Now that was a long weekend.
It started Thursday with the first day of the Round Robin. For once, I wasn’t tabbing, although I had helped set up the pairings, something at which I am now rather proficient. Newark had a ton o’ judges, so that part of it went quite well. I showed Carlos how to look for judges who had judged on one side to judge folks on the other side, and he was golden. Then, I judged a few rounds.
It’s funny, judging after you haven’t judged for a while. Needless to say, people have their ideas of what I’ll like or not like, and they do slow down, I think (inability to handle speed is a factor of practice, not preference), but all of that adaptation stuff is a good thing in a public speaking activity. A good debater has to pick up all ballots, not just the ones he or she would prefer to pick up. Anyhow, you fall back into the flow of judging pretty quick (and the flow of flowing, for that matter). One of the big reasons I don’t like to judge nowadays is, admittedly, that it poops me out. Back-to-back double flights requires a level of attention that I find elusive during those mid-afternoons when normally I’d be at the DJ doing my best to keep my eyes open. You can’t close your eyes when you’re judging. You need to be alert to everything, or at least as alert as possible. And as I say, that much alertness poops me out, and I’m lucky that I’m pretty good at tabbing so people will let me do that instead. To tell you the truth, from what I hear I’m not the only person in the universe whose alertness is curtailed after judging a hundred and twenty rounds in the last 72 hours. Human beings get tired. Debaters who put a lot of pressure on judges late in the day should think twice about that.
Needless to say, or maybe needed to say to some people, LD hasn’t changed all that much lately, at least from what I saw. But there are some things that I don’t like that have gotten worse. First, there’s the non-existent negative. A value, three independent reasons for some standard that epitomizes the concept of cockamamie, followed by a once sentence blip, does not constitute an advocacy. I’ve been decrying this one way or the other for eons now. Negatives with a strong offense have the opportunity to debate on their own ground. Negatives with virtually no in-case offense have no choice but to debate on the affirmative ground. That negatives win from this strategic weak start demonstrates to me—if everything we’ve said on TVFT about neg bias is true—that there’s a lot of judges out there who need to move away from the flow pad and think for a minute. If it turns out that it’s fashionable to demand nothing of a negative but a demurral from the affirmative, then no wonder negs win a lot. If you don’t have a position, and all you’re held to is how well you attacked the other guy’s position, then we are absolutely hogtying the poor affs. Neg presumption in LD went out with white disco suits, but a lot of judges apparently haven’t gotten the memo yet.
I also wonder why people want the most complex standard possible rather than the simplest standard possible. If the standard is simple to understand, it is simple to use as a weighing mechanism. If it’s complex, then weighing becomes more complex, if it’s possible at all. You can run very complex cases that are, nonetheless, simple for the judge to understand. KISS as one of the top tools of good case-writing seems to me to still hold true. The best debaters run very complex stuff that nevertheless is easy to understand. I have nothing against complexity. But I shudder at obfuscatory complexity: it’s like novices always coming up with the most bizarre, complex ways of looking at simple things rather than trying to find the bright line that informs complex things and drawing from that simple conclusions. It’s a novice way of thinking.
I did have some discussion with assorted Scientologists over the weekend about dumb-ass stuff. Most judges, when they hear dumb-ass stuff, which is rather often, are just wishing the other debater would say, “You know, that is one powerful bunch of dumb-ass stuff.” But debaters hardly ever do call out dumb-ass stuff, even when the dumb-assedness is so manifest it stands in the room with a torch and a top hat. Calling out dumb-assedness would probably win people a lot of rounds, if they could just summon up the nerve to try it.
1 comment:
Jim,
I think the debaters are doing smarter things in these instances than you're giving them credit for.
First, if a negative is well prepared for the affirmative case, given the time skew, why would he offer and defend his own framework (easily resulting in a draw theoretically, or a close/coinflip round in practice) rather than go defeat the affirmative on his own ground. Turns are prized for a reason: they're much harder to answer, and they tend to function as offense and defense at the same time, thus gutting the affirmative's ability to weigh in the round. I think the neg win ratio in LD is much less a product of some kind of neg presumption by judges and much more the rarity of narrow, strategic affirmatives which are more prevalent in policy. Affirmatives are not doing nearly enough work to defend a specific, narrow framework in the AC, but are instead reading longer factual tracts that negatives almost never bother to attack.
Second, standards that sound simple are frequently more vague, and thus actually harder to use for weighing. Complicated-sounding standards are often more clear about their philosophical assumptions and their conditions for achievement, making them stronger links between the contentions and ultimate value. In more "traditional" rounds, debaters tend to equivocate terribly on the meaning of their standards, pivoting them between deontological and consequentialist interpretations and borrowing semantics freely from the other side. When they get away with it, that seems clearly bad for debate. Certainly it makes debate a lot more like sophistry and less like philosophy.
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