Tuesday, October 27, 2009

There's a difference between flying a plane and having wings, as Miyazaki would point out

Max Xatx asks the musical question: “What do you do as a judge if a debater says something totally false.” By this he meant not that the debater was lying about something, but that what was being presented as fact was, in reality, so much onion sauce. He thought that this might not be a bad subject for the blog.

Now, I’m open to people suggesting subjects for CL. Members of the VCA are well aware that I ran out of original ideas somewhere back in 2004, so it’s nice to move away from the tried and true (and tried and tried and true again, truly) into something different. Then again, if MX asks for a royalty, the hell with him. Let him talk to O’C, who’s still getting that $5K per WTF post. Nobody pays me $5K for CL postings. I mean, I’m lucky to get maybe two grand out of each one of them. If I had Cruz’s money, on the other hand…

Anyhow, it’s a classic conundrum, and one that we actually teach our new parent judges. The deal is this: one debater says that pigs fly. You, as the judge, know that pigs are land-bound, but that is not the issue here. It is up for the opponent to respond that pigs don’t fly. So there are a number of possibilities. First, the opponent responds that pigs don’t fly. At this point, pigs don’t fly. Depending on that opponent’s argument, we may have grounded our pigs forever. Then again, if the first debater comes back with further evidence of pig aviators (e.g., some stills from Porco Rosso, q.v.), then we’re in the middle of things again.

The rule of thumb is, if an argument is made, it is up to the opponent to refute it. If the opponent doesn’t refute it, the argument stands. If the unrefuted argument is fallacious, it still stands. That’s just the nature of debate. It’s about the two people in the front of the room, not about the judge. If the judge were evaluating the truth of each person’s case, they wouldn’t have to debate it. They could just hand in their cases and sit down and wait to hear who had the best material.

Kaz was there when MX and I were talking, and as she pointed out, it was unfair to the flying pig debater for the judge to intervene with his or her own information on porcine aviation. “Why should the opponent who doesn’t respond that pigs can’t fly, and apparently doesn’t know any better, get the benefit of the judge’s pointing it out?” Good point. When a judge intervenes, it benefits one side and harms the other, and by what mechanism can a judge know when it is okay to intervene and when it is not okay to intervene? Debate rounds provide no such mechanism, which is why it’s not right to do it. *[See exception at the bottom.]

Judges need to keep in mind that common knowledge may not be as common as you think, especially among high school students being judged by college students or adults, who by definition have acquired more experience and, by extension, more knowledge than younger folks. I always get my knickers in a twist, for instance, when students confuse the Declaration and the Constitution, which is like confusing hamburgers and broccoli, if you ask me, but I don’t determine winners and losers on the basis of their confusion (although I do write enlightening little essays on the ballot on the history of the US, part one, the early years). It is how the round plays out between the two debaters that matters, not what the judge knows and thinks.

This leads obviously into a darker area, where the judge has opinions on the resolution, or opinions how the debate ought to progress, or any sort of opinions about what is happening that is not simply the opinion that the debaters will debate and the judge will pick up the debater who, theoretically, wins the argument that has ensued for the last 45 minutes. This is what we mean when we want a judge to be tabula rasa. We want a judge to enter the room with the least amount of preconceived notions, and to listen to the round that actually occurs, and to adjudicate it to the best of his or her abilities. This does not mean testing what is heard against the judge’s own knowledge or opinions. It means testing what is heard from one side against what is said by the other side. Even the rules of LD allow for ad hoc voting issues to be set in CX, meaning that whatever agreement the debaters set for determining the win, that is how the win will be determined. It doesn’t matter if the judge thinks that’s good or bad, that is still what the judge has to go by. Judges who go into the round thinking that, I don’t know, all debates are searches for the truth or some nonsense like that, and that the debater who comes closes to the truth wins is just engaging in self-delusion. The debaters determine what the debate is about. Deal with it.

There’s another aspect to this, which is simply the dropped argument per se, good or bad. Some arguments are more important than others, certainly, and all arguments need to be weighed, but realistically, if I’m training a new judge, I’m advising them to look at drops, and no doubt they are evaluating the rounds as much as anything on an arithmetic analysis of droppage. They will develop past this as they learn to flow and hear more debates, but this is a good rule of thumb for any debater standing in front of a neophyte judge: That judge is, by virtue of experience (or lack thereof) more inclined to take a quantitative view of the proceedings than a qualitative one. So, adjust accordingly. Some parent judges may never see past the drops, in other words. Adjust your arguing accordingly.

All of this points to why I think that the worse judges are, in descending order, high school upperclassmen, first-year-outs, and everyone else, with the first two groups virtually neck-and-neck. Debaters and recent debaters tend to put too much of themselves into a round, comparing what they hear to what they would do themselves. College judges eventually get past it, especially if they do a serious amount of judging, or so little judging that they really don’t have a horse in the race. Upperclassmen judging underclassmen, on the other hand, can be awfully wedded to their own ideas, however idiotic. And, after all, they may be only a week older than the person they’re judging, if that. Debaters, in those cases, need to adjust accordingly, but since they’re underclassmen and by definition new to the game, it’s not that easy.

So, that sums up about 27 different things, but I think MX’s answer is in there somewhere.

[* The exception: there are some arguments that are patently offensive and need to be regarded as such. I would ask that judges keep their sensitivity set on bull moose as a general rule, but statements that are aggressively racist, sexist, anti-religious group, etc., do need to be addressed in the adjudication by the judge. You shouldn’t pick up the guy proposing killing all the Jews or blacks or women or whatever, in other words. There needs to be a stern penalty for content that goes beyond the social norms of acceptable high school discourse. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it is a different business altogether from what I am discussing here.]

No comments: