the framing must be capaciously defined. But it will still be mostly a lesson in rhetoric.

lupire8• 3 years ago

If you are a revolutionary/anarchist, why would you think that a organized debate league with a rigid rule structure is the hobby for you?

dgb232• 3 years ago

This article reads like satire.

The prerogative of the young is to question the status quo in fundamental ways.

They aren’t yet restricted by responsibility and dependents. They haven’t become numb yet. Let them be sharp and radical.

Does the author prefer control and indoctrination?

Positive cultural change can’t happen if we force the young and the free into a box. All of the freedoms we have have been fought against the mainstream and against established power.

We will always need radical and critical ideas to move forward. We need young people to be able to say that our questions and subjects are fundamentally wrong.

scarmig2• 3 years ago

One of the points Yglesias makes is that judges prejudge certain arguments to be wrong. For instance, one judge says

Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist... I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments... Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.

At this point, the status quo (at least in debate, but also more broadly) is simply mouthing liberal pieties. Repeating "Black Lives Matter" a thousand times is neither sharp nor radical, and it's funny to see people whose ideas are incredibly conventional think of themselves as a rebel.

cdtwigg• 3 years ago

FYI this post was actually written by Maya the intern (Matt only writes the weekday posts).

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

At this point, the status quo (at least in debate, but also more broadly) is simply mouthing liberal pieties

A single example chosen specifically because it is extreme isn’t the status quo, and Maoism isn’t (and is opposed to) liberalism.

throw0101a• 3 years ago

> […] I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments […]

Then why would you waste everyone's time, including yours, in being a judge? It's like being a figuring skating judge and saying "I hate the cold and so think this sport done in a cold environ is dumb so will give everyone a zero."

morelisp13• 3 years ago

This is the classic problem of education having to balance expression and practice. Bringing a gun to a swordfight is effective but if you're in a kendo class it's not especially helpful. Such is the effect of kritik within policy debate. People should learn kritik, I even agree with much of it, but you also want to learn how to argue actual topics. And especially as someone who often agrees with kritik, I would rather the kids exercise that skill here where it doesn't matter, than in the real world with real impacts.

dgb232• 3 years ago

Thank you for explaining this perspective. There’s for sure a balance here between playful education and actual, invested debate. I was leaning too much on the latter, but the former is just as valuable.

almost_usual• 3 years ago

I agree this is really nothing new.

dahwolf• 3 years ago

They aren't challenging the status quo using this method at all.

As one of the debate examples given: the US should embrace a system of universal healthcare. Instead of actually engaging with the topic, they go all meta on it. Hence, no progress will ever be made.

RajT882• 3 years ago

This seems much better than the last article I read about trends in high school debate, which basically was talking over the other person and using the gish-gallop maneuver:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

morelisp13• 3 years ago

I can see why speed debate can seem like a gish gallop, but it's not. And the way policy is structured it's definitely not talking over anyone (except I suppose in some of the absolutely radical Ks that attempt to destroy the policy format, and even K-friendly judges hate those).

RajT882• 3 years ago

Trying to find the article now. I am pretty sure that they were not misunderstanding the dynamics of speed debate, and kids were actually using the gish gallop.

tekla14• 3 years ago

A big point in debate is learning how to deal with gish-gallop. That shit only works if you don't know how to deal with it.

AYBABTME4• 3 years ago

How do you deal with it?

dadadad100• 3 years ago

Thanks for this. I didn’t know there was a name for this technique. If you listened to RFK jr on Lex recently you heard many many examples. And also Trump. I’ve only heard it described as “flood the zone with shit”, which is a reference to a football (American) tactic

lowkey• 3 years ago

If you listened to RFK jr on Lex recently you heard many many examples.

Could you provide one or two such examples so we can evaluate for ourselves?

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

This is not a thing in Policy Debate (certainly not anymore). There are literally tons of different theory arguments against this stuff, like arguing T-abuse, condo, or in the old days even RVIs.

Also, in Policy debate, other than cross-ex the debaters aren't ever talking at the same time.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

I think this is a useful form of thinking, while exhausting for actually attending a debate competition.

Much of the world doesn't operate in affirmation and negations.

And even most of American's political divisions only masquerade as opposites, but if you listen - which neither 'side' does - you'll see they aren't opposites except in result. While other results are possible that do possibly bridge consensus.

guerrilla• 3 years ago

I can't stand the actual examples here (which reek of low quality Continental philosophy and dogmatic nonsense) but rejecting and questioning premises is definitely something I support, especially for young people.

ivraatiems• 3 years ago

This article smacks of a classic bad-debater behavior: "I can't win rhetorically on the power of my own argument so I'll attack the people and techniques that are beating me instead of addressing them substantively."

The correct response to "the whole world is broken and we can't debate X because it's stoppered by Y" is "the world is not broken (enough) to not debate X because there are practical things we can do about X."

If that's a unpersuasive argument, well, then it's unpersuasive and you ought to ask yourself why. It's always possible the judges are biased in favor of one argument or another, but that's how the game has always worked.

There are lots of arguments against critical theory that have merit and are useful in debate. "Boo hoo I don't like critical theory" isn't one of them.

ink_13• 3 years ago

Formalized debating like this bears about as much resemblance to persuasion as fencing does to actual sword fighting. That is, the broad strokes are similar but ultimately it's highly stylized and not actually the other thing.

rutierut3• 3 years ago

The whole debate format has been broken forever. Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea.

This stage seems like a marginal improvement, with the biggest con being that it's more anti-rationalist. Rationalism isn't a panacea, but one needs to master it in order to effectively argue post-modern critical theories.

Competitive debate has always sucked and apparently still sucks.

rahimnathwani3• 3 years ago

"Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea."

Why? One consequence might be to improve your ability to steelman an argument with which you disagree.

rutierut3• 3 years ago

Fair point that is useful, but the majority of people never steelman anything, a significant amount of people will even refuse to steelman anything on moral grounds. Strawmanning on the other hand…

goodpoint• 3 years ago

Pushing for competition instead of rational thinking is bad. Learning steelmanning is just one minor benefit.

tekla14• 3 years ago

Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea.

If you can't argue in the affirmative of the other side, you probably don't actually understand the topic to being with, and are probably not very good at critical thinking.

rutierut3• 3 years ago

I completely agree with this. If you’re arguing against trickle-down economics you should know where people arguing for it are coming from and be able to phrase it in a manner that its proponents agree with.

This also happens to be one of the most (holistically) effective techniques irl when “debating” with someone.

tsuujin• 3 years ago

Improving people's ability to competitively argue for things they don't believe in seems a hilariously bad idea.

I disagree with this so very much.

High school debate was foundational for my adult ability to recognize that nuance exists. Arguing a position that you don’t personally believe in, and winning, is a massively useful tool in understanding that for the majority of topics there are reasonable, intelligent, and acceptable arguments for both sides.

This is a trait seeming missing from most other adults I interact with. Too many people accept blindly that there is a correct and incorrect position and no room in between.

JHorse• 3 years ago

Good.

This country has been in desperate need of revolutionaries for far too long.

Respecting the structures and rules of polite society let the Climate Change "Debate" feed denialism that's literally burning the world down around these kids right now.

They're going to need to make some radical moves quickly once they get to positions of influence, and it's heartening to know that they're preparing for that.

jsmcgd• 3 years ago

Why do the debate organisers tolerate this? If the debate is X versus Y, why allow someone to say we should really be discussing Z? Imagine this in any other competitive arena like sport where during a match some team starts playing another sport entirely. There's nothing wrong with debating critical theory but not if that's not what's being debated. It should be an automatic fail, just as it would be if you're supposed to debating in a certain language and you refuse to do so. This just seems like deliberate sabotage/propaganda masquerading as sincere communication. As much fault lies with the organisers as with those who wish to deliberately pervert the debate.

aabhay2• 3 years ago

As a debate student that goes to dozens of tournaments a year, arguing about the same policy topic over and over can get very dry. When I was in high school debate, I found these diverse literatures exciting and stimulating, which made my passion for debate much stronger.

WarOnPrivacy3• 3 years ago

As a debate student that goes to dozens of tournaments a year, arguing about the same policy topic over and over can get very dry.

That brings up a good point. We probably need to differentiate between a student debate as part of a class vs extracurricular debating.

Students participating in a classroom debate only get so many minutes of exposure; each is valuable. Tighter boundaries would seem to be called for there.

jmye2• 3 years ago

It seems like there should be a place for both: one where diverse literature and meta-debate is both accepted and maybe even the point (e.g. make the premise actual critical to the Ks), and another where you are expected to argue for or against a position you don’t agree with. I think there’s tremendous value in having to steelman positions you think are fundamentally bad/incorrect, but I think you’re also right that there’s potential growth value in looking into deeper and different theory systems entirely.

But I think it’s generally a bad thing all around for the Ks to infiltrate literally all debate and crowd out anything else (in the same way the speed-talking phenomenon was [is?] a fundamentally bad thing for debate).

peterlk• 3 years ago

This absolutely happens. Running a K (kritik) is a risk because if the judge decides that you’re full of shit, they can basically just ignore your case. Your opponent can make an argument to throw the kritik out, and then you’re dead in the water

kleinsch• 3 years ago

The article explains it. Students like these formats bc they fit with their interests and politics, students graduate, the ones that were most active in debate become judges and reinforce that these topics will be rewarded

lupire8• 3 years ago

It's runaway natural selection.

AMC series math contests have a bit of the same problem -- pushing the material format more and more toward memorizing extremely insider arcana over a meaningful survey of the field of study.

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

There is a fundamental weakness in the fascist-adjacent proscription of orthodoxy while forbidding anything that may challenge or question it. That is not liberalism, it is an echo chamber lacking contact and ability to deal with the whole world.

