This whole MJP issue intrigues me. Read the comments on the last post.
Anonymous, fresh from occupying…something, makes an interesting point. A lot of judges don’t publish paradigms, so when it comes time to rank them, it’s a crapshoot. Absolutely. Then again, if you’ve ever read a paradigm, you will be up to your eyeballs in crap, and will want to shoot yourself. Who invented the paradigm, anyhow?
Here’s the thing about paradigms. You take a bunch of young folks who think they are the masters of the universe and ask them to talk about this mastery, and throw into it that they’re all language addicts, and they will go on and on forever. There are paradigms out there that make War and Peace look like a one-liner. The idea that all this content is somehow predictive of a judge’s actions in a round is to believe that that a meteorologist can predict the weather without actually knowing the atmospheric conditions of the spot where he’s predicting. Until you’ve heard what someone says in a round, you can’t know what your reaction is unless you’re an automaton who only reacts to the exact words exactly the same way every time. You’re not. Get over it. Even the same case content, in the forge of an actual round, will vary depending on responses, emphases, presentation, etc.
By the same token, there are judges without paradigms. It’s almost impossible for a tournament to enforce that a paradigm be published for each judge simply because who has the time to track that down? And even if you do, is it that important? Given the nature of most paradigms, which make what a bull does in the woods look like the God’s truth, probably not.
Still, we want to rank, right? I’m thinking that all a ranker really wants to know, and needs to know, is a couple of things. How thin are you going to slice this sucker? I mean, primarily all you want to know is if your judge is a circuit type or an old fart. Anything beyond that is fantasy, because circuit types will judge on non-circuit material occasionally, and an old fart who hates theory will pick up based on theory. Complex paradigms are not predictive, but the general nature of the judge is: in general, old farts want old fartness and circuiteers want circuitness. That’s all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
I suggest that instead of putting in the categories we have now for judges, which usually ask for a measure of experience, we put in a simple three categories:
Circuit judge
Traditional judge
Newcomer
Do you really need to know anything else? And they are completely value-neutral; we don't make any of them sound better or worse than any other. Of course, we insist on all judges being put into one of these categories in the pre-registration. They may, of course, have those complex paradigms as well, and you could consult them to your heart’s desire, but if you only knew this much about the judges you don’t know personally, you would know an awful lot. Add to this that you will also know what school they are from, and you probably have some idea what the general approach of that school is. Say a school is notorious for bringing an army of experienced parent judges. They would all be categorized as traditional judges from that particular school. That is more than enough information to rank them.
I’m going to do this next time I have a chance. I think it makes a lot of sense.
We’ll talk about the other issues from our Occupy Debate Street guy next time. They’re good issues to discuss, as is Pajamas’s.
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