Ryan again

I just want to bring his comment up to the fore, where it belongs.

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.


On facts, agree pretty much. And I have no argument against the nature of what Ryan explains is good debate judging. But I disagree on the desirability of all of this in PF. Not that I don't suggest PF judges shouldn't flow, but we've already seen two debate events, LD and Policy, set participation limits based on running material at high speed that untrained listeners wouldn't be able to understand even if they knew what was being said. The train has left the proverbial station on these two events. Whether or not LD is shrinking or will shrink in participation as a result, my assumption is that that is the case, but I do not have specific facts, but there is no question that policy has shrunk dramatically, and that there are demonstrable links between that shrinkage and the activity's evolving arcaneness and speed. Further, when debate is about debate, while it may be a fine intellectual exercise in many ways, it is jejune in many others, another aspect of that arcaneness I was talking about. Again, I do not challenge the educational value of any of this, but I see no reason why all debate activities ought to be allowed to evolve the same way, if that way ultimately limits participation by students or judges. Why shouldn't there be a debate activity judged by reasonably intelligent people prepared to judge that debate? I mean, by all expectations, the moment we remove parent judging from PF, it turns into Policy with a revolving door on topics (and then before you know it, we start using the January topic in February and March and April leading up to TOC, similar to what we do in LD. If the March-April LD topic were paid on a per-use basis, it wouldn't be able to put food on the table!) And, of course, speed restraints will immediately go out the window. PF was an event born in the idea of its accessibility; is that idea now wrong? The big thing lay judging does is pretty much keep PF where it is today. Benefits: high school debate accessible to more students, parents (the good will of whom is important) can become useful assets to a team, administrations watching a debate can actually understand it and see where their money is going, entry level costs are minimal and, because of parent judging, remain lower than other debate formats. Negatives: PF doesn't get, in a classic rhetoric sense, as good as it can get. So the question becomes, is our goal to develop ideal debate formats, or good ways of getting kids in high school to debate? Given that, with LD and Policy, we seem to be on that dialectic path to ideal debate formats, I like keeping an activity for the rest of us. I like keeping all the activities, for that matter. Life is a banquet, as Auntie Mame would say.

Still, as I have said, I certainly agree that PF judges need to do a good job within the boundaries of not giving up their day jobs. They should flow. By the same token, PF debaters should recognize who's judging them and debate accordingly. Is a public speaking activity geared to the listeners of that activity is somehow a wrongheaded idea? As much as I appreciate that the skills involved in high level LD and Policy are useful and for life, they must first be translated into the rest of a person's existence, given that as far as I know there are few forums for discussion exactly like a fast LD or Policy round. On the other hand, there are plenty of forums for uses of speaking skills exactly the same as in a PF round. I have spent my entire career convincing people of one thing or another, or not, and watching others do likewise. Those are direct PF skills.

You know what I think the biggest problem with PF is? Maintaining a "mass market" debate event in the present environment we've created of high maintenance debate.