In which we stew

Because I’m involved in some serious discussions of case content, I thought I’d watch some LD rounds. And I tried, lord knows I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t follow them. In a word, I’m am finished. I can’t analyze what’s right/wrong in LD if I can’t follow it from word one. [Sigh.]

In a way, this causes me to care a little less than I should. I hear the pleas of people who claim they are trampled on one way or the other, then I try to get an understanding of it and my only thought is that, if you can find yourself being trampled in this meaningless wash of words where as soon as someone finishes talking the other person grabs the flash drive to get a copy of their case to read it and find out what was said, you’re a more patient person than I am. I’ve always maintained that speed per se is not a bad thing, if you’re willing to isolate the tiniest of audiences for what you’re saying. In LD, where a lot of people are complaining about certain judges and certain ideas, and claiming that those judges and ideas are ruining debate, at the same time we’ve created an activity that is intelligible only to those judges. At the point where control has already been wrested from the coaches, the coaches have a job of work ahead of them getting that control back.

Talking about the problems in debate can be frustrating. Talking about anything with debate people can be frustrating, let’s face it, but as a general rule you can at least take them to account with not answering arguments. But in the discussions I’ve been having, the distrust and mistrust and general negative feelings have been enervating. But I guess this has been building over a long time. It will take a long time to fix, if it’s fixable.

Even the simple stuff seems to engender arguments. There isn’t much I’ve said about MJP that strikes me as particularly far out. CP has been helpful to me privately in differentiating my own experience from the policy universe, so I’m more than willing to limit my conclusions to the LD community. To wit, we’re already limiting the pool to the top third or so of the judges 93% of the time, or put another way, 7% of all rounds are 3-3 or worse (and that includes 1-2s). That 4% of rounds are 3-3s has, to my mind, rendered the idea of tossing 3-3s for 1-2s relatively moot: it’s virtually a statistical deviation not worth arguing about (especially when you realize that some of them don’t have 1-2s to fall back on). And when I made that statement publicly, I was excoriated for some sort of mathematical heartlessness. No one’s bothered to try to understand what I’ve been saying would be worthy of a best practice, to set whatever number of tiers makes sense if there’s 8 or 9 or so in each tier. 3 tiers? Fine. 11 tiers? Fine. No one’s bothered to understand that preffing isn’t limited to circuit teams, and certainly no one’s worried about the effect of preffing on teams that don’t pref, which tend to be traditional/conservative but who, by not preffing, get circuit judges unfriendly to their style, or at least more friendly to their opponent’s circuit style. Everybody immediately wants to try some other way, which will probably be no better or worse than what we have, before we’ve really looked at the way we have it. I daresay the first numbers I’ve seen on MJP were the ones I posted myself. This is new stuff, but there’s an awful lot of egos in the coaching room who have it all figured out how to do it better, based on... What? I don’t know. When I argue with CP about the math, for God’s sake, the man’s a freakin’ mathematician! He enlightens me. But when I hear from some other people who haven’t run 10 billion tournaments, much less written the software to run 10 billion tournaments, I’ve got to wonder.

Oh, well. I needed to get this out of my system. I’m going to Utah with a goal of coming out with some avenues for better communication among coaches. I needed to put this rant aside before somebody hits me over the head with a frying pan.

Onward.