The Corrosion of High School Debate

This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It'll happen as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended.

It's unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is hard if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (i.e. they're not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you've introduced role-playing elements, basically)

So in high school debate I didn't do so well. I think primarily because I didn't have enough information prepared before going in to respond to an opponents case.

I had routinely been smacked down by judges who felt I didn't attack a point sufficiently to avoid conceding it.

So for one tournament, the proposition at hand was whether global concerns ought to be held above local ones. I stated case that aliens had infiltrated most, if not all, national governments, and they had a goal of putting the human race into slavery, or worse. Clearly global concerns for survival trump local government concerns that may be based on ulterior motives. Hey, it was the mid 1990s, and X Files was all the rage among nerds.

My opponents would say they wouldn't even dignify that stuff with an answer. I responded that they conceded my point, then, and judges agreed.

Out of 4 matches that tournament I won three. The fourth time, I got an opponent who actually called my bluff since I obviously had no evidence to back up my assertion.

My debate coach got the scores back and wondered what happened, because I was otherwise the losingest member of the debate team. She congratulated me on winning and hacking the rules, and then told me she never wanted to hear about me composing a case like that again.

The last competition I was at, some of my school's teammates went up against what I thought of as "The Superweapon".

The debate starts out with the normal political, social and military arguments related to your side of the proposition, and then moves on to phase 2: even so, none of it matters because Jesus Christ's return to Earth is imminent. "Expert" after "expert" weighing in on Christ's return and its implication for Latin America.

I had a very large briefcase -- a case full of briefs -- but, uh, none of those briefs really addressed that particular line of attack.

I enjoy "intellectual discussion", so I went to a college debate team practice once to see if I wanted to join (back in 2003 or so) - I walked out of there with my mind blown. There was absolutely nothing intellectual about college debate team. The entire point was just to see who could say the most words per minute. When I explicitly asked, I was told that content doesn't really matter, just fast talking.

Another poster posted (as a dog-whistle) a link to Towson JR, the first team of black women to win the national debate championship. Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent. The author of this article went to a "pr-Ivy" with a $70 million endowment. That's some privilege to complain about - he even humblebrags about it: "From winter to spring, in settings as grand as a Harvard lecture hall and as cramped as a boiler room in a Salt Lake City public school, [...]". Flying to Alta (so sorry their campus isn't as nice as yours) isn't cheap or something everyone can do!

Also, since everybody rants about spreading - many critical teams do not spread, or are at least under 300 words per minute. There is a growing recognition and acceptance of the privilege it takes to spend an hour each night doing speaking drills.

This is a much better article about the state of debate: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9...

I readily admit that for most people, it's not so simple as, "you want good high school debate? Simple! Just go to Hotchkiss or Exeter." (schools that cost $50k/year) In theory, there's no reason why other leagues and schools could not ban spreading and put down a rhetoric-forward, comprehensive debate format. The catch, it seems, is that none of them have successfully done so. It's probably a culture thing-- the New England prep schools have a fairly large community of teachers and students who know how their debate format works, who know how to practice and judge for a less formulaic format. It's not obvious how you would create such a culture out of nowhere, and you'll get little help from New Englanders, especially the prep set, who are famously provincial about education.

> Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.

I do pretty much agree with the author though. Everything has become a game and we've completely lost sight of the fact that we're ultimately trying to build a better society. It's a big part of why I stopped identifying with political labels. Although, as always, I'm suspicious of the concept that there ever were "good old days".

[1] https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...

Debate teaches you how to think. Teaches you how to respond to arguments efficiently and concisely and how to organize information.

I regard HS Debate as the best times of my life. The insane amount of stuff you learn is just crazy. What other activities are there that exposes you non stop to political critique, current events, history, energy policy and puts you in contact with some extremely smart people?

And if you really hate it, there is nothing stopping you from running K's and stuff. Most were really stupid, but at the very least it teaches how to argue against irrational/stupid arguments in a practical manner.

Debates, televised or on stage? They have time limits.

Free-wheeling verbal exchanges? They still have time pressure, in that they are synchronous. And like debates, there's also a linear aspect, where it is easy to forget about tangents or branches of thought.

Essays? They lack interactivity; form and presentation is prioritized over the true content of the argument.

Discussion boards? They are largely immutable, and worse, they are hierarchical - it is still vulnerable to "spreading" since you cannot collapse branches together.

