Ryan Miller responded to my thoughts from last week:
As a late 90's LDer, I don't buy your story. I hated pomo, hated theory, didn't enjoy more than middling speed...but I slowly began to go to tournaments where opponents used (and judges accepted) such tools *because I wanted intelligible ballots.*
Lay judges may be fine at deciding who won the round, and you're right that the whole architecture around them is much lower-overhead, but they basically don't ever give you specific, concrete advice about what to do differently in order to win. The PF ballots my kids get never tell us anything we didn't already know.
So, I guess I've argued this before, but what you get out of the high-overhead system is clear RFDs without intervention, and almost all of its costs are a direct result of that benefit.
Which is not really to disagree with much of anything you've said--there's a place for both kinds of debate, to be sure, and always will be. But I think it does give a clearer picture of why, as debaters and coaches get serious about trying to win, and want to see returns on expensive investments like camp, they gravitate toward the high-overhead environment. Then the community bifurcates and hates itself, and the NFL introduces a new debate event.
Ryan raises a lot of issues I could argue with, but I think more importantly he is pointing to something that I didn’t think of when I was writing that post, and I think he’s right about it. The last time I went to TOC, with the Panivore, JWP spoke during the Breakfast of Champions (which was also called the “Oh, That’s What Grits Are Do I Have to Eat Them?” gala, and which I gather has been toned down a bit under new management), and he mentioned that one of the guiding ideas behind creation of the TOC was that people would go to camps and learn how to debate a certain way, and the TOC (and by association, the tournaments leading up to it) would allow them to do that style of debate in the real world. By the same token, they would get adjudication that matched their style. They could debate the way they wanted to, and get judged on their merits in those debates. Needless to say, the influence of the TOC has been transcendent over the years. As Ryan says, people want to see a return on their expensive investments; God knows that people pay plenty for what he calls the high-overhead environment and what I’ve always called the $ircuit. Same animal, no matter what you call it.
Ryan and I have in the past had disagreements of the value of esoteric criticism (applied to films, in a fun exchange a while ago), but not a lot of disagreement on what it is and how it works. This coincides with my proselytizing for MJP. What I see in LD at most big tournaments, with include a range of styles and interests, is a dichotomy in preference between experienced circuit judges and local old-fashioned judges, with a bunch of folks no one knows who they are, plus the odd parent, tossed down toward the bottom. That is, people rank their favorites, circuit or traditional, as 1s and 2s—excluding those folks who claim to have figured out some way to game the system, which I don’t necessarily disbelieve but I certainly wouldn’t have the patience to try it, and given that almost inevitably people get their 1s and occasionally their 2s, I can’t imagine what the value of some other bizarre schema might be—their unfavorites 4s and 5s, and they cross off the wild cards or true stinkers as strikes. Most of the time, as I say, this means that you’re getting your 1s or occasionally your 2s, but there are pairings that are just murder, when a school hell-bent on circuit prefs hits a school hell-bent on traditional prefs. I know who these schools are and dread finding good fits for their judging. Maybe these are the ones “gaming” us. There’s no question that they’re the ones getting 3s and 4s on a fairly regular basis. Their outround panels look like higher math: most panels go out with prefs totaling 3 or 4, and then these awkward pairings get 10s. Hey, it’s your prefs. All I can vouch for is their mutuality.
Anyhow, in keeping with Ryan’s thoughts, MJP does allow people to seek out, find and pref the judges who provide what they are looking for, in his case, useful ballots with RFDs that can be directed toward winning future rounds. My brief has always been that, if schools disinclined to pref actually did pref more often, they would pull up the level of the traditional judges in the pool, and thus maintain some of the old-fashioned debate styles that are perhaps disappearing in the increasingly isolated circuit environment. There’s nothing that says that a traditional judge can’t write a solid RFD.
