Case disclosure Part 7

A couple of takes from the Big Bronx invitation:

1. The community norm that has developed (and seems to be working) in Team Debate (Policy Debate) is that no one should have to disclose a position that they haven’t run yet. We feel this norm is applicable to Lincoln-Douglas Debate as well. We are not asking you to disclose information BEFORE you run it. Specifically, if this is your first event of the year you do not have to disclose your positions until you run them. For example, if you run a case round one, only then does it become public information.

And…

The community norm in policy is to put things online within a round or so of it being run. If you run a new position in elimination rounds, you should post it immediately after the decision. Bronx Science will provide a wireless connection and for those with laptops, and so submission directly to the wiki should be easy.

Okay, if I were running a rebuttal here, I would start thinking about the purposes of disclosure, as they’ve been presented by those in favor of the process. They’re educational, they’re leveling, they’re good for everyone. As for me, I’ve always looked askance at people who run wacky cases, who get wins out of shock and awe rather than debating. I’ve seen it many times, when someone runs a totally ridiculous, unexpected and, for that matter, unpredictable position, and wins because their opponent was at a loss for a meaningful response. We can indict the opponent for not finding the magic bullet in the vast amount of available prep time (approximately two minutes), but I tend to indict the person who ran the case entirely because the person thought they would win by the element of surprise combined with the case’s extremism/nuttiness. That’s not debate; that’s chicanery. If one is able to secure a position that is unanswerable because the position is so crazy that no one could have conceivably prepared for it, it isn’t much of a win. Members of the VCA have heard me rail about this before.

One can run normal positions, however, and still like the idea of “secrecy” for a perfectly good reason, as Paras explains. “I strongly feel that it hurts me more than it helps because I don't have the ‘secrecy’ of my positions anymore… I think part of the beauty of debate is having to respond to a case you don’t know much about beforehand. Yah, it might make rounds less substantive and not as great as rounds in a world with disclosure, but I believe that’s because debaters are still learning how to think. What’s the educational benefit of making responses that your coaches helped think out for you? School isn’t conducive to learning how to think on your feet, and in that aspect debate ought to be unique. That’s why, quite frankly, a lot of debaters suck at responding to cases they don’t have blocks to. I know that I’ve grown tremendously in this regard, but am still not a great critical thinker. But I know that because I had to think critically about rounds and feel like crap for not being able to come up with good answers, I got better at thinking. In those few minutes I grew a lot as a thinker. That wouldn’t have happened if Cameron had written out responses for me, which he could have easily done.”

This is a good argument in favor of not disclosing. I think that for the argument to prevail, a lot of people have to be responding by rote, and I don’t know if that’s true or not. I would ask this of the policy folk. I mean, has policy become less educational because it no longer requires as much thinking on one’s feet? I really don’t know. This points to the core of what debate ought to be about as an educational activity. I don’t know how we can answer it.

But there’s no question that disclosure does not point in that direction. Disclosure has certain goals, as I said. So why in the name of all that is holy are the rules of engagement set up so that, at the very least, one can go to a tournament and, to begin with, not disclose? That is, all the discussion of this, both here and when we chatted about it on TVFT, assumed that a case did not have to be disclosed until it was made public by being run in a round.

What?

I mean, simply enough, if disclosure is so all-fired good, why don’t I have to do it? For all the debaters going to Greenhill, under these rules of engagement, there can be an absolutely empty wiki. Not one single person has to disclose a case. Not one single person will have run a case, and even if I’m missing something and they did run a case somewhere, they can post that case and not run it. All the rules of engagement are about publicizing cases that you have run. None of them are about publicizing cases that you are going to run.

If you ask me, that is a fatal flaw. It makes little sense to me, and it opens the door to shenanigans not unlike the chicanery of the person running surprise nonsense. If disclosure is good because it allows everyone to prep, because it creates a body of information about resolutions, because it levels the playing field at tournaments, at the point where disclosure happens only AFTER THE FACT, it is useless. And worse, it allows for abuses.

Some comments pulled from earlier: “Apparently some debaters post fake cases on the wiki to distract from the ones they will be running.” “Big schools have the resources to write so many positions that they break new cases every round. What is the likelihood that a lone wolf debater can write enough cases to combat the case disclosure?” “They disclosed EVERYTHING-- including cases run in practice rounds at camp.” Cruz says: “Also, at most tournaments, in my experience, most large teams do NOT run lots and lots of cases. Instead, they spend time putting a lot of work and research into a few (even two) solid positions.” Perhaps. But at the point where any one person does this, big school or small school notwithstanding, it is a gaming of the system that the system is in no way capable of stopping.

But I think it’s deeper than that. Either disclosure is good all the time, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then why is it good some of the time? Why is it okay not to disclose if you haven’t run a case yet, but then you have to disclose it after you’ve run it? The idea that it is now “public” isn’t a warrant, it’s just an observation, and not a particularly persuasive one, since it’s only public to the people who heard it, which may just be your judge and your opponent. I can see the link here to size—if your opponent or judge represents a big school, it is indeed “public,” at least to them—but again, that’s pretty weak.

And even if people don’t seriously game the system, I think we can reasonably expect that a case might be new at a new tournament, so the posted case won’t be run. And plenty of people break a new case in elims for whatever reasons, and they are perfectly able to do this, according to the disclosure rules of engagement. The debaters who are against disclosure, at the very least, can easily elude a lot of oversight by doing those two things. Not to mention that the whole idea of a case becoming public and people having to post ASAP sounds pretty dicey to me. Wireless goes down, and disclosure is over. If disclosure is good, no one has yet made any argument that it’s only good at big tournaments at schools that all have wireless internet. All the arguments so far have indicated nothing that wouldn’t make disclosure good at small, local tournaments. There’s plenty of schools I go to I can’t even get my phone to work, much less connect to the internet.

You see where I’m going with this. First, we have set up a system that is inherently contradictive. Second, that system allows a small amount of gaming that is not at all unethical (running a new case this tournament from last tournament, that is), meaning that in the presets and your first elim round, you get to break a new case. Now maybe you can distil it down to the whole prep-out issue, that when this happens, no one has prepped out, but where is all of Bietz’s evidentiary ethical considerations then? Or my fears about silly surprise cases? Third, unless we have reliable wireless and force kids to access it immediately after a round, the system fails. Fourth, even if none of this is right and all of it can be disputed successfully, we can only have disclosure at tournaments that have all the electronic tools available to everyone, and yet there’s no reason why all the harms of non-disclosure are not applicable to small tournaments (and, perhaps, might be more applicable).

Telling us that policy has solved this by accepting it does not answer it. Frankly, it would seem to have the same harms for them, although perhaps mitigated by the nature of the activity (an issue that still needs to be discussed).

I’m not being obstreperous here, I’m being curious. Maybe I’m missing something really obvious. And I can see that the harms I’m talking about are removed from the harms of non-disclosure vis-à-vis big and small schools. But there’s an intrinsic logical flaw in the whole thing that eludes me, and in the worst case scenario, has students prepping for cases that are not run. That is, this is the posted case, but oh, look, I’ve got a new case, so sorry, Charlie. This strikes me as an absolutely bad thing. I’d like to know why it isn’t.

Of course, if people were to agree with me, simply mandating that people post the cases they are going to run would solve it.