What is needed is a communication medium that is asynchronous, that prioritizes argument content over form or presentation, and that follows a graph-structure form. We don't have that. It doesn't yet exist, outside of mathematical proofs. A system that loosened and adapted those principles for non-specialists to comfortably use could change the world.

(A lot of people have tried working on this, me included - there are plenty of examples of "argument graphing" and the like out there, but none have really proved workable yet.)

Excellent critical thinking takes time, the willingness to revise, and the ability to track. Focusing on speed in the short term just slows things down in the long term.

I was also on my high school debate team, Student Congress to be specific (though Lincoln-Douglas was an option).

I joined because I loved policy and imagining the impact of legislative changes. The fact that most of our debates were on mock legislation that other students had written made it even better, because we argued topics that the real congress would never touch. I learned so much about researching and building arguments, even if my record didn't show it (never placed once in 2 years). I learned that being right was not as important as being aware of the tone of the room and making yourself heard and tailoring your arguments appropriately. I was not naturally gifted for on-the-fly speaking, but I did improve even so. And importantly, I learned things about myself and avoided pursuing a career I might have hated.

I regret nothing even though I have no dusty trophies to show. The friendship and experience I gained from traveling around the state with other politics nerds was, and always will be, the best part.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the backlash against highly technical forms of debate is most indicative of the current political moment. From my perspective, the backlash is basically just lots of people with at-best marginal interest and basically no skin in the game loudly condescending legions of volunteer educators.

More-over, the politicians who most typify the current political moment more resemble the under-prepared student sweet-talking their way out of a substantive debate than the over-prepared egg head presenting an 15-point analysis of an amicus brief at break-neck speed.

Critiques of overly-technical, jargon-filled, evidence-heavy debate styles aren't exactly difficult to sell. And there's a lot to be said for slowing things down (I insist on quality over quantity when I judge).

But it's worth pointing out that the proposed alternative styles devolve into "dueling used car salesmen" at least as often as the former devolve into "speed competitions". I'd rather watch a bad speed match than a bad duel between clueless care salesmen, but that's certainly a personal preference between two objectively bad choices.

In other words, most high school students aren't particularly good at making arguments and will settle for style when they can't win on substance. That's true regardless of the style you choose to emphasize.

The important thing is that tens of thousands of kids learn how to present a speech in front of an audience and also get some practice reading "amicus briefs and economic analyses".

If you want make debate about convincing an audience of laymen, the judgement needs to be done by an audience of laymen. Do that, and the pace of the debate will slow significantly, since there's no benefit to making an argument that the audience can't hear or understand. But then your complaint will become "these people are dumbing down their arguments and winning, how can we fix this?!"

The comments section of the episode page gives you an idea of people's opinion of the state of high school debate.

I'm sorry, did someone really think that a high school extra curricular was going to act as some kind of deep and wisened meditation for teens on rhetoric?

More than anything else, debate forces you to think quick on your feet - really, /really/ quick. Tantamount to an e-sport, but WAY more open ended, since the aff and neg can run just about anything under the sun, or even go meta (which seems more common since the early 90's when I debated).

Yes debate is a terrible model for useful rhetoric. It's also a hellishly fun boxing match for brains/mouths.

Why do they even teach debate, while most high school student probably have never even heard of dialectic. Debate is useful in competitive environments of power, where you have your self interest as a goal. It doesn't seem very healthy for society to be teaching such self centered tactics to high schoolers without at least also teaching about truth centered tactics like dialectics.

I was lucky enough to go to a comprehensive school where the debating chamber was important. The school does not have a debating chamber now. A few key teachers retired and momentum was lost. Strange how the must attend event no longer matters.

On a related note, I explicitly avoided policy debate in HS because of its non-sensical verbal vomit style, and by few experiences with Lincoln-Douglass (LD) just seemed too abstract. One of the things I liked at the college level was that teams would present cases that were a little more practical than LD without the "I need to memorize wikipedia and 3 years of the Economist then recite it all" aspects of Policy Debate (PD). Judges also had some discretion on judging whether the case was a fair case (the affirmative team presented a case of their invention usually), which helped curb abuse. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that flexibility at the HS level.

We're a long way from vanished Hellas, but we do know a few tricks they didn't. For instance, we know that the elderly, while suffering a certain decline in the fluid intelligence necessary to react rapidly to novelty, can do well in crystallized intelligence – that factor which employs skills, knowledge, life experience, and, in short, wisdom.

