Monday, August 09, 2010

Case disclosure Part 8

Let me first get one thing straight, just in my own head (and not relevant to the post that follows). In policy, I’m assuming people only disclose their affs, being that the neg strategy is directly dependent on the aff, whereas in LD, people disclose affs and negs. If I’m wrong on this, I hope someone will correct me.

Meanwhile…

In my last full post, I brought up some questions that I think need to be answered.* Since Matt thought I was thinking backwards, let’s start backwards and look at his response: “The reason one should have to disclose their case after it is run is because breaking a case puts it in the public domain. A wiki just makes it accessible to all even if not every team has the resources to be present when that case is broken. The whole point of disclosure is make what is already technically ‘public information’ more accessible to those for whom information is harder to come by. Also, as far as I am concerned, until a case is broken, it is just not finished. Both in my coaching and debate experiences I have been in situations where cases were edited up until the start of a round. Having to disclose positions before they are even run makes little sense to me in light of this.”

First of all, I’m aware that people are going by the premise that once a case is run it is in the public domain, and the wiki theoretically makes the public truly public. That doesn’t answer the point I was making, that for all practical purposes, a debater can run cases at a tournament that are never in the wiki, which exists for the direct purpose of people seeing what that person is running. Here’s the logic: I go to the tournament with a new case. It isn’t on the wiki. I run it. In round 2 I debate the other side, and run that. I now get a short break and I post the first case, but the schematics are up and no one has a chance to do anything with what I posted, and then prior to round 4 I do likewise with my other case, with the same results, and so far I have gone through 4 rounds and no one has had my cases disclosed to them. If I’m really a conniver I could pull out new cases for rounds 5 and 6, but that’s extreme. However, I will pull out new cases for elims, and pull the same business again, keeping my cases from public display till the last minute. This is not some bizarre scenario, because already people bring a couple of cases to a tournament, or else rewrite their cases between rounds to update them as a result of experience in prior rounds or new evidence gained. My point here is that the actual disclosure of what one is running can be quite minimal even without a lot of finagling, and virtually zero if one is a real finagler (and believe me, there are plenty of finaglers out there, big teams and small).

Let me repeat this: “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 [in advance]. 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.”

To clarify, it is not the distinction between public and private that doesn’t make sense to me, it is the rules of engagement distinguishing between the two, given how much lip service is given to the value of the latter in all the pro-disclosure discussion.

This was my main question: “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?” What was the warrant that it was good to run a case no one knew about? I understand how the warrant “expires” by the case entering the p.d., but it would seem that everything about the rules of disclosure engagement value privacy until a case is run. So we have one set of rules for privacy, and another set of rules for the public domain, and we can easily twist those rules if we are so inclined to maintain quite a bit of secrecy. Matt’s argument that he may not be finished with his cases until he goes into a round may be true, but I’m guessing that he went to the Harvard tournament with, oh, a general idea of what he’d be running… And even if not, one can set rules that the cases have to be posted by Thursday for Friday’s tournament, and that one has to run disclosed cases. God knows tournament directors set rules for a million other things.

So that’s my question. At the point where we’re only mandating disclosure after the fact, there’s an inherent contradiction, that a case is valuable as a private entity at some points, but that as soon as possible, we want to discount that value. Which is it?

And what also remains unanswered from that post are the questions about whether this is only a big tournament practice, being that live wifi is far from the rule at most high schools. No one has addressed whether disclosure is so good that it ought to be ubiquitous (as compared to our analysis of judge selection, which we did see different systems working best in different contexts).

I think Max’s responses to the original post are in line with my thinking. I do want to emphasize that my goal here is to get the answers, not to indict the system in any way. It is what it is, and I don’t know whether it should or shouldn’t be changed, having never gone through it. And I remain a believer that the experiment at Bronx is a good way to study it. But I will suggest that, if what I’m saying here is the way it is, people who are adamantly against disclosure should start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel because, no matter how you slice it, it ain’t much disclosure at all…

* Tom Deal looks at some of what I wrote in my post, and Matt Dunay's reply in the comments to http://coachean.blogspot.com/2010/08/list-legality-and-couple-of-other.html He makes some good and different points than I do.

7 comments:

Tom Deal said...

http://www.azuen.net/2010/08/09/caselists-and-privacy/

Chris Palmer's most recent post is unbelievably smart. It may be one of the strongest reasons I've heard to reject the caselist. I know I said earlier that I'm not afraid of my past in debate coming to light, and that there are certainly things that would be labeled incriminating/shocking/unacceptable by certain parties if they found them in there. It's true, I'm not. But my kids are more important than me. I want them to feel free to learn and academically experiment. Even if that means saying and doing things that are considered insane in the mainstream. I'm not willing to take the chance with them. I'm not willing to create information on what they've done that potentially places them at risk for excommunication/exile/persecution in the context of work, school, church, or state. I just won't do it.

