To answer richmindseed’s last comment up front, Rawls, I would suggest, would not prefer that everyone break (I was actually reading about this last night, surprisingly enough). He would instead tell those who break that they were lucky to be born into the world in such a way as to be better debaters than the rest of the field and that it is absolutely no accomplishment on their part: they have not merited breaking, they were just lucky enough to accidentally have the skills/talent/training/genes to break. And I don’t think that one can take any particular element in a vacuum as the determinant. Debate tournaments exist for many reasons, not just so that one person can win. If that were the case, I wouldn’t take debaters along who I know can’t win. The underlying goals of debate are arguable, but they are certainly not limited to, and could conceivably not even include, winning tournaments. (I’m happy to discuss this in more depth and, in fact, often do.) In any case, going forward, the upshot of the math discussion here is to seriously think about each tournament and its numbers and goals and to act accordingly. We are only at the starting point of this journey toward a workable elim/prelim paradigm. But at least we’re thinking about it and talking about it, not just here but in TVFT and, I understand, at various tournaments over which I have no control. Our work here is not done, but it’s in progress.
What I really want to talk about is judges and judging, and some common misperceptions of the job of a tabroom. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time today, so I’ll just have to make that a preview of coming attractions. Meanwhile, just go about your business in an orderly fashion and do not exit your vehicle until it has come to a complete stop. Have a magical day! (Feh…)
3 comments:
For the record, my name is Ankur - not sure this particularly matters, but I see no reason for making you continue to address me by a silly handle. I also appreciate that you find a lot of this conversation to be irrelevant to the point you want to make about the role of the tab room, judging, etc. My comments below are thus relevant insofar as they speak to what the guiding principles of tournament administration ought to be, but I appreciate that I am speaking to specifics that are slightly irrelevant to your larger project.
Your point is well taken about Rawls - my application of his theory is slightly more localized than yours, but does not deny the basic idea of your argument, which is (if I understand you correctly) that breaking is a consequence of several factors beyond the debaters' control - the debate lottery, in other words, is much like the natural one. I just wonder what the upshot of your argument is - it seems like the perspective you describe is one that agrees with the notion that "debate performance is arbitrary anyhow, so who cares about making tournaments fair?" At that point, fairness concerns are completely irrelevant to tournament proceedings, which seems more than a little silly to me. Am I misunderstanding you?
I also don't believe that you understand my argument regarding the whole determinant thing. My point is simply that tournaments ought to be arranged in a fashion that ensures that the single biggest reason you succeed is how well you performed at this tournament. While we may choose to attend tournaments for many reasons (and certainly, my focus at the vast majority of tournaments I attend(ed) is/was not simply competitive success), the competitive aspect of the tournament should be modeled on this axiom. This seems like a fairly self-evident claim - why call it a debate tournament if the point isn't to see who does the better debating? Why vote for the person that does the "better debating" in a round if that's not the point of the competition writ large? As a result, you are (I hope) entirely correct that the goal of DEBATE is not winning tournaments, and that should not be the goal of DEBATERS. The goal of debate TOURNAMENTS from a tab perspective, however, had better be to declare the best debater as the champion.
Of course, there are significant constraints upon this in practical implementation - wellness concerns and logistics are the two that immediately come to mind. As someone who has yet to recover from an illness contracted at a debate tournament last January, I have a profound appreciation for just how important it is to compromise on the competitive side of things to ensure these constraints are respected. We ought, however, to recognize that this is in a significant way a non-ideal arrangement, and maximize the extent to which tournaments adhere to the axiom stated above subject to these constraints. This is where I see your points about logistics, who the judges are, etc kicking in - they might modify what we end up doing, but cannot affect the abstract reasoning regarding what constitutes the best possible competition.
I guess, therefore, that I see the role of the tabroom as to attempt this constrained maximization - they ought to figure out what the ideal tournament would look like, then get as close to that as they can while compromising where essential to satisfy the aforementioned critical constraints. As a result, I think it's incredibly important to make sure we know what an ideal tournament looks like, in order to ensure that this role is manageable. Tab rooms have it hard enough already; we might as well ease the burden a bit by ensuring that their role has a solid footing...
I don't think you're suggesting that I find your comments irrelevant, because I didn't (or I wouldn't have answered them). I think we actually agree most completely on the main point of designing the tournament to lead to the best outcome, and on the specific points of how the math should work. I'm only thinking that there are plenty of limitations to this search for the best outcome, so ultimately, it's the best outcome despite the limitations. Mostly I feel that we need to look at more individual tournaments from this point on and see how they go and then come back and revisit the whole math thing. Given that I do a tournament a week, it won't take long.
That's fair - my preference towards theoretical reasoning is based both on my background as a math major who likes pretending the real world doesn't exist, and on the sense that it's hard to get a large enough sample size to make any meaningful assertions. If you're in the process of collecting a bigger sample that we can use, though, I'll go ahead and overcome that former reason!
As an aside, there's someone doing a lot of interesting data analysis at http://blog.anumbersgame.net/ for policy that you might find interesting/helpful, insofar as the kind of analysis we're talking about seems to render the actual debate event under consideration irrelevant, and concerns like logistics are harsher, if anything, for an event that takes twice as long to conclude...
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