I therefore propose a "Legacy" debate category, to be judged only by those above the age of, say, 70. A pace of 300 words per minute, while impressive, will not be much good when assessed by those whose brains are no longer physically capable of processing that hypersyllabification.

It sounds like the real failure is the failure to meaningfully regulate the offending behaviors. Maybe there is difficulty regulating it, but the "gee, we'll never be able to fix it regardless of how we regulate" is more likely an attitude of lethargic helplessness rather than a meditation on the nature of competitive debate itself.

H'm. Sounds like you got a good education out of it.

I wonder if there are similar fora for adults.

What? My father was on his high school debate team in the 1930's.

I agree with this quote so much. I was on the debate and robotics team in high school, we did extemporary style in debate. I ended up leaving the debate team and focusing entirely on robotics because debate taught students how to argue, not how to listen. Whenever debate kids would leak into robotics, they would cause endless looping conversations talking about different designs.

The main issue is that high school debate doesn't teach how to listen well, only how to hear well. If debate was more freeform so students could actually form opinions based on what they thought about the resolution, then I believe this problem would be fixed. I have a friend who did my proposed style and said that it was extremely fun, and turned debate into a problem solving exercise.

Even then the funny thing about this article is that, in indicting what it considers a decay in critical thinking, the article misses a lot. Spot the error:

> in recent years its speed has increased markedly, as have the mountains of evidence. The emphasis on logic and critical thinking has waned.

Disclosure: did this activity, was ranked #1 for my class year, etc etc. (Note that doesn't mean I think the activity's perfect, either.) One of the coolest outcomes is that - since it attracts people who want to become lawyers - you end up building a really, really deep legal bench:, fed and appellate clerks, m&a/whiteshoe types, litigators, etc.

I say the function of debate in a democracy is to inform members of the public so that they can make intelligent political decisions.

That being the case, debaters should be thought of as being educators who inform the public about the arguments on each side of an issue, and should be so evaluated. Having a winner and a loser doesn't make, sense. If they both do a poor job of informing, that should be noted, and ditto if they both do well. Perhaps there should be a few prizes in a tournament for the teams that do the best job of informing.

Let me add that positions on policy or ethical matters invariably rest at least in part on deeper assumptions about things like human psychology and history. For that reason, these should be addressed in debate.

As for learning how to think logically and evaluate evidence, that is all part of what it takes to be a good educator.

If anyone disagrees, then they should present their own idea of what is the proper function of debate.

Maybe I'm insulated because I went to a midwest high-school who didn't care much for the elite tournaments but we still managed to do well at nats.

EDIT:

>High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking.

That depends on your perspective. I'd say the judges learned some things in my debates, would they have changed their minds? Probably not, because 16 year olds just aren't that convincing to most people. It's like that bear joke, you just have to be better than the other guy. But what about my opinions? They may have never changed in the midst of a debate, but case-building is definitely an exercise in truth-seeking. Debaters get more out of it than judges but that'd be natural, they're the ones poring over all the evidence and picking out the good bits. Being adversarial with yourself as you write an aff and neg is far more enlightening than any other approach I've found.

Key thing here: parents judge rounds. These lay judges aren't trained to listen to 300 wpm. They don't know any better though-- they'll still come back to the tab room and say "wow, these kids are really great, I didn't even understand what they were saying!" Yuck. The politicians of tomorrow.

And if your opponents haven't trained spread, what's the use of you spreading? Are you that insecure in your ability to sway others with logic and reason that you would resort to speaking quickly? Maybe instead of getting riled up by the game you should learn a real skill: listening. You'll find more of their flaws that way.

If you can't speak in a way that your listeners can understand, then your words are worthless.

It reminds me of that scene in the "Bad News Bears" where the little league coach realizes the grown-ups pushing the kids to win win win are the bad guys.

Debate has become a worthless life skill. Members of the USA national legislature rarely give speeches to try to convince their fellow legislators of something; mostly the room is occupied by nobody but a couple of clerks and some automated CSPAN TV cameras.

Aristotle might say we've abandoned pathos (understanding our audience) and ethos (personal integrity) in favor of logos (the bs that gets spewed at 300 words per minute).

I'm glad this elite debater is calling bs.

This is quite common online too, especially among creationists:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

1. Spreading is definitely a thing in Lincoln Douglas now as are the wonky Mead 92-like arguments. It’s even easier to spread now that we can flow on computers (which was just beginning when I left in 2005, so I learned how to flow on paper. I still use this format for interviewing people.)