I also disapprove of the tendency to muzzle people with prior restraint because they raise controversial points because somehow "harmony" is more important than insightful and authentic discourse on topics of greater import because someone "might be offended" or "will encourage negative interactions". If only certain topics can be discussed while others cannot, that is a lack of freedom.

eiiot7• 3 years ago

Many tournaments (especially on the West Coast) and their organizers enjoy and encourage kritical debate. (That's what they did in high school -- Kritical debate was born in Policy Debate, and spread to other formats, so many coaches have that previous experience) Many on the East Coast ban it entirely, or heavily discourage it. At some level, there are almost two different leagues. The "tech" debaters even have their own championship, of sorts (NPDI).

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

You must be talking about a particular event (parli?) because the K is on all coasts in policy

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

The purpose of a K is not to argue that you should be arguing about Z, it's to say, "X is based on this fundamental assumption, and that assumption is flawed in this way..."

A Neg team running a K has to link directly to the Aff's plan or argument, or they'll just 'no-link' it and move on.

On the K-Aff side, they need to convince the judge(s) that some fundamental assumption of the Topic itself is flawed, which you still have to directly engage with the Topic in order to do.

There is no such thing as a K debate which just says "I'm arguing about some unrelated thing instead".

drewrv• 3 years ago

“Kids are doing something differently from how we used to do it” is always a red flag for me.

The fact that traditional high school debate produced leaders such as Nixon, Pelosi, and Larry Summers is not the ringing endorsement of the process that the author seems to think.

I think this a compelling argument: “minimum wage is an irrelevant debate in a country where basic necessities such as housing, healthcare, and education are increasingly out of reach. Structural reforms are needed, not minor adjustments to regulations that often go ignored.”

If people don’t think that’s compelling, I’d love to hear that argument! But the author’s complaint is framed as “kids today are doing it wrong” and it doesn’t really counter the points the kids are making.

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

Cheers - the point is that it is up for debate!

"I don't think this is how debate should be!"

Okay? If it is so obvious why this is bad, win the argument in the round.

vacuity10• 3 years ago

If things were so obvious, we wouldn't need the debates. Your first line is most correct, in that many things are up to debate because even if the general tack is right, nuances matter.

Aunche2• 3 years ago

I think this a compelling argument: “minimum wage is an irrelevant debate in a country where basic necessities such as housing, healthcare, and education are increasingly out of reach. Structural reforms are needed, not minor adjustments to regulations that often go ignored.”

If your argument is that the minimum wage distracts is from systemic reforms, then that's still a policy argument, albeit one that likely wouldn't get far. A kritik is basically saying minimum wage assumes the existence of capitalism and capitalism is bad. A socialist policy maker isn't going to use that as an excuse to vote against a higher minimum wage.

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

What? The original argument made is absolutely a valid kritik and a far stronger link by the way than the one you are presenting as a strawman

binary132• 3 years ago

this is bait.

dang• 3 years ago

It does contain ideological flamebait but the details around high school debating are interesting and uncorrelated with any common topic here. That makes it a good candidate for an HN thread. As many commenters have been adding their own interesting experience with high school debates, I think HN is 'winning' this one so far (i.e. there are more thoughtful comments than flamewars).

agg232• 3 years ago

My high school Policy league (2010+) did not allow kritiks essentially at all. It was an extremely rare occurrence to run a negative plan (I'm not sure I ever saw it myself). An aff kritik would absolutely not have been tolerated as we would ding them significantly on Topicality (sticking to the required resolution), which is voted on halfway through the round (so if aff loses, the round is over). I was one of the most resolution bending debators, with most of my aff plans going outside the bounds of what everyone else thought of for that topic.

I think my league was very abnormal however as we had a lot of layman, parent judges that we had to teach rules to (and sometimes the teams had conflicting interpretations), and we didn't allow more abusive techniques such as speed and spread (a common technique in Policy or Parli to present arguments as quickly as possible to prevent the opposite team from being able to address all of them, resulting in a de facto win). We would never have allowed someone to judge with a bio of "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for ... fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism", and it's insane to me that this was allowed at a top end tournament. There were certainly judges that brought their own priors (and we tried to keep track of them to help the rest of our club out), but they generally didn't announce it in such a damaging way.

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

Your league sounds typical of debate leagues, it is the national circuit that is abnormal.

Paul-Craft10• 3 years ago

I agree. The GP post describes the HS policy league I participated in fairly well, except that we didn't have parent judges. We were a small, county league in a league that had all of 4 or 5 schools participating, so we were able to get by using coaches as judges.

And, lest you ask the question, no, the coaches were not overtly biased toward their own teams. My partner and I definitely beat a few teams in front of their own coach as the judge, and we definitely lost a few rounds with our own coach judging. There were no explicit position statements by any judges, either. They only "position" was that the affirmative must advocate for the plan in order to win topicality.

ajolly6• 3 years ago

Did you find speed or spread common in Parli? In any circuit I was in you would get dinged on that fast, and it was more of a dead giveaway that a policy debater was trying Parliamentary.

agg232• 3 years ago

I never got to do Parli unfortunately, so I can't speak to that. I have only the stories of my coaching team, which was the original coach followed by their star student of a college Parli team that performed very well on the national track (something like second or third for several years). I've seen videos of (maybe national track) high school Policy debaters speed and spreading through a massive ream of evidence, but obviously that doesn't indicate the frequency.

AYBABTME4• 3 years ago

As a foreigner with kids growing up in the US, this crazy bias toward critical-everything in the US education system makes me worried that my kids will be indoctrinated in some weird speculative theory instead of educated in normal fields in a focused and rational manner. It leaves me wondering if I shouldn't send them abroad to some school system that has remained sane.

knewter• 3 years ago

Homeschool your kids. No one else cares about them

mbg7214• 3 years ago

In my area of the forgotten flyover country, the options are:

1) Public school for free for middle-of-the-road (in our district) results, and be at the mercy of school-board politics,

2) Do Catholic school, and we agree with the religious particulars of the Catholic school near us, but it's expensive and they may be weak in STEM and global social studies,

3) Join a home-school co-op, and use the flexibility and extra time to get it all right and fill in any gaps.

I don't know what the right answer is, but 3 is looking increasingly good.

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

I was homeschooled for 1.5 years, and while there were aspects of it I really enjoyed, it is absolutely rife with religious fundamentalists. My biology book used the "how many monkeys would it take to write the Bible randomly" as an argument for intelligent design. My mother didn't vet the books well because she was getting help from a Christian friend of hers.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside in, the teachers care but the administrators do not. While I would still consider public school, I think supplementing and supervising their assignments is the minimum a parent can do. Homeschool just isn't feasible for many people, and there is a reason teachers specialize in topics past grade 5.

skyechurch2• 3 years ago

As a public school teacher in the US, I would strongly suggest you look into the real conditions at your public school and weight those observations much more strongly than viral takes in the outrage economy.

(Not to suggest that there is or isn't nonsense going in in your district - really do get involved - think of this a Kritik of the very bad incentives which exist in substack world.)

AYBABTME4• 3 years ago

How do I do this without being the parent of a kid that attends the school? I don't think they would enjoy that a random dude come in, they'd call the police I'm sure. We were in the SF East Bay (Berkeley) until recently which is basically ground zero for this stuff. Past tense because I don't want to stick around here too long and have my kids suffer this. In the above comment I was talking about my doubts, but we're actually acting on those doubts and my kids are going to study at an international school in Asia.

lupire8• 3 years ago

Critical thinking and Critical Theory are not the same thing.

Critical thinking is why USA has better scientists and inventors than China and India.

vacuity10• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that's the game plan here. The closest I can think of would be analytical reasoning and iteration. Perhaps schools are teaching those well, but I don't think they're transferable to critical thinking regardless. Critical thinking is more about a reasonable standard of rationality even if you aren't in your domain of experience.

AYBABTME4• 3 years ago

By "critical-everything" I'm talking about "critical" theories, or "Critical Theory". Aka the lenses people put on that makes them see everything as some sort of struggle due to power structures. A fun thought experiment that's worthy of exploration, but a side quest, not something that should be front and center in a child's education.

JuanPosadas• 3 years ago

Critical thinking would lead one to understanding how arrogant and historically illiterate this claim is.

The reason the US has some science/invention advantages is a lot more complicated than:

white people randomly woke up one day and decided to be like more brain-think while everybody else sat around doing nothing all day like a bunch of dum-dums.

eiiot7• 3 years ago

Debate is a tiny section of the high-school world. I'm a current Parli debater -- in class, we aren't taught anything even close to what you would see in rounds.

aabhay2• 3 years ago

Interesting to hear that the high school debate world is just like it was when I went to high school 20 years ago.

I became somewhat radical and left wing through my debate experience and then took action on it in college (participated in lots of illegal/anti-cap collective actions at Berkeley) and ultimately found that the entire revolutionary cause and “movement” are intellectually bankrupt. It all certainly sounds and feels very different when you can flit around the intellectual landscape in a debate versus having to settle on a real vindication and make your life out of it.

erulabs2• 3 years ago

Had a similar experience - I was exceedingly excited after reading the communist manifesto, some Jorge Luis Borges, and a number of other revolutionary texts as a kid. I searched high and low for people to talk seriously about this with. It wasn’t until well into my late twenties I finally realized all the pleasant, satisfying, productive conversations I’d had had been with moderates or what I may have once foolishly called “imperialists”.

I do love talking to bright young communists tho. It’s amazingly pleasing to introduce an ounce of doubt, or conversely an ounce of appreciation for the world we inhabit.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

The problem is that people get sucked into communism due to its success and the fact that Capital is crucial reading. Capital is also difficult reading that requires pre-Marx prerequisites, and The Communist Manifesto is really short. So people read The Communist Manifesto, which is really all Engels, and pretend to have read or understood Capital.