But that’s not really the issue, and Ryan does point out a real problem that we have, the relative uselessness of a lot of PF ballots. To some extent this is endemic to the activity, and deliberate, but still, it’s not desirable and it’s not necessary. There are a handful of instructions I like to give the PF pool when I have the opportunity, but I don’t always have that opportunity and certainly at most tournaments there is no attempt made whatsoever to train the judges. Frankly, I have always maintained that the teams should train their own damned judges, but there are plenty of teams out there who wrangle a parent or two for chaperones and give them no help whatsoever in the activity that they know perfectly well and in which they could easily instruct these parents. I know, for instance, that the NFL has a handout for how to judge PF, and it’s quite good. Would it kill people to give it to the PF judges in advance?
Here’s the thing. In tab, I don’t see a lot of hoo-ha over LD. Issues might arise, but for the most part they are technical and non-activity related. And, as I say, they’re rare. In PF, on the other hand, it’s still the Wild West, and it wouldn’t be a tournament if there wasn’t at least one serious complaint about something derived from the event itself, not to mention a slew of complaints about the behavior of teams/coaches/judges. Get a grip, people!
The issue going forward is not where LD is or where it is headed; I think that’s already been determined by all the factors involved in its evolution until now. PF, on the other hand, needs to settle down a tad. It needn’t go the same route as its debate predecessors, but it does need to serious itself up a bit. It’s up to all of us to do something about this. I’m not quite sure what, at the moment.
1 comment:
1. PFD/lay judges: you're right that some simple training measures could do wonders for ballots in novice or lopsided rounds. But in more complicated rounds, there's no way to fairly adjudicate (and communicate that adjudication) without a rigorous flow, and that's not something that can easily be self-taught or learned in a few minutes. There are a lot of speeches in a PF round, which makes keeping track of arguments harder, and being able to make new args/responses later in the round actually makes that task harder, not easier. Nobody thinks figure skating or gymnastics would be equally well judged by people who didn't see many performances; why claim the same about debate? At the high level of any activity, discriminating performances is hard.
2. Traditional judges. Of course there are 'traditional' judges who are highly experienced and write good ballots, but the correlation between circuity judges and better ballots is not thereby merely accidental or extrinsic. "Traditional" is one way of saying "interventionary" and it's a pretty broad-brush and unclear kind of intervention at that. I don't think it's any worse that circuity judges whose paradigms say they "disregard theory," but both are really aesthetic preferences driving intervention. The latter is just more recent (and if I had to guess, will die sooner) and so less clarified as a block of judges. The more that you signal your willingness to intervene, and the broader-brush your criteria for intervention are, the harder it is to know how to win the ballot.
For the no-theory judge, does that mean if your opponent runs an abusive case, you should too, to highlight the absurdity? If the judge intervenes against abusive cases, how abusive is abusive?
For the "go slow" judge, how slow is slow? If they're not flowing and penalizing dropped arguments, then we're back to lay adjudication. If they are, then what's the threshold at which they intervene against speed? And it can't be just "when they yell clear, that's the limit" because case structures and rebuttal structures depend on time allocation in advance.
So sure, some people who prefer slower debate or debate sans-theory have an absolute advantage in front of such judges (or even just an aesthetic preference for those debates) and so will or should pref such judges. And some judges, because of school affiliation, competitive success, or other factors manage to have fairly interventionist paradigms for a while and still be broadly preffed. But fundamentally, signaling "I intervene" and especially "I intervene on broad and loosely defined criteria" is a way of saying "it's hard to know how to win in front of me, and the ballot I write probably won't clarify that."
3. Camps: camps are driven by the literature and by trying to help debaters improve. Evidence and practice is what they get paid for. Insofar as the real-world discussion on many topics is often quite meta (critical legal studies, etc) and clear tips for improvement rely on non-intervention, which thereby allows meta-argumentation, you get meta-argumentation. So it's not just that camps happened to teach a certain style of argumentation, and people then wanted judges who appreciated that style: it's that there's a deep cultural link between those practices and clear ballots.
4. Aesthetics. This is a real conundrum for people who want some kind of educational or aesthetic norm for debate other than the one they're getting. If you don't intervene, you get the NDT. If you intervene, you get something like parli, where investment is low (no hotels, no coaches, no camps--travel is at least as much about friends and destination tourism as debate), drinking is high, and winning is based on natural talent and a bit of luck. It's just not clear how to incentivize work without tying that work to the ballot, which is where the tin comes from.
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