2. People were complaining about the “diminishing intellectual integrity” of debate when I was doing it over 15 years ago, so I’m going to guess that things haven’t changed as much as the author is making it seem.

3. Crazy arguments aside, debate is the only academic sport I can think of that teaches you how to: 1) formulate coherent arguments, 2) defend those arguments with facts instead of opinions, 3) learn how to speak in front of people (sometimes lots of people) and 4) make do out of nothing (we often debated in classrooms, even in tournaments held at colleges).

Debate changed my life. I met people from all sorts of walks of life, rich and poor alike. I debated against and amongst people from all races that believed all sorts of things. If there is any activity that can solve for the notorious achievement gap problem, then this is it.

I learned about rock music by rooming with a guy at Catholic during debate camp. (He introduced me to Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan. I was hooked since.) I had my first serious relationship through debate. God, some of the best memories of my life came through debate. My first flights? Debate.

I was devastated when my school (Bergenfield HS) dissolved their debate team during my senior year. We had one of the best Policy and LD programs in the country and often beat out much wealthier schools than ours (though we had nothing against Texas). Most of the folks that joined our program did well later on in life: a few doctors, a few lawyers, etc. I’m positive that I wouldn’t have the life that I have now had I not said yes to my future captains asking me if I argued too much at home and needed an outlet.

My coach had a huge falling out with the school and called it quits (very difficult decision for him; he was homosexual and was often prosecuted for it). No other teacher wanted to take up the program, which made no sense to me initially but after dating (and eventually marrying) a teacher made a ton of sense (this was likely a labor of love for my old coach that didn’t pay the bills; no other teacher had that passion). The football, basketball, baseball and golf programs went unscathed, of course.

I tried to start a program at Stevens, but scheduling made it really hard. College debate is no damn joke; it’s practically a sport in its own right. People have failed out due to going too hard on debate. The most I could do to get involved was by being a judge on the weekends, but even that got difficult once I started getting into serious relationships and working more.

If we have kids, I will definitely nudge them to try debate.

One way to make that competitive would be to deliberately build a prisoner's dilemma into the rules: If one party wins, they get the most points. If they reach a compromise each party gets some points. If either party fails to convince the judge, nobody gets nothing.

As far as I can tell, this claim is made up.

Here's the full results packet form the 2017 National Championship: http://results.speechanddebate.org/2017/posting/2017%20Resul....

Cmd-F McCordick: 0 results. (Did not even participate?)

Cmd-F Regis: 5th place in public forum (Eoin Matthews & Randall Zuccalmaglio).

Urban Debate Leagues (UDL), often produce championship level debaters that use poems and music as evidence and make arguments up entirely from their own thoughts.

The format of policy is extremely loose and just because the tactics that are most commonly used can be seen as anti-intellectual that doesn't mean that you can't be extremely good while appealing to layman as well.

To understand just how fast these kids are talking, spend a few seconds watching a debate video (this was the first thing that came up when I searched "policy debate" on Youtube, and it's consistent with my own experiences): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4MzZ_WS_Ww#t=1m45s

Debaters started formulating outlandish arguments. The more apocalyptic the outcome the better, with little care for the argument’s probability or real-world application. “A new retirement program will trigger a nuclear war.” “Prison overcrowding would cause the destruction of the ozone layer.” High school debate had come to this.

If anyone thinks this is hyperbolic, I can assure you from my 4 years of experience on the California high school debate circuit during the 00's it is not. The premise of the competition, that "failing to respond to an argument means you concede the argument" means that it doesn't matter whether you have effective talking points; simply that you have talking points of any sort. Volume over effectiveness, speed over eloquence.

However, there was always a stark difference between local debate competitions and invitational or state-level competitions--at higher-level competitions, many judges are former participants, and will take notes on the "flow" of the debate, which allows them to confirm, "Yes, the affirmative side made ten arguments, and the negation side only responded to nine of them," turning into a game of scoring points.

Converesly, at many local/league competitions (which might include volunteer judges with no debate experience, e.g. parents of kids at the schools participating, or faculty at the school hosting the event), many judges lack both the familiarity and the inclination to effectively recognize teams that have "won" based on this technicality, and weight was often given to students who were able to talk "like real people" at a reasonable pace that the judges were able to follow. The "negative" side of this is that sometimes debates were decided by who was a better orator or came across as more charismatic rather than which side had the better logical argument (though you could make an argument that there's value in that as well). Granted, this is based on my experience in the Yosemite Forensics League; I'm sure the tenor at "local" competitions varies on a league-to-league basis, and YAL does include a lot of California's more "rural" counties (think Bakersfield, not San Jose).