No need to get hung up on Communism. We have wonderful traditions of class politics in the US, pre- and early-Soviet Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, India. You can almost entirely avoid that century of cargo-culted Bolshevik word salad.

vbsd• 3 years ago

What texts by Jorge Luis Borges are you thinking of? Wikipedia quotes him calling himself a conservative, and none of the short stories I’ve read strike me as revolutionary. Perhaps something from his youth?

zeroCalories• 3 years ago

I had a very similar path. One thing that turned me away from radical thought was noticing that critical theory operates in the same way as a conspiracy theory. Getting really sick of it all these days.

andromeduck• 3 years ago

That's an interesting framing. Feels more god of the gaps to me.

throwawayqqq11• 3 years ago

Did i read it correctly? The main problem is the lack of good responses?

The debate landscape wouldn't change with good rebuttals.

ryuhhnn• 3 years ago

Is critical theory a rhetorical dead-end if you want to seriously debate something? Sure, but framing a debate and constricting it to a dichotomy is no less radicalising than a critical theory argument. I think people dislike critical theory so much because they know that it shifts focus to the structures everyone knows control society but nobody wants to acknowledge. Sure, it’s lazy to blindly advocate for revolution for the sake of revolution, but it’s also lazy to reject a line of philosophical inquiry just because you don’t like how it was presented. What should high school debate even be for? Should we restrict it to rhetorical sandboxes, or should we allow it to be a forum where ideas can be put forth and debated?

taeric• 3 years ago

I think the point is some view debate as a way to force folks to consider views they might not fully agree with. The search for common ground was the lesson.

As this story is presented, a lot of these feel like non-sequiturs. Not wrong, and not not worth discussing, but not in the spirit of the debate.

sixo2• 3 years ago

Mmm, it's a dead-end without a philosophical framework powerful enough to contain it.

It's like trying to decide how to build a system/business while also trying to work out what to build/what problem you're solving. At some point, to actually do anything, you have to pinch off the space of all possible problem requirements/business objective/etc.—not permanently, but long enough to start building! You certainly can't coordinate a large team to do it when the goal itself is changing. You have to draw a line around something and saying "we're doing this", and then focus on how to do it.

In ML terms: If you don't commit to a goal for a while, then every time you encounter uncertainty in whether you're accomplishing your current goal, it will "backpropagate" to increase uncertainty in the goal itself. This can easily become unmanageable. To make any progress, you need a series of forward passes (attempting to do things) and backward passes (revising your idea of what you're trying to do.) Balancing these is a skill, and is highly contingent on what you're doing, runway, etc.

Applied to debating with critical theory, this means: if you constantly cast doubt on the entire framework of modernity, you can never come up with a useful answer about any particular thing in the immediate present. Every potential harm or pain backpropagates to indict the entire system. These harms are rightly considered indictments of the system—but in the real world, unlike in a debate, you still have to act.

I haven't done debate myself, but these same problems come up in internet discourse all the time, and it seems clear that you need to some equipment to handle this tendency to make any progress. What's necessary is the ability to designate "responsibility", i.e. leadership.

pclmulqdq3• 3 years ago

I would suggest that it's a dead end without a mutually agreed upon philosophical framework to contain it. The participants in a debate are unlikely interested in agreeing to one particular framework, and this is a big part of why critical theory in other areas is such a hot-button issue: the philosophical presuppositions that critical [X] theorists want you to make are inconsistent with the worldviews of some other people (and even inconsistent with other critical theories in some instances).

ducharmdev3• 3 years ago

I wonder if the speed/frequency of discourse has soured some of the potentially good ideas that critical theory can put forth.

In college I had a deep interest in critical theory, but I recall most of my time with it spent simply thinking: reflecting on the ideas and critiquing them myself. We didn't exactly debate the ideas, either - it was more akin to collaborative analysis of their strengths and weaknesses.

As you suggest, I think allowing this ebb and flow made the experience a more fruitful one.

leetcrew2• 3 years ago

it's more that it's like showing up to a spelling bee and giving a long monologue about how the spelling of words is arbitrary and the entire competition is meaningless. you're not wrong, but you can't expect people to appreciate your derailing the event either. if you so thoroughly reject the premise of the event, why are you even participating?

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

if you so thoroughly reject the premise of the event, why are you even participating?

Any debater making these arguments on the affirmative side almost certainly includes an argument answering this question when they are doing it.

DiscourseFan2• 3 years ago

Spelling bees are a quirk of the English language (though there are other languages with more perverse orthography see Hindi).

I feel like the notion that words have a "correct" spelling, and memorizing that is turned into a competition that is often televised and broadcast and highly promoted to all middle-school students in the US, is probably political in nature. At least one should probably question why it is we even have spelling bees, the history of spelling bees, the structural questions, the constitution of the game itself as it relates to the worship of the Word (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, as they say), and the place of the Word in the organization of society. But those are only a few things you could ask.

A debate student, when asked to argue about the place of spelling bees in our society, might generate these very arguments. A young student who is winning a lot of spelling bees probably wouldn't, and they'd get laughed out of the auditorium if they couldn't answer and then started arguing that spelling bees were racist or something like that. I think your point is moot.

msla2• 3 years ago

Here's where it's a dead end:

“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist... I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments... Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”

If there's no way to defend against an argument because it's Objectively Correct in the eyes of the judges, that isn't debate, it's a lecture with extra steps. It's like being able to on stage and win by screaming "SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!" and nobody being able to counter it. If this is a competition, it should outlaw winning moves that can't be countered.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

That person can have those beliefs, but they have disqualified themselves from being a judge. By their own words, they have said that they cannot and will not judge objectively. So they should be disqualified from judging.

istjohn• 3 years ago

True enough, but I'm not terribly impressed that the author was able to find one stupid judge statement. There are probably other judges vowing to reject kritical arguments out of hand, which is just as indefensible.

vorpalhex3• 3 years ago

We should totally disregard anyone who seriously backs critical theory and treat it the same as "Because God".

A theory that can explain everything is a terrible theory and explains nothing. Responding to your critics that they don't get it because of racial ad-hominem attacks isn't a defense.

Factual statements have criteria that would disprove them. There are experiments that would support a flat earth if that were an accurate reflection of reality. There is no such criteria for critical theory. Fail to find structural forces? You've simply been conditioned to ignore them. Explain away differences using a robust model? You're simply not being an ally.

Critical theory is not science, it's sloppy religious nonsense.

Paul-Craft10• 3 years ago

You miss the point. Critical theory doesn't seek to explain anything. It simply seeks to answer the question: "What if things were different?" In doing so, one is more able to see what the established power structures are, and to challenge those selfsame power structures.

livinginfear• 3 years ago

I remember seeing this video a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 Is this actually indicative of the kind of structured debate that happens in colleges?

csours6• 3 years ago

Debate doesn't do any of the thing that I consider critical to learning about the world.

    1. Maintain a calm attitude
    2. Evaluate facts BEFORE taking sides, and evaluate if you have enough facts to make a conclusion
    3. Consider the deeply held beliefs of the primary people involved
    4. Honestly evaluate "How could I gather evidence that I'm wrong about this"
    5. Consider that the solution may lie outside the area of discussion

The human brain REALLY loves to have a satisfying answer. Debate provides that for some people, but satisfying is not the same as true or useful.

vorpalhex3• 3 years ago

Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior. It's not a universal solution - debating about string theory being true or not is sort of goofy, it's a "get more data" problem.

However lots of problems exist that have sufficient data.

Debate, pedagogically, also forces students to take data and form coherent arguments, use logic and persuasion and even learn how to have stage presence.

A tool can be imperfect and useful.

csours6• 3 years ago

Arguing is a form of truth seeking behavior.

Arguing is a form of correctness defending behavior.

I have found the most correct position, and I will now defend it. I challenge you to prove that I am not doing this.

----

I have a t-shirt from a media organization that says "I stand with the facts". I like the shirt and the saying. I think facts are very important; but people experience the world in narrative format. Debate is a way to tell a story. It's a story where you're supposed to keep more than one point of view in mind. I do think that's very useful.

However, when it comes to solving problems, I do not think it is very useful. The debater who uses half truths and shifts the subject before they can be pinned down can be very convincing to the audience, even while the judges see through the tricks.

vacuity10• 3 years ago

I think parent's point is that some people seem to think being in a debate club means they're automatically "good" at arguing even when they aren't. Of course, we would all be served by having greater development of critical thinking in schools. Just that people might be cocky.

thaumasiotes3• 3 years ago

That's not a problem with debate. It's a problem with the judges. They are apparently quite willing to be open about the fact that they won't actually do their jobs:

Below are quotes from written judge preferences from the 2023 Tournament of Champions across all four formats
Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist... I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging... I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments...

lupire8• 3 years ago

Debate has always been corrupted by the practice of last winners driving the contest to ridiculousness, such as the focus on talking quickly over quality content.

But why are the organizers choosing judges who refuse to judge?

pmarreck2• 3 years ago

And yet every single courtroom trial is essentially a debate, and is the foundation of the US justice system.

csours6• 3 years ago

Really makes you think, doesn't it.

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

With an arbiter that’ll hopefully call bullshit on empty rhetorical tricks and even do their own research occasionally, but otherwise yes.

It’s the difference between a cooperative system and an adversarial one: science would grind to a halt if cherry-picking evidence were accepted as the norm; but you could never trust the other side of a lawsuit enough to assume they’re not cherry-picking, so you have to settle for not lying, which is hopefully easier to check (thus rules on hearsay etc).

Now that I’m thinking about it, another point of view might be that scientists, in addition to having less to lose from an unfavourable result, are engaged in a recurring game and thus generally cooperate[1], whereas the parties of a legal case are in a one-shot situation and thus have little choice but to defect.

See also: conflict vs mistake[2]. Left for future work: how do we make (a) advertising, (b) politics more cooperative?

[1] https://ncase.me/trust/

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

Having been in a jury this debate format is a big problem. If one of the sides is not good at presenting their case, there is a problem. In one of my cases the prosecution had an expert witness that stated some totally wrong facts about visibility during sunset. Due to photography I know a lot about lighting conditions so if I hadn’t spoken up during deliberation the prosecution would have gotten away with a falsehood.

pclmulqdq3• 3 years ago

Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time. I would posit that it's actually a very useful tool in that context. Everyone who argues on the internet is trying to convince the other side, but that's actually the only person you aren't trying to persuade in a properly-structured debate.

