We’ll be doing MJP at both Bigle X and the Gem of Harlem. I find it hard to believe that not long ago I was thoroughly in the anti-MJP camp. So what happened?
I think the process was evolutionary. My initial feeling was that debaters choosing their judges would lead to a balkanization of the activity, where debaters engaging in questionable practices would select judges who approved of those practices, thus effectively making those questionable practices the winning practices. Since MJP was mostly at the $ircuit level, including TOC, this would mean that those questionable practices would not only win their rounds, but would be seen as paradigmatic for other debaters wishing to win rounds at national events. MJP was the perceived mechanism for ruining LD.
There is a modicum of truth in this, but underlying the existence of hip college judges who like arcane practices and who cast a strong influence on the activity is the fact that after a couple of years there’s a whole new tribe of hip college judges who like different arcane practices, and what we thought would be the establishment of certain bad practices is replaced by a never-ending flow of different bad practices because, well, hip is one of those things that changes with the wind. Today’s hip is tomorrow’s You’ve Got to be Kidding. The kids in high school today have annual events where they dress in funny clothes that were worn by their predecessors four years ago who are now in college. Welcome to Nostalgia Night. Nothing gets dull so quickly as the cutting edge…
In other words, the influence of college judges is something of a constant, albeit a constant that is always changing. The idea that MJP would intensify the effect of dubious college judges/coaches in the activity proved not to be true because those effects were constantly in motion, and one of the strongest arguments against MJP then fell.
Meanwhile, in our tab rooms we were certainly ranking the judges based on our own knowledge of them, and assigning the experienced judges to the bubble rounds and the less experienced judges to the less meaningful rounds (competitively). An A judge goes to the down-2 while any judge can adjudicate a 4-0 or an 0-4, insofar as no decision will affect the chances of any debater in those rounds advancing. So at least to some extent, we were enforcing our own concept of “good” judge onto things, although honestly, we didn’t split the hairs too finely. We didn’t say, so-and-so was good because we knew how so-and-so judged, we simply went by, this person has been around a while, or this person writes detailed ballots with clear RFDs, or this person was an active debater not long ago, and that was enough. We were hardly “placing” judges. But, still, we were obviously basing our assignments on their having some sense of knowledge of the activity versus their just falling off the cabbage truck.
The idea of community rankings, of which I was a strong proponent, where the people attending the tournament decided the rankings rather than the tab room, replaced the above, but, to be honest, usually with the same results. Very seldom have community rankings been much different from our own perceptions, but there was now the buy-in from the community that they were involved in the decision-making process. And so they were.
At this point Bietz commented that, while in a known community, community rankings made sense, if you were an outsider to that community, you were a bit at a loss. This does, of course, include that paradigms are available to all, but most paradigms are pretty useless, especially compared to firsthand experience of the judge in question. My counter was that, if you were an outsider to the $ircuit, you were in the same situation with MJP. But the difference is, at least in MJP you can find some kindred spirits, and everybody, however new to the $ircuit, probably knows some other people they can ask for ranking help, whereas this might not be as true with a regional community.
On top of this, since MJP forces you to rank a large percentage of judges highly (the default is A+), you are, in effect, opening yourself to a fairly wide range of the judge pool. MJP, rather than limiting who judges you to a select few, probably throws you to the wolves of about half the pool, which is more than we’d usually rate as As in the tabroom if we were on our own. Compared to the strikes-and-dice approach, where any judge can judge you at any time except for a handful you know hate your very existence, MJP is, in fact, pretty close to that same picture. Plus, the people who pay the money to attend the tournament get to control, to some extent, the judging their money is buying, which is a crass but not inappropriate way of looking at it. The worst-case scenario, getting a judge you think sucks big time, means that your opponent is also getting a judge they think sucks big time: that is, you are both, with foresight, facing the same crappy judge. (Hint: slow down and toss all that theory malarkey.)
So, I seem to have drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid on this. Given that no system is perfect for the activity, and no system is perfectly fair, at least this one is equally unfair. And the activity itself will not, I think, suffer as a result.
Welcome to 2010. The next thing you know, I’ll be writing T-shells and selling them on eBay.
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