I think my experience does get toward a different point, which is that the kind of competition you see at high levels may not be reflective of what some (or even most) kids experience when they simply go to tournaments several Saturdays out of the year and never advance to a larger state tournament. If you're going to a prep school that is renowned for having a champion debate team, then sure, you're going to get fast-talking spreading, but for some kids who aren't hyper-competitive, never advance (and are okay with that), there's still plenty to get out of the program (and arguably more to be gained from a personal enrichment standpoint, even if there's no accolades). That being said, my best experiences with the National Forensics League programs were more on the "individual events" (which features events explicitly score based on oratory ability, e.g. "dramatic interpretation" or "original oratory"), rather than the debate side of things. (At my school, both were coached under the same umbrella program.)

Continuous speech recognition allows new approaches to scoring.

Teaching scientific discourse, and team collaboration, is increasingly a focus, even down to K.

Imagine being able to do automated judging of team and individual performance, at listening, clear presentation, group facilitation and collaboration, problem analysis and creative problem solving, tasteful system design, and so on. That could be really neat.

No wonder it has been gamed. Intellectual pursuits can never be scored simply, and to do so means you'll get rule gaming that defeats the whole purpose.

Should go back to which team "developed a more convincing argument" and leave it up to the judges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolved_(film)

[I did parliamentary and policy debate in high school; now I'm a High School parliamentary debate coach]

1. @elefanten correctly points out that arguments are still evaluated at speed. This is my experience; the author characterizes it as "bludgeoning," but good debaters increase their speed to add evidence to a small number of strong arguments. Bludgeoning can happen, but it's uncommon. If McCordick's characterization of Policy were accurate, we could expect the fastest debaters to predictably win all their tournaments. This isn't the case. Speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment, but there are diminishing returns. By a third year in competition a high school debater isn't focusing on speaking faster at all. The real competitive edge is in argumentation.

2. McCordick's comparison between "corrosion" in debate and "corrosion" in American national politics is extremely hasty. National politics have not become more inaccessible because they're technocratic and opaque. The 2016 presidential debates were not run at 300+ wpm, nor did they involve detailed policy advocacies. Debate is characterized by technical elitism, national politics by right- and left-populism. How is debate jargon remotely like "the kind of language currently poisoning our public sphere?"

3. McCordick speculates that debate produces students who don't care about truth and public speech, but there's no real evidence of this. Even if there's validity to his stylistic criticisms, it's unlikely debaters are on the whole less civically engaged or politically literate or eloquent than their peers. My experience, at least, is that they're dramatically ahead.

4. He ignores all the skills besides rhetoric. Research and acadmic/technical literacy are critical to prepared debate, as they are to college academics. Debate teaches a number of mental models that I've personally found extremely useful––e.g. for grokking multiple opportunity costs in decisionmaking. It teaches work ethic and self-motivation, both skills admired in athletics. Also topic knowledge at a very accelerated level for high school students.

5. McCordick gives the impression that debate is homogeneously inaccessible, which is inaccurate for a few reasons. A) High-level competition makes up the vast minority of High School debate; the vast majority of debaters are active on nationally uncompetitive local circuits where traditionalist judge expectations keep debate slow and untechnical. B) Other commenters correctly point out the rise of new performative styles that preference debate on relatable terms, which have been highly competitive for years now. C) There are plenty of debate formats that aren't hypertechnical––McCordick even competed in two of them: Public Forum and Worlds. Parliamentary debate often plays a similar role where it's offered.

6. I agree with @ashark that debate's idiosyncracies are a product of Goodhart's Law. Competition is an essential incentive for the workload, in the same way that international science fairs incentivize research (the only other high school competition in which I've seen a similar work ethic). @ashark suggests in a different comment that the only way to counteract specialization is to allow subjectivity in judging. This would just substitute judge-appeal as the metric for competitive success, which is hardly a better proxy for truth-seeking and communication skills given judges' pre-existing political biases on a topic.