There is a good reason why pretty much every court proceeding in a democratic country is structured as a debate in front of an impartial party.

c_crank7• 3 years ago

From what I've seen of high school debates, it provides very little for the observers and encourages the students to cram as many nice sounding words in a limited amount of time as possible. Maximum slogans, minimal substance.

placesalt• 3 years ago

Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time.

There are different types of debating, which may cloud the question; debating once or twice a year on a single prepared topic may be less informative for participants. Debating dozens of times a year on an active team is an entirely different experience. I would not be surprised at all if debate team participation has significant overlap with the rhetoric taught to students in ancient times.

Debating is an object lesson for the participants in how one can find (or should at least be able to find, if you're a good debater) arguments in favour of either side of any given issue.

Debating, especially impromptu debating, teaches quick thinking. It also teaches an ability to empathize with people on any side of an argument - you know, from experience after debating, that one can make good arguments in favour of an arbitrary side of a topic. You regularly work through points of view that you may not personally hold.

It's been said that math is learned at the end of a pencil - you learn it by working through it. Debating is the same - you learn empathy and understanding with points of view other than your own by working through them yourself.

Edit: all of this is from my experience in parliamentary debating eons ago. Things may have changed, if - as the article suggests - people can win without arguing the actual question they were given.

Zak• 3 years ago

This article is about competitive debate, which is no more for learning about the world than bicycle racing is for transportation. Aside from maintaining a calm attitude, those points are irrelevant to the goal of winning the competition.

vacuity10• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure parent recognizes that and is criticizing competitive debate as "debate".

graeme2• 3 years ago

The difference is you actually move from point A to point B in a bicycle race, and retain the skills of doing so in non-race conditions.

evrydayhustling2• 3 years ago

My first reaction reading this article was that this is indeed disturbing, but so was the format of debate I was exposed to in (turn of millennia) high school. The format basically embodies an idea that every opinion is equally valid, and what matters is how strong their advocates are.

Model UN, a close cousin, emphasized multipolar perspectives but in a context of research, creativity and cooperation.

I think the ethos of Debate is one of the drivers of today's polarization, long before Kritiks arrived.

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

IMHO the traditions of debate are more analogous to boxing than say, philosophy - a competitive endeavour, emphasising technique and effectiveness rather than a truth-seeking activity per se.

I think this is a legimate point of view despite the underlying hint of nihilism.

Some traditions emphasise restrictions on the kinds of tactics you're allowed to use (e.g. pure demagogy or deliberate use of convincing fallacies are frowned upon) and I can't help but think of these as like queensberry rules vs mma...

nrfulton8• 3 years ago

In retrospect, I found the actual debate part of debate to be mostly a chore. But the research and learning parts were a lot of fun. Some things I learned about in high school because of debate:

1. A lot of stuff about the actual topics that we debated. Both in substance, and also in the relevant components of federal policy tools. Eg, I still know a lot of useless facts about US agricultural policy, US foreign aid policy c. mid-2000s, statistics on realistic offshore wind production capacity c mid-2000s, etc. Contra the narrative here: the actual policy topic stuff doesn't tend to age very well...

2. How the Federal Reserve works: its history, its basic structure and mandates, the reason for its mandates, how decisions get made, how it interacts with other components of the federal government, etc. Also weekly deep dives into quantitative easing as it was being invented. Consequently, also quite a bit about the BOJ (I graduated in 2009, so my peak debate participation years were 2007-2009.)

It's very important to note here: fiscal policy was NOT the debate topic that year! The topic was alternative energy. But we could link into fiscal policy via alternative energy by arguing that green energy investments were in essence stimulative fiscal policy and would trigger inflation when combined with QE and interest rate policy. And then we could benefit from having the most up-to-date evidence about what Bernanke would do (see #6). Again, in 2008-2009. As high schoolers. Without much or any adult direction.

What other extra-curriculars let kids play these types of games?

3. Some really useful law and policy specific research skills. How to find and read proposed legislation. How the legislature actually works. How to find and read court opinions. I know this stuff sounds trivial, but I still regularly have conversations with 30-70 year olds who have never actually read a bill or SCOTUS opinions, so it's apparently not something that people learn how to do in high school, or college, or graduate school.

4. Yes, also quite a lot of critical theory. (It's part of the game and I don't get why people get so fussy about it. If the argument is bad, win. If you get an unfair judge and lose anyways, oh well. It happens and winning actually isn't the point anyways.)

5. But most importantly, lots and lots of research skills.

6. Quite a lot of natural language processing to help with 1-4, which became surprisingly relevant lately.

Policy debate has its flaws. But, at least at my high school, there was no other activity that came remotely close to providing the pedagogical opportunities available in debate. Perhaps at elite private schools or schools in the wealthiest suburbs there are good alternatives.

IME, that's still true now. This year's topic includes AI. I judged some debates this year and learned some stuff about AI by judging rounds. I'm not an expert or anything, but my PhD was at least AI-adjacent and I've been in AI labs for a good half decade now, so it was kind of surprising to learn new stuff from high school debate kids.

Anyways. I'm more convinced than ever that the kids are okay. Let them play their word games.

calf5• 3 years ago

What was it that you learned about in AI? Did they discuss stochastic gradient descent and overparameterization?

csharpminor• 3 years ago

I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this opinion, as it doesn’t match my experience as a competitive debater in college. Have you ever been on a debate team or is this from observing? I’m genuinely curious!

To refute your points a bit :) ->

1. Debate itself is highly stressful, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My time in debate made defending my honors thesis much less stressful and I’m a very calm presenter as a result.

2. This is exactly what debate research forces you to do. You may not get to choose your side, but you’ve done your best to prep in either direction. You get very good at understanding if the evidence provided has any gaps, and if it supports the impacts claimed.

3. Debaters do read judge profiles to understand the audience and determine strategy.

4. This is a major part of prep, as naturally you need to prepare both sides and understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep.

5. This occurs often, as mentioned in the article linked above. Ks and counter plans allow debaters to reframe the topic in many ways.

On your last paragraph: I experienced the opposite. Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced.

I will say that for my part, debate had a profound impact on my life. It taught me how to research, consider unintuitive perspectives, and articulate a point.

My research in debate directly led to a fellowship, honors thesis, and mentorship - all outside of debate. I leveraged my academic success into a great career and owe a lot to the skills I picked up on my college debate team.

ChainOfFools2• 3 years ago

Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced

This reminds me of an observation that I made far too late in life, though I'm not sure how I could have discovered when it would have been most useful, in high school or thereabouts. That is that although I enjoy getting into debates where I am confident I am prepared to push for my own side in the best of faith, I find that in practice what I what I always end up driving toward is to push for a draw, even when I feel my own position is the stronger.

Even when I feel like if I have "won", it's muffled under a vaguely anticlimactic suspicion that due to limited time or poorly managed tangential sidetracks that the matter is still unsettled, that I didnt do my best to exhaust all of the reasonable avenues of discourse.

starkparker2• 3 years ago

Have you ever been on a debate team

Agreeing with OP and having participated in debate and mock student legislatures, with some success, from middle school through college — your points in rebuttal illustrate OP's complaints. Your rebuttal plays the prompt before you attempt to understand the point or the person making them.

You aren't effectively rebutting anything with your points; regardless of your intent, you've created a prompt out of OP and then presented a case to win it. The pressure of debate doesn't inherently improve a point; not every disagreement can or should be decided with evidence; reading judge profiles doesn't help exercise empathy and sympathy; "understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep" misses the point of critically self-examining what that statement means in the first place; a solution lying outside of a debate is not an invitation to reframe the topic but to step out of the debate to try to come to a shared understanding on a different level.

Your approach would be, and has been, a natural approach I've turned to when it was the most prominent (or only) way I'd learned to approach a disagreement. If not OP's point, then at least for me it's proven to be a fundamentally flawed one when applied to most venues outside of the structure of competitive debate. It plays well in a lot of modern venues, especially online, but it doesn't accomplish much.

cmdli2• 3 years ago

I was in high school debate and I would agree with the poster above you. In general, debates are judged based on the stated arguments in the debates, which makes sense. However, what this often leads to is debaters simply preparing rote responses to any argument the opponent may present, and then reading off as many as possible (some even speak extremely quickly, called “speed”).

The trouble with this is that most times, a nuanced or carefully considered argument will be quickly overridden by several generic responses, and when you don’t respond to all of their responses they will argue that you dropped the point and therefore they automatically win.

Debates mostly devolve into a game of tug of war, with very little thought or quality put into the arguments. K’s are in a similar category, and are mostly successful in an attempt to catch the opponent off guard by arbitrarily changing the topic.

Most of the skills I learned in debate have been thoroughly useless when it comes to determining the truth or making decisions. It has made it easy for me to derail discussions, though.

csours6• 3 years ago

Debate has many benefits.

Participating in debate competition does all the things you say. I would say that the biggest benefit is learning how to form a narrative.

As an observer, debate has not so many benefits in the real world. On the competitive debate stage, you have to follow some rules, in the real world, you win by exploiting people.

I do not believe observing debate is effective for finding and deciding facts.

I do not believe observing debate is effective for changing minds. The imposition of 'sides' reinforces many of the biases and fallacies that you're taught not to use; people regularly fight dirty in real life.

zug_zug• 3 years ago

Right, how highschool debate should be structured is like this:

Two parties are given sets of random "belief statements" (e.g. "All zugs are wogs", "Some wogs aren't clogs"), and then both parties exchange statements over a limited amount of time, and they either both win, or both lose, depending on whether they can both find the logically inconsistent belief statement.

Because this is how we should mentally understand real-world debate.

raincole• 3 years ago

Debate is "abstract art".

Cypher• 3 years ago

It's not even critical, it's deconstructive.

jefftk• 3 years ago

Here’s a brief timeline of the development of the different high school debate formats: ... 2009: Parliamentary debate is founded

I was doing parliamentary debate in high school around 2002 in Boston; where does 2009 come from?

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

You're expecting WAAAY too much if you think this right-wing rage-bait piece is going to get their facts right.

modeless• 3 years ago

Oral debate is the lowest form of argument.

yk• 3 years ago

Just whining about the meta.

When debaters reject the topic and advocate for these critical theories, they choose not to engage in pragmatic policy discussions.

Well, they choose some strategy to generate debate entries, namely theoretical sophistication, instead of whatever pragmatic means. (Usually it just means "My position is really great and I don't want to think about alternatives," but perhaps there is a specific technical meaning here.)

Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles.

That is just saying, to compete on a high level people have to play the game well.

agentgumshoe• 3 years ago

I would struggle with the game. Not because of the topics, but because of the sesquipedalian nature of the responses (e.g. the example responses in the article).

My response would be "can you please ELI5 that so you stop wasting our time unnecessarily.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

You wouldn't struggle if you did policy debate, though, because part of it is preparing for these arguments. There are literally tons of arguments in policy debate to run against Ks which (mis)use Critical Literature terms to create an Alt that doesn't actually solve for the K.

bhouston• 3 years ago

I loved debate in university and I benefits from the skills I learnt.

That said I am not sure the handwringing in this article is justified. So what if someone uses critical theory as a response to a topic? Criticizing and understanding the world is important. I think young people who care about the world is important. And us older people will always view what the younger generation does as too wild and weird as we become more conservative with age.

Young people experimenting and trying new ways of working with the world and ideas is important to the vitality of society. Shutting them down because they are changing things will ossify us.

vacuity10• 3 years ago

I'm a young person myself and I sometimes find myself thinking like a stereotypical conservative curmudgeon. Not really in terms of typical "US conservative values" but rather "I'm stubborn about my opinions". I think some of the more recent discourse is valuable but a lot is radical to the point of absurdity. I like the phrase "have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out". I think I'm better at this balancing act than a lot of "young people".

Based the article, the usage of these kritiks seems to sometimes be quite damaging to productive debate:

For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good. Instead, debaters have to concede that capitalism is a bad system and make other leftist arguments like, “it’s capitalistic to fail to argue for the topic” and “Marxism isn’t the most effective response to capitalism; instead we need to look to other critical theories"
Kritiks are often (although not always) strategically employed by students from big, well-funded debate programs. Their opponents—who often attend schools with fewer coaches and resources—may not be familiar with the dense philosophical arguments.

Also, I disagree with the premise that "reform is hopeless and the only solution is to burn it all down", so I guess I won't quite see eye to eye with these people.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

The article is straight lying about judges, though. They're cherry-picking ones (which they know, so they specifically claim otherwise without then explaining how they're not) that they can use as left-wing bogeymen.

Based the article, the usage of these kritiks seems to sometimes be quite damaging to productive debate

There is a very valid discussion that the community itself is having about K-Aff *solvency thresholds*, but that is not what this bad-faith author is talking about.

I live in the Bay Area, and no one in even the hyper-liberal debate circuits here would blank and eye, much less automatically vote against you, if you ran Cap-good.

Most people outside of the debate community are probably unaware of the specific round that sparked off all these right-wing "debate is indoctrinating kids with leftist ideas!" articles, but this reaction is hilariously proving the point of many Critical arguments.

shanusmagnus• 3 years ago

This strikes me as a similar technique to trying to jailbreak an LLM to answer your questions without all the safety neutering -- you're trying to convince the judges to eval your new rules of debate, and then interpret your utterances in that new context.

schoen• 3 years ago

I've repeatedly wondered whether the causality might run in the other direction.

The first time I heard of people saying "you should lose this argument because you have a harmful mindset / hold harmful presuppositions / are using harmful language", they were policy debaters practicing kritiks around 2000. (I did high school and college debate, but never policy debate, always the much less formal Lincoln-Douglas style with, at least at that time, no spreading, evidence, or kritiks -- and topics that were a surprise rather than given ahead of time.)

Some of them started winning debates that way, and I keep wondering if they started to think of it as a useful or effective approach more generally.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

That's an odd angle that is worth investigating.

edit: The real question is how all of this stuff took over politics, nonprofit boards, corporate boards, etc.; basically Robert's Rules debate style deliberative environments. Changing trends in literally high-school and college debate would feed into that, because they ultimately feed people onto boards and into politics.

morelisp13• 3 years ago

But the formats using Robert's Rules or similar structures are least affected by this.

I assure you these people are way more likely to feed into, y'know, policy institutes like CATO, Hoover, or Brookings. Nonprofit boards have little use for the kind of manic nihilism policy debate breeds in its most dedicated adherents. (A lot also go into Big Law or lobbying.)

skipkey• 3 years ago

Arguing something only tangentially related to the debate topic is a decades-old strategy, at a minimum. We called them squirrel plans, or something like that.

When I was in high school in the late eighties, one semester the tournament topic was something like, “Resolved, that the USA should decrease the non-military consumption of fossil fuels”. A fairly straightforward topic.

In one tournament we ran into a team whose affirmative plan was, “ban oil-eating microbes”. Basically they ran with “evidence” from some articles written by crackpots who postulated that these microbes used to clean up oil spills could mutate into something that would essentially eat all life on the earth.

You had to be ready to handle things like this so you would have a number of generic negatives that you would try to tie in. In this case, we ran with our “humans are bad, so killing them off is a net good” negative. We called that one Malthus.

LeroyRaz• 3 years ago

To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc...

The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks).

The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)

tekla14• 3 years ago

K's are not new. People have runs K's since at least the 2000's. I myself ran a Zizek K that was quite a lot of fun to run with back then.

I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.

atypicaluser2• 3 years ago

Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.

JumpCrisscross3• 3 years ago

wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse

People are taking it more seriously. In the past, one had the capacity to debate opposition. That appears less true today. Debate experience doesn’t seem to correlate, in my experience, with ability in negotiation or public speaking anymore.

btilly2• 3 years ago

The information that K's are not new is in https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-critical-theory-is-radicali... which points to them getting started in the 1990s.

My impression is that the author thinks that K's are bad in principle. And that the level of popularity is a problem. Certainly that's how I think about it. What you call "quite a lot of fun to run with," I call, "intellectually dishonest groupthink." Ideas should be debated on the merits of the ideas, and information on the merits of the facts. Winning on the popularity of the ideology you espouse is an easy way to ignore holes in your ideology.

Lawyers have a saying. "If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the facts are on the side, pound on the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." K's are pounding on the table. And pounding on the table is sufficient reason to declare that you have lost the debate.

lost_tourist• 3 years ago

Seems like the ultimate "move the goal post" art of debate to me.

majormajor2• 3 years ago

Two things here that seem unconvincing:

It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters.

I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)

This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."

JumpCrisscross3• 3 years ago

not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice

It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.

civilized4• 3 years ago

Neither critical theory nor capitalism are revolutionary. They each have large bastions where you will be at best low status, at worst cast out, for criticizing them.

Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.

gotoeleven2• 3 years ago

Critical theorists and academics in general are smart enough to be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. For example, they are at the same time against capitalism and against starving to death in a gulag.

cmrdporcupine3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately "critical theory" (as stereotyped in public discourse, but also as practiced in American academia) is generally like Marxian theory completely stripped of the materialist method and an actual attention to economic fundamentals. It's name-checked radicalism. Any "anti-capitalism" is purely skin-deep, a kind of moral grandstanding but on the whole without any program they could give as an alternative, or even the ability to fully explicate what capitalism really is.

And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left."

Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.

If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself.

Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.

brmgb• 3 years ago

There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice

Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.

DiscourseFan2• 3 years ago

Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.

rezonant2• 3 years ago

Agreed. Another factor here is how the audience for debate is changing. The author of the article themselves is mass reviewing debate arguments on YouTube. Not so long ago this would have been far more difficult (and thus be seen by far less people). Making these debate arguments widely available to the wider Internet implicates that a simple intellectual exercise where you argue a policy position you see as problematic could help to make that policy position more likely to pass in the future if you are very effective in your arguments...

zzzeek• 3 years ago

It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine"

that is the opposite of "revolutionary"

hotdogscout• 3 years ago

Different spaces have different cultural values and taboos.

It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools.

It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US.

Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket.

Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.

Etc.

gigatree• 3 years ago

“Revolutionary” is relative to the context it’s in. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is capitalist if academia is Marxist.

Also - the world isn’t capitalist for ideological reasons. You have to work hard against nature to destroy the notion of personal property.

lambdaloop• 3 years ago

There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable

It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.

cmdli2• 3 years ago

The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.

msla2• 3 years ago

Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.

mellosouls2• 3 years ago

it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate

Sure. But not in the debate itself.

That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.

themitigating• 3 years ago

with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks)

One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.

shortrounddev27• 3 years ago

High school debate is not a good event for this kind of argumentation. It's a very technical event with stupid rules and ridiculous "speeches" which consiset of someone screaming facts at you at 300wpm in between gasps of air

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0

digitaltrees• 3 years ago

This feels like a fire fighter showing up to your burning house and saying “well I can’t save your house until we debate the merits of private property ownership”. There is a time and place for policy debates, turning every social interaction into an opportunity to thrown in a red herring is immature and ultimately ineffective. None of these debates are going to move the needle and the aggregate effect won’t move the needle either.

howinteresting• 3 years ago

This. American high school debate format makes no sense. This is just the latest contradiction to be heightened.

Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.

tekla14• 3 years ago

Just because you suck at it, doesn't means its not a good/useful event.

kaonashi• 3 years ago

It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

Ah, the status quo, truly the highest form of revolution.

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

Critical theory is not revolutionary.

True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it.

Socially, it is dominant

No, its not.