Until someone answers this concern, I am against the caselist. Period. He's right, he seems right, and while I definitely disagree with him on other issues, I just think he's nailed it on this one.

-Rebar Niemi

Unknown said...

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Ryan Ricard said...

Rules of Engagement: You should tell your opponents upfront what they could reasonably expect to discover by asking the right people.

If your opponents do the same, then neither of you have to waste the time of scouting (and it is a waste, even aside from all the equity concerns).

All of the examples of "abuses" you offer seem to be examples of the principle "One can succeed in debate by doing lots of original research."

Tom Deal said...

yeah on our local circuit policy teams don't have a caselist, but they do have an informal process of AC disclosing plan text and advantages while the NC discloses the possible offs they'd run. i think this type of situational disclosure maybe 10 min in advance of rounds engages the key issue to some (actual specific prep that is helpful on certain scary args), garners the majority benefits of "do i have answers/no answers to this thing" and doesn't really have the same effects as a caselist negatively.

Anonymous said...

I do want to apologize for being somewhat quiet recently; Sandy Berkowitz and I are coordinating both a middle school debate workshop and a coaches institute this week at VBI Session II and we have our hands pretty full. (I don't want to do an injustice to this conversation by posting half-complete thoughts and whatnot.) I do believe some other voices will be posting shortly, and will be back to post more often as the camp winds down. I am all about having a discussion on these issues and am really glad that this discussion is happening in such a constructive manner. Forgive my brief silence!

Aaron Timmons said...

Jim Menick makes an excellent point regarding “why not post it all if disclosure is good even if the argument hasn’t been run”. This is an interesting query and makes sense. Actually, I have little problem with this idea if the premise was to be followed by all. My concern is that it wouldn’t. For close to a decade we have discussed an “open source” paradigm in policy debate. That movement has gained no traction. The true reason why the current model exists is based on the idea that there is a balance between education and competition. Without question the core of what we do should be grounded in education. That said, debate at invitational events is about wins and losses (accomplished using a backdrop of those wins being achieved in an ethical manner). Teams (large or small) if they have an argument or case based on the work they do or the strategic nature of a case/argument/responses to an opponent’s case, should be able to be used one time to reward work and creativity. Unless the resources we use are static (everyone reads the same evidence set) I do think the “post it all” model would privilege well resourced teams. If we have concerns about “lone wolfs” ability to compete letting them roll in to an event with a creative idea is one way to equalize the playing field in that debate. This does NOT mean that just because a debater is from a under resourced team they should be able to avoid peer review in a competitive zero sum activity. To use a sports analogy (albeit not a perfect one), if the University of Northern Iowa or Butler shows up at the “big dance/NCAA tournament” an d are playing a Kansas or a Duke, the players and coaches should NOT be able to say, “you can’t scout our games because we are smaller schools and you have more coaches, resources and McDonald’s All Americans than we do”. I finish with a quick trivia question that is obvious. Who won those games???

Hard work should be rewarded. If we aren’t going to have a static evidence set. the current model seems to best balance education and competition.

Aaron Timmons said...

Many have argued that octo - final bid tournament are unique in the way they “spur others to action”/model what those events do. While it pains people to hear it, I will appeal to what has happened in policy debate unique to case lists in the last 10 years or so to show that this phenomena has not been the case. For the last 8 to 10 years we have had a policy case list at the Greenhill tournament. St. Marks has had a similar list for about the same period of time. During this time frame, Berkeley, Emory, The Glenbrooks, Harvard, MBA nor last year Blake (which was a first time octos bid event) were all octos qualifiers in policy debate. None required submission to a case list as an expectation of entry. My point is that historically, conjecture about other events “getting on the bus” because another event does it seems to be empirically denied. Providing why the Lincoln Douglas octos bid events would do so is less than clear to me. It might be argued that certain personalities make a change more likely. Again I say, “Empirically denied”. Melissa Wade, Dallas Perkins and Sherry Hall, Tara Tate, Ted Belch and Billy Tate all have influence on the policy community. They didn’t require a case list (primarily because most contribute that attend these events anyway). It seems like those making the modeling arguments need some proof that Apple Valley, VBT and the other octos events will model Greenhill and Bronx.

My thought is that they will not for myriad reasons. Those arguing the precedent of modeling should (perhaps ought is more appropriate) have a higher “burden of proof” to prove their case given the history in that “other activity”.