7. I understand frustrations with debate's apparent inaccessibility to laypeople. It's a frustration I experienced myself when I first started. Why, though, is there so much frustration over specialization in debate? Why not similar frustration over other specialized activities? Debate definitely doesn't bring politics to the polis, but it needn't. Not all politics is about eloquence; it's also about cost-benefit analysis, philosophical dilemmas, wonky details. It isn't necessary that everyone is a technical expert, and it's naive to believe that policy doesn't demand expertise. I find grindcore offputting, but that doesn't mean grindcore is "corroding" or "perverted."

Interested in developing such expertise? Competitive debate is one of many ways in which to develop it. It certainly isn't perfect, but it teaches skills that don't exist anywhere else in high school curricula.

Does it erode general advocacy skills and interest in truth? Certainly not for debaters who are good at it. If anything, it builds them. Skills are not mutually exclusive.

On a petty note, the article credits Jack with winning "the high school debating national championship"––America Magazine should be more precise. Regis won first in World Schools Debate, not one of the major formats.

I learned a ton about research, writing, and effective argumentation.

Those high school debaters seem like they'd be recognized as 'doubleplusgood duckspeakers' in 1984.

By default, the convention was to apply a "policy maker" paradigm, in which the advantages of the plan affirming the resolution are weighed against the disadvantages brought up by the negative team, and the side with the most "weight" wins. Thus, it's natural that the arguments would eventually converge upon the scenarios with the most weight, i.e. those with the highest death tolls or biggest quantifiable impact on humanity. Nuclear war and climate change were argumentative staples in these types of debate rounds, and I even recall some cases where a policy maker judge, in his oral feedback, literally added up scenarios for each side to determine the winner.

Another convention is "silence means consent", which likely led to the practice of spreading to overwhelm your opponent with arguments so that any unanswered argument automatically gets granted as won. I feel like that practice is more an artifact of the way debates are structured with time limits and restrictions on only considering arguments that were continuously extended throughout the speeches in order to be considered as a valid "reason for decision". Coupled with a desired to quantify each argument in order to outweigh the opponent, I think this behavior is inevitable given the structure of the activity.

However, I feel that the open nature of the evaluation paradigm was a shining educational tool. Given the right judge (e.g. a debate coach, an experienced former debater, or a college debater), you had the option of advocating for any type of evaluation paradigm you wanted. You could open the debate up to meta topics such as whether the affirmative plan was "on topic" by nitpicking the definition of words in the resolution or arguing grammatical technicalities, and claiming that "non-topical" plans were damaging to debate as an activity and warrant a loss; you could attempt to compare the morality of certain scenarios against quantifiable death-toll scenarios, such as advocating that the moral obligation for overturning some court case to symbolize the eradication of racism against some group might outweigh any type of nuclear war scenario; you could even make arguments against the practice of "spreading", in the name of education, and demand that if the opposing team speaks too fast that would damage the educational value of debate and thus warrant a loss.

All and any of these arguments would've been valid, and I feel that provided valuable lessons in thinking outside the box, looking for technicalities, and optimizing approaches for playing the game.

My best friend growing up is a near mystical figure in the insular LD debate community and has coached a lot of nationally successful debaters, including his younger sister who won the TOC and is considered the most dominant LD debater ever as far as I know. Aside from him, at one point another close friend was #1 ranked in the country (he had the most TOC bids that year) and another won Novice Nationals. I was naturally good at it as well (I quit literally hours after winning the Novice state tournament), but I absolutely hated debate for all the reasons listed -- "spreading", abstruse philosophical critiques that always devolved into nuclear war, and the barely intelligible speed-talking that even motivated the dorkiest of debaters to practice circular breathing. I had to find a new friend group (for a while, we're still all close) because these guys talked about nothing except for debate.

> High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking.

I couldn't agree more, and I have said nearly the exact same thing to many people that are unfamiliar with high school debate.

For an example, take the 2014 CEDA Championship Debate held at Indiana University -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8

* It seems that all the original videos from the above have been removed (from youtube), only clips are available.

For those that are interested, a response to the criticism of the above "debate" was made that is itself cringe-worthy and difficult to watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pij5Sg4_DY

It has never been, and can't be about truth-seeking, this is exactly what it is not about.

It's always been about an intellectual game. So one learns the others view so one can attack it better, if thats ones goal and along the way learn critical thinking.

This author seems like one of those idiots when they have audience votes, who votes for the side they agree with.

That said their original thesis is correct, debating has gone absurdum and so theoretical a lot of the learning seems to be lost.