(particularly among that demographic).

There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.

It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.)

It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.

banannaise• 3 years ago

There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.

I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.

tptacek3• 3 years ago

Your premise is faulty. The aim of debate isn't to foster people who form their own opinions any more than baseball is designed to foster people who can reliably strike fast-moving objects out of the air to a stick. It's a sport, it has rules, and it rewards tactics and strategies devised within those rules. Read Patrick McKenzie about this; he's written a bunch about how competitive debate was unintelligible to outsiders as far back as the 1990s.

imtringued• 3 years ago

It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.

lupire8• 3 years ago

I'm sympathetic to the concerns, but the article rambles on in a way that doesn't make me trust the author as guide to good debating.

eiiot7• 3 years ago

The author (Maya Bodnick) was ranked #1 in the country in the 2019-2020 season.

https://www.parliamentarydebate.org/rankings-2019-20

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

She's doing a lot of talking about Policy for someone who does such a kneecapped debate format (Parli). In Parli, the topic changes every round, and they have 20 minutes to prep, so there's no real depth to their research. They're not even allowed to bring up things they researched beforehand.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

She did Parlimentary (Parli), which is an incredibly abridged format in which you only learn the topic of debate 20 minutes before the round, and it changes every round. It's in literally no way comparable to Policy, where you are debating the same thing all year, and put in literally tens or hundreds of hours of preparation.

She's talking about a format she has no clue about, because it's just a right-wing rage-bait article. There have been a bunch since NDT finals, and everyone who knows about that round knows exactly why these *particular* people are so mad...

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

What?! High-schoolers, given access to the infinite debate medium of the internet, no longer want to score brownie points from their teachers by debating narrow, safe, softball "debate topics" that are carefully-constructed to keep people from discussing interesting things like capitalism vs marxism, which might put the school in hot water with government and big industry, who are very comfortable with the status quo? What...

techno_tsar2• 3 years ago

This is what the author and some commenters are missing out on: entertainment value. If you're a young adult doing extracurricular debating, you're going to get very very bored doing things by the book and sticking to the narrow confines of 'policy making'. Running a kritik is probably really fun for those students. The author makes it explicitly clear where her biases are, and even reiterates cliched conservative fears of critical theory.

ecshafer• 3 years ago

This isn't really surprising. I thought Debate seemed really interesting, my high school didn't have debate. So I went to the debate club in college, and it was literally the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my life. Its not well reasoned and well researched arguments, its people speed talking and hyper ventilating as they cram as many points in as they can. The point system just doesn't work and debate doesn't come close to a real debate. I am not sure what the fix is, make it entirely subjective? crowd appeal? Or what, but the reality of debate clubs vs the movie version, the movie version is much better.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

The point system just doesn't work

There is no point system in Policy Debate.

ducharmdev3• 3 years ago

I know this is just an example, but is this an accurate representation of what these arguments are like?

Western societies are structured on Enlightenment-era philosophy that fundamentally does not value Black people as people, and defines them as slaves. Even though documents like the Constitution have been amended to end slavery, it created a society that is rotten to the core, and the only way to fix it is to burn down civil society.

I found this particular one strange because it sounds like essentialism, which is both a hallmark of Western philosophy and a common target of critiques by critical theorists and poststructuralists.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

There's not any one sentence that represents what Kritiks on the whole are like, because they can literally be about anything. This author is cherry-picking stuff to rile up right-wingers about schools indoctrinating kids.

In fact, this sentence wouldn't really work as the basis of a Kritik in most cases, because it's explicitly arguing that those things are true in the status quo (so nothing that the Aff plan would do specifically caused that, which means it loses on "uniqueness"; i.e. it's not the Aff's fault, it's just how the world is.)

As a K-Aff, they would probably be pushing for some kind of well-tread Alt (alternative action) like De-col. Afro-pessimism is something that all experienced policy debaters are familiar with, and familiar with answering.

ducharmdev3• 3 years ago

Thank you for the context - I thought that sounded off.

Ericson2314• 3 years ago

I dunno, debate previously promoted a sort of detached both-siderism that matched an e.g. Clintonian "winning is more important than using wins to enact good policy" politics. Now the pendulum has swung to the other side.

Whatever. All this stuff is stupid college application padding and we should not think so hard about it.

iamthepieman2• 3 years ago

In the debates I've been involved with as a parent to a high schooler, The students have always argued both sides. They'll typically spend the morning arguing on the affirmative and negative teams respectively, break for lunch and then switch. How would the teams arguing K's handle that??

ajolly6• 3 years ago

K's are more common on the negative side, however there's nothing stopping you from trying to redefine terms on the affirmative. Of course the counter is to point out topicality but as the article is saying it's really going to start boiling down to who your judges are.

noduerme9• 3 years ago

I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith. I have a soft spot for this. My grandfather, before he fled Belarus, was trained at a yeshiva and on his way to becoming a rabbi. His explanation of the training was ... Jedi-like, to my young mind. Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. Any shortcuts to rhetorical passion might be allowed, but learning to parry them and see through them was what was truly valued... well and beyond the ability to convince others (and certainly beyond obedience or conformity). Not surprising that my family in the US became lawyers.

This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening. That being said, failing to take the unlikeable part of a debate is read as cheating - if not to the judges, who may share your bias, then to the audience who you've alienated and failed to convince. And so it can and should fail in the long run, as an impurity in the art.

shagie• 3 years ago

This is not to say that there's anything wrong - morally or rhetorically - with breaking the game if you don't like the choices. There's no unfair play when the point is to win a debate. Debates are not won by changing your opponent's mind - I mean, who cares? They're won by convincing whoever else is listening.

This is a current topic of debate in debate...

https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable-2205

Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate.
This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.

worrycue5• 3 years ago

Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind.

I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.

noduerme9• 3 years ago

No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that.

Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side.

Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.

noteboom• 3 years ago

Welcome to Judaism.

stale2002• 3 years ago

The point of the argue both sides exercise is that it does help get to the ultimate truth.

When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true!

That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.

honzabe4• 3 years ago

Not necessarily. We were doing this in sociology seminars at college and it was not about manipulating the audience at all. It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. It is basically a practice of the skill of critical thinking. When you try to argue your opponent's side and to your surprise, you come up with arguments that seem good to yourself, that is getting closer to the truth, isn't it?

nine_k• 3 years ago

The point is to learn to see through manipulation, among other things.

Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate is to detect and outline that difference, and show it to your audience, if any.

The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse.

Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.

freeopinion2• 3 years ago

It is common in high school debate tournaments to argue the same resolution repeatedly at every tournament through the school year. Each match you are assigned one side or the other and you should be ready to go 100% on that side. You aren't trying to persuade anybody. You are trying to make as many arguments as you can, be ready and refute any arguments from the other side, identify logical fallacies, etc.

The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through.

These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.

vintermann• 3 years ago

Yes - and it's rich to me that veterans of sophistry as a game are complaining about new tactics. Granted, I don't think highly of most of these kritik-hijackings either, but they only exposed the shallowness (or "nihilism" in the author's words) at the core.

atoav3• 3 years ago

Socrates was already complaining about the sophists and their ability to argue for and against everything (destroying every truth on the way).

Don't get me wrong, I love arguing and rhetorics, but there are people who abandoned all sense of truth and rationality in debate. Rhetorics are a weapon, and like every weapon it should be wielded by people who know that with great power comes great responsibility. Sure, one can argue about objective truth and whether it actually exists, but many who wield rhetorics don't give a damn about any truth, be it objective or subjective — they care about winning. And they don't care about the price everybody has to pay for that win.

Despite that I still think putting yourself in a different position to defend is a good lesson, but the goal of rhetorical training shouldn't be to form ruthless mercenaries, but thinkers who can wield the word and still admit they are wrong in an actual, real world debate, when they are shown to be so.

If you are one of those people (like me) who likes debate for debates sake, you have to be especially careful. Like people who like to use guns we have to be especially aware when we use it and for what reason.

Most people who use their rhetoric have never been given the moral compass to wield it.

caned• 3 years ago

Sadly, it seems the kind of caution you advocate is conspicuously absent from cable "news" punditry. Even worse, there are millions of viewers who feel that they are being informed by this kind of caustic debate.

noduerme9• 3 years ago

Hmm.

I don't think the rhetorical appeals to anger, hate and fear that are the hallmarks of genocidal leaders are learned in a debate class. They're low-level schoolyard bully stuff. They're exactly the sort of thing that's tempered by the conscience you develop if you are exposed to new ideas or have to argue something that's strange to you. Hateful rhetoric drives, and is driven by emotion. So is loving rhetoric. If you find you have to defend some group of people you previously had a loathing for, there's a fair chance you'll start to see things from their point of view, if only because it's human nature to become emotionally invested in what you're arguing about. (Check out any stupid bar fight where both sides know they're wrong, but are completely emotionally invested).

Yes, speech is a tool and a weapon. We should call out arguments made in bad faith; but we need more people who can identify them to do so.

P_I_Staker• 3 years ago

I agree, we should reserect Socrates from the grave from wince he came, and may him Emporiumor of the universe. For good.

vxNsr• 3 years ago

Putting aside the whole question of debate this is a such a fascinating misunderstanding of what Yeshiva is. It’s so close and yet somehow entirely wrong. I don’t know if I could explain what happens in Yeshiva in a way that would any sense to this crowd, but I can affirm it is mind bending, and I have never felt more exhausted than when I was in Yeshiva. No amount of work, physical or mental since then has come close.

kalkin9• 3 years ago

I think this an attempt to champion the idea of rhetoric as a virtue, in the face of arguments made in bad faith.

I'm legitimately not sure whether by "this is an attempt" you're referring to critiques in debate or the article.

In practice, for better or worse very few of the people who use critiques in debate are true believers. Even if they're leftists taking a generally leftist approach, a Marxist is likely to take up an Afro-pessimist position or vice versa for tactical reasons. Exactly the sort of "have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor" you commend is involved - only rather than just two sides, the sides include "X would have good consequences", "X would have bad consequences", "you're doing good/harm by talking about X", "X is on/off topic for this year's resolution", etc.

As for the article - it may be attempting to defend the virtue of being able to effectively defend opposing points of view, but it's doing so in a confused way at best. Just to give a couple examples:

Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles

It is indeed often more effective in debate to respond to a critique by denying or reversing the (often tenuous) link to what you actually proposed than to try to refute an ideology wholesale, but that burden is entirely consistent with the mentality that learning to "defend the opposite side" is valuable. And even so the premise here is wrong - at least when I was doing this <redacted> years ago, it was by no means taboo to simply counter-critique at the ideological level instead.

This drives out students who don’t want to learn about critical theory

It's true that competing at the national level in high school or college debate demands quite a lot in terms of research and preparation. It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.

High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds

This is silly hyperbole that suggests (a) Slow Boring could use better editing and (b) the author would have benefited from actually trying to engage with substance of some critiques, such that they might be able to distinguish Karl Marx or the afropessimists from Nick Land or the e/accs...

noduerme9• 3 years ago

> I'm legitimately not sure whether

I was referring to the article.

> It's not, however, clear to me why it would be better to drive out students who refuse to advocate views with which they disagree (the mostly-straw critique debater) but are willing to actually prepare to face them, than to drive out students who are unwilling even to prepare to refute a certain category of argument.

Well, both students are unwilling to engage with the material they need to deal with, as unpleasant as it is. I personally don't think one is worse than the other on its face. But if the ground rules of the debate have shifted in a way that forces you to frame everything in a way that implicates the speaker as agreeing with the position they're arguing unless they use a particular category of argument to undermine that position while they're arguing it, then it's not a matter of learning to refute that category of argument but rather being forced to embrace it. Rejecting that artificial requirement to salt your own speech seems rather honorable in the "purest" sense of debate; whereas refusing to play by the rules and do the work of arguing something you don't agree with shows an unwillingness to engage with the subject matter - which is not the topic of debate, but the ability to debate.

HarHarVeryFunny• 3 years ago

Reminds me of a friend who was invited to appear on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show as a subject matter expert, and told how O'Reilly asked him which side of the "debate" he wanted to take. Kinda funny given how many O'Reilly fans thought he believed in what he was saying!

skinpop• 3 years ago

Can't have the kids learning critical thinking.

plaidfuji• 3 years ago

For example, if the topic was “The U.S. should increase the federal minimum wage,” the affirmation side might provide some arguments supporting this policy. But then the negation side, instead of arguing that the government shouldn’t raise the minimum wage, might reject spending any time on the original resolution and counter-propose a Marxist kritik

Honestly, if this is what debate is all about - “here is a political policy proposal, argue either for or against it” - this sounds like a waste of time. Good for the negation side. What is the minimum wage trying to solve?

To get meta on this article, maybe debate itself should be reimagined. Pose a problem, like “too many jobs don’t provide a living wage for their locale”. Then ask for policy proposals. Find two teams with strongly differing approaches, things that they have researched and believe in, and then have them debate.

starkparker2• 3 years ago

From a student perspective, this was the Model UN/mock legislative assembly model, and I loved it waaaaaaaay more than I ever loved the debate model that was more popular and pushed harder the last 3-4 decades.

Spivak• 3 years ago

Seconded, and this is why it has kept increasing. These kinds of arguments are fun to make.

nrfulton8• 3 years ago

This piece is not about the vast majority of high school debate and is probably going to create some real headaches for people just trying to run an after-school activity.

All of the statistics in this piece are about the "Tournament of Champions". As its name implies, the Tournament of Champions is an invite-only tournament. In order to get an invitation, students need to do very well at several elite tournaments that make up a "national circuit". As the name of the circuit implies, doing well at these tournaments typically requires traveling long distances throughout the year or living in places with a large concentration of "national circuit" tournaments (ie, coasts and huge cities).

Almost all high school debaters compete close to home in regional or local circuits. "Kritiks" are far less common on these circuits, usually ineffective, and almost always used because some kid is excited about them for one reason or another.

In 15 years of judging I've judged maybe a half dozen rounds in local tournaments where an actual kritik was read, despite being one of the few judges who would be at all receptive (I don't have strong feelings either way; I just want the kids to be able to exercise their brains and explore their interests).

These facts are going to have to be explained to some irate school board member who read this piece. The explanation will come from some stressed and over-worked coach/volunteer in order to make sure their rural midwestern debate program doesn't get cut or micro-managed out of existence.

Anyways, I'll let the Harvard kids carry on with their elite infighting about how there's too much critical theory at the invite-only championship of a largely inaccessible national circuit.

shortrounddev27• 3 years ago

This piece is not about the vast majority of high school debate and is probably going to create some real headaches for people just trying to run an after-school activity.

My experience is that these kind of politics are universal in policy debate, not so much LD or PF

nrfulton8• 3 years ago

I think your experience is atypical. In most circuits, the typical judge is a parent with no particular knowledge about debate and certainly not a tabroom.com paradigm.

eiiot7• 3 years ago

In the age of Covid, I think TOC is actually relatively accessible for most of the country (or anyone with internet and a laptop, at least). A large large majority of the points that allowed my partner and I to qualify for TOC this year were from online tournaments that most people could enter (in fact, tournaments that have extremely high entry fees, like Stanford, do not give NPDL points).

I do think that much of kritical debate is concentrated on the West Coast, though.

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

Humans and their mind viruses.

shortrounddev27• 3 years ago

It has been like this for at least a decade; Policy debaters were all about far left kritikal debates when I was in high school. LD and PF were normal but policy was super left wing.

Anyways, high school debate is a stupid activity and I don't recommend anyone do it. It teaches no useful hard or soft skills, only encourages talking extremely quickly to win on rule technicalities rather than the weight of your arguments and speaking ability

breakyerself• 3 years ago

Sounds good to me. It's impossible to make a good argument for keeping the minimum wage low so they instead up the ante.

rezonant2• 3 years ago

Do you think that a factor in why Ks are becoming more prevalent and desirable amongst participants (judges and contestants) might be because of the increased audience that their debate positions have, since they are all put up on YouTube?

I would imagine the incentive changes quite a lot when your effective arguments for (what you perceive to be) an odious policy position could help to make that policy a reality.

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

Securitization is a political decision that discursively constructs certain phenomena as threats to justify their management and extermination. The practice of security erases alternate perspectives through the dominance of Western rationalism, permitting unchecked violence against alterity. We should use this round to create space for an epistemological multiplicity that breaks down dominant discourses of North Korea.

Does this actually have a meaning? It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry.

nrfulton8• 3 years ago

It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry.

It is mind numbing. IMO it's also a fair bit of sophistry, but it's at least sophistry that involves some amount of concept compression. Ie, you can't quite unpack those concepts into a single paragraph of similar size.

Also: please remember, in these conversations, that we are talking about things written by teenagers.

Does this actually have a meaning?

Yes.

Here's a much better but slightly lossy way of saying this:

If you talk about North Korea only as a threat to be contained, then you can fall into the trap of forgetting that it's a country of humans. That could be a bad trap to fall into for a number of reasons. One reason: if you forget about your adversary's humanity then it becomes easier to commit atrocities. It's easier to "contain the communist threat" than to "fire bomb a village". Instead of rushing ahead with policy decisions that manage North Korea as an abstract security threat, we should first try to understand the various perspectives of people within North Korea.

Hopefully easier to understand.

The reason it's not pure sophistry is that there are some details I left out -- the second sentence of the original, in particular, has a fair bit of additional stuff packed into it. And the last sentence of my version is a bit over-simplified. Fully expanding everything might take a page or so; idk, I'm too exhausted to try :)

But that's the basic idea. And, more to the point, that's the level of detail at which this idea that would actually matter in 99+% of debates. So that's probably how it should be stated.

You can't learn without making mistakes, and these types of things are great teaching opportunities.

On that note: this type of writing also happens in Mathematics and especially in documentation of complicated software. We have a sequence of long sentences relating fairly abstract concepts. If the reader already understands each of those concepts and how they typically interact, then the reader can piece together the meaning of the sentences quite quickly. But for a reader without that context the paragraph is utterly inscrutable, appears to be nonsense, and takes hours to unpack.

The key observation here is about technical writing in general. Describe the basic idea without too much jargon. It's okay to remove some details and over-simplify! Then, if the reader needs more details, give the more precise statement. The expert can safely skim to the precise statement. Everyone wins. What a useful teaching tool!

Aside: I've always found public reaction to these think pieces off-putting. I think of debaters as kids learning how to engage with ideas. The incredibly public and harsh critiques of their failures seems... mean spirited. People will actually project all the ills of American politics onto something written by a kid who is making his first attempt at packing a lot of concepts into a small space. I tend to be a bit more sympathetic, since I see highly practiced professionals fail at this task all the time.

phoenixreader• 3 years ago

fun fact: an average "policy debate" speaker speaks 350 words per minute and is completely unintelligible to an average person. They speak faster than auctioneers. A "policy debate" is not your average debate and is more like its own sport. The goal is to cram so many arguments into the limited time that your opponents cannot address them all.

Watch these and you definitely cannot understand them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrTYHn1Am0c&list=PLHaG-zIzA-...

Even the Onion could not have written a better skit.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

It’s an activity that selects for kids who often go on to have important careers in politics.

I actually like the "Kritik meta" because it just reveals what debate culture is, a posh hobby. I think the real frustration about this just stems from the fact that the kritiks have sort of hacked the game and revealed the silliness and stilted character of debate (unintentionally or not) by taking it to the next level.

High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds.

