I’ve always assumed that the word eponym was named after a guy named Epo.
Also, at the DJ, which is jumping lately, there are three people we refer to as the two guys who look alike who don’t look alike, and the other guy who looks just like them.
Okay, I got that out of my system.
Let’s look at PJ’s comment on MJP (which, of course, is merely an M and a twist away from him, which he hasn’t seemed to notice):
I was writing about how one or two schools are totally off from whatever everyone else ranks. From my tab perspective, this is an annoyance, but my tab perspective is narrowly dedicated to making the tournament run smoothly. It is pragmatic and selfish, not philosophical.
I'm uncertain if it would be 'better' or 'worse', but if it is only 1 or 2 schools maybe they simply suffer from innumeracy.
No, I think it's very deliberate. It's the same schools all the time, and it definitely reflects an opinion of who should judge. Some schools, of course, don't rank at all, which reflects an opinion of ranking (except for the couple of cases where it reflects ineptness at getting the rankings in on time) or a young team without interest in the vicissitudes of judge paradigms.
I am mildly curious if I did rank everyone backwards, at least for the students I ranked for. If I did it wasn't for the purposes of mucking up the system. And if I didn't it wasn't for the purposes of NOT mucking up the system. I've been open about my MJP views. I am not morally opposed to it, so we do engage in it more as form of defense than anything else. I don't think that other people's ones are automatically our 1s.
PJ's team, as I recollect, was fairly mainstream. (Which I hope doesn't cause him to pull his hair out. Oh. Wait a minute on that one...)
I am slightly surprised the 1-1 or 3-3 issue does happen more often. A round judged between schools of differing philosophies SHOULD have differences in rankings, and that it does not occur actually troubles me. It means debate IS becoming more specialized. As the near-great Robert Heinlein observed, 'specialization is for insects.'
Well, yes, and that's the interesting nub. Why has the universe at large gone so deliberately in lockstep in this? I know we all don't agree on whether the sun rises in the east, so why do we agree on MJP so much?
I think that the folks who are opposed to it—and therefore dismiss it—because it does...something...to the judge pool might want to think again about this. I don't believe that the mechanism is hiding some intelligent design, that it must lead to some teleological predictable outcome (i.e., recent college grad judges who did well on the $ircuit). If everyone ranks according to their wants and needs, it would be quite different. The thing is, the ones doing the most ranking do want that special cadre of $ircuit judges. This pushes them up to 1 for a lot of people. People who don't rank get the other person's 1. End of lesson.
I will publicly say that I am prone to ranking recent graduates whom I don't personally know or have judged low, but that is because I have no particular reason to think that they are good judges until I see their ballots. I don't think that winning some TOC16 tournament means that one is a qualified judge, I actually tend to suspect that people who had to scrap just to get to the bid rounds -and did so often- might very well be better. will also low rank judges who have pedagogical practices I strongly disagree with (it is hard to take judges who like theory but won't vote on RVIs seriously, its kind of like taking Republicans seriously regarding criticisms about the national debt). I also tend to believe that debaters who did not flow much as competitors rarely magically become good flowers when judging. Debaters who debated for programs which don't do much of their own case writing I suspect are not that great at critical thinking, until they show otherwise.
And 'Oral critique' will usually be more than enough to get a '6' from me, or a '5' at best no matter how many tournaments one broke at has a HS debater. Though I may be open to visiting them in their capacity as a dental hygienist.
Which means, of course, that PJ is carefully choosing his judges based on his analysis of them. His analysis is conservative and, dare I say, smart. It is the kind of analysis that people who don't rank also ought to be doing.
In MJP at a big tournament, you'll get equals. My bet is that a large part of the field feels like PJ, but their scorn for this newfangled MJP thing, and therefore their refusal to use it, puts them in a position of being the most harmed by it. MJP, as I say, has no internal engine making it that way. The process of making MJP a machine to honor people who shouldn't be honored is propelled by people who refuse to honor someone else.
Let me put it another way. MJP is here to stay, at least for a while. Don't be put off by it. Use it. Use it your way. That's what it's all about.
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