Case disclosure Part 5

(While questions remain unanswered from the last post, I want to move on while the subject is still hot.)

When I look at the responses to disclosure, I get an overall sense that there are two different issues at play. First, there is disclosure along the lines of, we publish cases in advance for everyone to see, which is argued pro and con. Second, there is discussion of situations where, for lack of a better word, folks are gaming the system. In other words, a classic case of uses and abuses. If abuses are both inevitable and seriously damaging, they are a reason to negate. We’ll get to them later. For the moment, let’s just imagine that, as I say, everyone publishes their cases in advance of the tournament for everyone to see, and discuss that world pre-tournament.

Here’s what Bietz says in his Rostrum article: “Big teams already get many, many more flows than the smaller teams just because they have more debaters, more judges, and more coaches. Open disclosure gives everyone access to the same information. Additionally, it helps the ‘little guy’ even more because for many of these debaters, the option of going to a lot of tournaments isn’t available. Open case disclosure gives them the ability to see what other teams are running prior to showing up to the tournament. Thus, there is an added benefit of equalizing not only information at a tournament, but also equalizing (to some degree) the playing field for people who do not have the resources to travel as much.” Cruz puts it like this: “Requiring that all competitors participate in a case list helps eliminate the unequal power concentrated with programs that have plenty of resources, employ multiple coaches, or that are members of an ‘inner circle’ and that thus are able to more easily acquire information about other arguments being made by other programs.”

In other words, the status quo is that big teams have a lot of information, first, because of their size, and second, because of their regular attendance. They have a lot of people and go a lot of places and manage to acquire a proportional amount of information. Disclosure would open the door to that information to other people as well, no matter how many rounds they see and no matter how many tournaments they attend, or, if one looks at it from a different angle, who they know. All of this is absolutely true, but it does miss one key point that we need to examine: there are ten of them and one of me. Ten people can do an awful lot more than one person when it comes to prepping, blocking, etc. As Sophie says, “Big schools have the resources to prep out every possible position they will hit, but small schools don't. For these reasons, I think it's absolutely detrimental to a debater from a small school.”

Sophie also questions the premise that the big guys already have your case anyhow. “Even if large schools near me have my cases, large schools across the country most likely do not. And hearing through a chain of friends across the country isn't going to produce an effective prep out that is going to screw me over, so I really just don't think it's true that ‘disclosure happens anyway’…Even if big schools near me, like Bronx, will have my cases, Greenhill and Harvard Westlake and Whitman and Strake don't have them yet.”

This looks like an important point to me. Let’s say that we know that Sophie is a good debater. We know she’s going to the Bronx. With disclosure, we find out what she is running and set our defenses. Without disclosure, we generally prep on the topic and hope to be prepared for whatever Sophie is running. On the other side of it, Sophie must singlehandedly (almost) prep out on the other 50 people she’s worried about. This does not seem to benefit Sophie. If the benefit is that they were going to crush her with sheer numbers anyhow, but now she’ll have a marginal opportunity to load her slingshot if she has time to prep out on all 50, that doesn’t work. On the other hand, one can say that, at the event, the schematic is posted and Sophie can look it up on the Wiki and plan accordingly, and that is true. But by the same token, so can her opponent, who, if one of the 50, has had ample opportunity not only to get an idea of her cases but prepped out on the evidence. So as I see it, the advantage still goes to the bigger schools, and the providing of cases in advance makes that a greater advantage. The mathematical advantage of size looks suspiciously improved when multiplied by time (i.e., disclosure in advance). As Kanisha says, “Even though I do have a coach who is awesome and dedicated, we just do not have the time nor do we have the resources to use a case list effectively.”

I don’t think we can really dispute the advantage of bigness, period, and that disclosure does not seem to mitigate that advantage because while, even if viewed positively, showing that it does provide access to information to small schools, it also provides the same information to big schools that have deeper resources to take advantage of it. Big is big. Maybe, just maybe, disclosure makes bigness an even stronger advantage. I have to agree that big schools arguing that this is not the case is not terribly convincing...

But…

The worry in the material above is based on the idea that teams will spend incredible amounts of time prepping out on the material in the database. But is this realistic? I mean, they could prep out on it, but will they? I would suggest that the answer is, not much.

Here’s the deal. Make the assumption that everyone puts in the case they’re going to run at the Bronx. (We’ll get back to variations on that later.) Now, I’m going to that tournament in LD. So are 160 or so of my nearest and dearest friends. No one is going to prep out on all 160 of them. As I said above, maybe I’m concerned with 50 of them. So let’s look at their cases. Wait a minute! Look here! Both Joe Blow and Lefty Larue are arguing the Colbert evidence! Hey, so is McGee (“Bub”) MacPherson. So are half the other people I’m interested in.

This is the reality. In the great wide world of this (or any) particular tournament, the vast majority of the people are going to be living in roughly the same case world. The big schools knew this already, from their experience down in Texas; the little school in upstate Vermont only going to Bronx now knows it too. Level. And yes, the big school has the resources to do more, but they’ve always had the resources to do more, and they always will. If the big school seriously wants to prep out on every case in the Wiki, maybe they can. But they’re ultimately prepping out on the same thing over and over, so they’re really not. That advantage is more perceived than real.

In other words, the benefit of bigness does not go away. It never will. But in the realistic world of going to a tournament and wanting to be well prepared, the small entry now gets more than he or she had before. It is an improvement. What I’m saying is that the content of the wiki probably adds incrementally to the large program, but exponentially to the small program. The information in there is going to be, in a word, repetitious, at least for the most part. It will be information that might be new and quite useful, in the aggregate, to the smaller program, whereas it will be old news to the bigger program. Yes, the bigger program has a great advantage if it takes up analysis in the particular, but, at least in preparation for a tournament, they’re really not going to do that. As for going after a particular person, sure, if you’re at a certain level, you might expect to meet a certain handful of people at a tournament. The little program now gets preparation it may not have had before. The big program also gets preparation, but it may have had it already. Yes, the big program can do more with it. But they were always going to do more anyhow. Their benefit is not as increased as is the smaller school’s benefit.

So, there does seem to be an advantage here to the small program that doesn’t exist without the wiki. There also seem to be advantages of scale that really don’t change much. Keep in mind that all of the above is prior to a tournament, and based on cases being disclosed that are run at the tournament. We do need to look at other things as well.