Nolen Gertz in his book on Nihilism points out that the reason people dislike nihilists is because nihilists have the tendency to reveal the nihilism of others when they are being confronted. The author seems to dislike the Kritiks simply for revealing what debate was already about, "winning rounds" by playing the game the best way possible, an activity for affluent kids who are supposed to go on and make a career out of rhetoric.

chdean• 3 years ago

The author's take is a little confusing in an activity where the validity of certain types of argumentation, including kritiks, is routinely debated and playing to judge's preferences is a (often underutilized) part of the game. I recognize it's probably changed a bit in the last decade or so since I participated, but at that time it was about as common to have judges refuse to consider kritiks as embrace them. Arguments that they undermined debate (using many of the same points as this article) often won.

Part of the activity is arguing over the rules, which makes it much more interesting, I think, than one as narrowly defined as the author seems to be advocating.

ajolly6• 3 years ago

Wild to read about this shift, and I'm glad this wasn't the meta when I was competing. (Won bronze at nationals for Parliamentary debate)

One of the aspects I loved most about parli was specifically that you weren't going in there with prepared arguments, father would have to think through the implications of a topic on the fly.

galkk2• 3 years ago

What a shit show it must be.

Immediately throw away any proposed topic and start arguing about your favorite theme. If this isn't kind of cheating, I don't know what it should be.

They need some cough.. adult in the room.. strong person to show the door at any attempt to steer away from the declared debate topic.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

Looks like you fell for the rage-bait!

K's are not a free-pass to "start arguing about your favorite theme".

If you run a K that doesn't link, you'll immediately lose. If you run a K that links only loosely, you'll lose. If you run a K whose Alt doesn't solve for the K, you'll lose.

Ks are literally dependent on being related to the thing which they are run against. When it's a K-Aff, they must link to the Topic itself.

galkk2• 3 years ago

This is not how it is presented in the article, with examples like

Additionally, sometimes the affirmation side kicks off the debate by proposing a kritik — they don’t even bother advocating for the original resolution!

And examples of the judges openly demonstrating their preference to kritiks and their arguments and way to present them.

somsak2• 3 years ago

Always so funny to see these videos where the debaters have such hugely audible inhales and an obscene cadence of argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXpCLs7I4Q

dmvdoug• 3 years ago

What happens in debate matters for American politics

Honestly, it really, really, really does not, and the earnest dead-seriousness of the hand-wringing over it made me look away out of embarrassment. Lord. Hopefully the writer gets involved in sone other activities that will induce a bit of perspective and humility.

peanutcrisis• 3 years ago

Related reporting:

[0] https://www.thefp.com/p/judges-ruin-high-school-debate-tourn...

[1] https://www.thefp.com/p/personal-tweets-lose-high-school-deb...

dreamcompiler• 3 years ago

Seems to me that the rules of debate should be that any time a debater brings up one of these 'kritik' arguments they should be instantly disqualified for being non-germane to the topic.

Further, I thought debate judges were supposed to leave their personal biases at the door and judge the quality of the arguments. Just as judges in a courtroom are supposed to do. (But yeah, I get that real judges seem to often let personal bias influence their decisions, and justice suffers as a result.)

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

I'm glad this politics student managed to escape the trap of STEM thinking that her upbringing was forcing on her and learn via debate club that the true way to power was via politics and blaming everything on "critical theory". She'll go far.

morelisp13• 3 years ago

In addition the many weak points of the article's main topic that have already been addressed, this sentence:

Growing up in Silicon Valley—a place full of scorn for politics—and attending a STEM-focused high school, debate was how I learned about public policy and economics.

Is absolutely insane to write for someone with her educational background. This is a school for kids of VCs during the height of SV openly playing political kingmakers. (Isn't Sheryl Sandberg her aunt?)

iandanforth2• 3 years ago

High school debate has always been broken. It has only very rarely been about the contest of ideas, and always been about how to win. For example there is a concept called 'spreading' in policy debate. This is where you speak as fast as humanly possible to lay out as many points as possible and if the opposing team fails to address or mention any of them you claim victory. For some reason this strategy, which makes the debaters all but unintelligible is allowed and leads to victory.

In Lincoln Douglas debate it was common to construct what is called a 'collapsing tautology'. Your argument is constructed to look like a series of logical steps with which there can be argument, but in fact all it is is a tautology that ultimately can't be refuted. It's a trap and if the opponent engages at all they lose.

More generally HS debate is politics and persuasion. Know the judges, build charisma, learn what works regardless of the content.

The introduction of a new noxious debating strategy might be noteworthy, but it is no more ruining debate than all the others, and the students don't actually care about the strategy or its tenants any more than they care about the validity of Rawlsian justice.

jeffrallen2• 3 years ago

Despite everything odious about Malcolm Gladwell, he recently did something nice: got himself his ass handed to him in a debate and then went to find out why he lost so badly. Made for a pretty fun podcast, if you are the sort of person who takes joy in Malcolm Gladwell getting knocked down a notch or two. :)

lukifer• 3 years ago

Are you referring to the Munk debate with Taibbi or something else?

kalkin9• 3 years ago

It's funny, I have mixed feelings about my policy debate experience but the sort of tendentious criticism in the article makes me want to defend it.

(I want to call the article ill-informed but I suspect the author is actually at least generally aware of all the dynamics you describe and just relying on their audience not to be.)

whimsicalism16• 3 years ago

As a former hs debater, the author is certainly not uninformed but I agree that they are writing to grnerate outrage rather than adequate reflection

timmytokyo• 3 years ago

What you describe as "spreading" sounds a lot like the infamous "Gish Gallop", a hugely effective debate technique named after young-earth creationist Duane Gish, who would spew out dozens of weakly supported arguments, secure in the knowledge that each argument would require at least twice the amount of time to refute [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

iandanforth2• 3 years ago

Yep, same thing.

towelrod• 3 years ago

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...

The most interesting part of this article to me was the end, where the author argues about how important High School Debate is and how Kritiks are the ruin of this important tradition. I was a HS debator in the early 90s, before K's were popular, and from my experience debate was already a fun but ultimately harmful activity. The whole idea was to spew a constant stream of arguments that didn't have any merit as quickly as possible, hoping the opposing team would forget to respond to just one out of 100, and then you win.

HS Debate already trained a generation of win-at-all-costs, who cares if you are right folks like Karl Rove. I don't see how the current generation of kritik based debate could possibly be any worse

tptacek3• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of Patrick McKenzie's experience in college debate, where he took to every compatible proposition the argument "abolish the koseki" (the Japanese family register), a problematic Japanese cultural tradition that he could count on his opposition being unfamiliar with, until they ultimately had to change the debate rules to prevent that strategy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10445061

morelisp13• 3 years ago

This story doesn't really hold water for me; you do this once, we all laugh about it, but by the next week every team has a neg case file for this and a dozen variations of it.

imbnwa2• 3 years ago

Then there's people acting like 'politics' was never a meta-argument to begin with, it's just as much apart of the breakage. I remember having an assistant coach who'd debated in the 80s being befuddled that we were arguing what Republicans thought of the plan.

ignoramceisblis• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8

user6723• 3 years ago

Look into R/K selection theory talked about on https://www.anonymous conservative.com/blog and you'll see why Frankfurt caca is popular today.

nilslindemann• 3 years ago

A very interesting text, and the pop-up hovering it, hiding the text, shows that indeed there is a fundamental flaw in our system.

AndyMcConachie• 3 years ago

I have next to no sympathy for this article. These kids sound awesome. Actually thinking about the world and engaging with it as opposed to playing a debate game by the rules.

These kids sound awesome. If debate club was this interesting when I was in high school I might have gone. Instead it was exactly how this guy described it. Brainless recitation of prepared arguments trapped inside of a box.

ang_cire24• 3 years ago

It's not even against the rules, kritiks are literally a standard part of debate. Right-wingers just don't like it because it allows people to attack the choices of arguments and sources.

So with kritiks, if someone walks in and runs an "immigrants are eating babies in secret demonic rituals" argument and cites Alex Jones, you can say, "That's xenophobic, and Alex Jones is xenophobic, here are my sources that support those assertions, and you shouldn't vote for them, judge, if they're perpetuating that, especially in a space where there are debaters who are themselves- or who have family who are- immigrants."

Without Kritiks, you have to either find a source that *specifically* says "Immigrants are not eating babies in demonic rituals" (and unfortunately, there are far more nutjobs out there putting out garbage than there are people spending time to individually refute each and every stupid statement), or you have to try to attack the negative impacts they're claiming - OR - you have to run an ethical violation argument, which is accusing the other team itself of being intentionally malicious, which is a much higher threshold than saying, "they should have known better", which is not making assertions about their intentions.

Kritiks are a normal part of all debate, both competitive and informal.

jrflowers• 3 years ago

I love this article about bad faith arguments in formalized debate that’s actually a very vague culture war complaint

Der_Einzige• 3 years ago

I really missed out on this thread despite being likely one of the most important folks to post on it (I turned my time in Policy Debate into an NLP career - see DebateSum: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Hellisotherpeople/DebateSum and CX_DB8: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8)

For those who are interested in the intersection of AI and Debate Evidence, there's a lot more work being done right now. We have a follow-up dataset to DebateSum on its way to a paper at some conference called OpenCaseList: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist which is basically DebateSum but 40x better in every way. This is also likely the largest and best quality argument mining dataset ever gathered.

Fun anecdote, when I tried to introduce automatic extractive summarization tools to the debate community, I had parent/judge/teacher groups who were FLIPPING out about this. They were not happy at the idea of automatic debating or computer assisted debating systems.

Nevermark3• 3 years ago

Imagine if debate involved a sequence of: (1) Show you understand your opponents arguments well enough to strengthen them first, before (2) your dismantling of their arguments are considered to have clear weight.

I.e. include an element of arguing both sides as part of every debate.

Winning would be based more on demonstrating mastering knowledge of all the best arguments involved, more than simply an ability to demolish the other's arguments based on weaknesses in how they were made.

I think this would be harder to study for. I.e. it would require more thinking on one's feet, which would result in less talking point type arguments, and a greater ability to carefully process the thoughts of others.

Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate

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