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Comment by RugnirViking | Hacker News Reader

Thats always been the problem with competetive debate - you're supposed to argue a position that often has significant culutural weight, meaning its unlikely anything you say will change anyones mind. I was once asked to debate a pro slavery stance in debate class despite obviously everyone being against it. I felt our team did pretty well and the other team did barely anything and yet everyone voted for the other side. Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.

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You see that even on sites like this one (or reddit), where the etiquette page beseeches everyone to vote for comments that are useful, insightful, or well-argued, rather than just what they agree with (especially already agree with).

But it never really seems to play out that way; it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour.

  it's always pretty easy to farm karma by restating a popular opinion, cracking a joke, or dunking on the target de jour

Interestingly, my most upvoted recent comment was one stating a position that was opposed to ~all of the existing comments on a thread.

that could mean they were taking advantage of upvote anonymity, and agreeing without having to put their name to it.

Perhaps! But in this case it wasn't an opinion that could cause embarrassment or cancellation.

Perhaps you were simply quite compelling? I upvote people I disagree with when they are courteous or when they change my mind. I don't imagine that practice is uncommon (maybe wishful thinking on my part)

If something is an interesting debate then most people don't have the expertise to engage meaningfully with the facts and arguments being put forward. Experts can bullshit you all day and no amount of critical thinking is going to pull you out of a deep well of ignorance.

Fair, but I think critical thinking, even given the lack of domain-specific knowledge, would be quite valuable to some discussions on HN and beyond.

>Experts can bullshit you all day and no amount of critical thinking is going to pull you out of a deep well of ignorance.

that would be a lovely problem to have in modern social media. Meanwhile, I wonder if it would even hit the top 100 these days.

This website isn't even that bad compared to literally almost anywhere on the internet. From what I've observed with my comments, my "popular opinion" and "unpopular opinion" comments aren't that far apart in terms of comment karma.

One-liner trivialisms and cheap baiting usually gets flagged here, not upvoted regardless of the topic, which is a very positive thing. I am very grateful to the site's admins and users for this lovely place, it's truly a unique thing.

It mostly isn’t, but it does make occasional appearances. Go back and read threads about the Google Memo or Gamergate.

Or any thread about Tesla Autopilot or cryptocurrency.

But apart from those it is true that low effort comments and jokes do get downvoted and discussion is much more interesting than anywhere else on the internet imo

> From what I've observed with my comments, my "popular opinion" and "unpopular opinion" comments aren't that far apart in terms of comment karma.

I think that's because HN is smart and doesn't just allow a fresh account go on a downvoting spree. It seems so obvious in retrospect but so underutilized.

There's a lot of debate over whether we should have dislikes/downvotes on modern social media, but it seems strange that the Slashdot mentality of "you need to earn the downvote" seems to have only spread to here and to the "answerHub" styles of forum (wikis, StackOverflow). I remember one interesting feature of Voat (back when that was making waves) on how it limited votes per day and was criticized for it, but I think simply applying that limit to downvotes would have fixed many issues there. It seems ideally you want to encourage as much positive feedback as possible, but require a little friction for negative feedback.

> I think that's because HN is smart and doesn't just allow a fresh account go on a downvoting spree. It seems so obvious in retrospect but so underutilized.

Ehhhhh I'm not sure I'd say smart, just that low effort trolling or manipulation is harder. Plenty of obvious sock puppets and ideological hacks, and the simplified text system makes it easier in a way.

Like, the standby of "repost last weeks stuff, and then copy-paste comments from previous threads about it to get upvotes" works. You just have a 500 karma lead time.

"Marketing and Propaganda works, even if you understand how marketing and propaganda works"

Maybe HN is in an endless September now but it used to be that a joke or repeated comment would get downvoted.

Disagree. The best threads are the highly contentious ones where I'm upvoting everybody.

Absolutely! If someone responds to me with any sort of meaningful reply, I always upvote. And my general heuristic for upvoting is

1. I learned something 2. I had an emotional reaction which means something intrinsic was challenged or affirmed 3. the person asked a question or is curious.

Genuinely, in non academic competition often the best way to “beat” an opponent is to change the rules

Examples of this that are well understood are regulatory capture, where group A convinces a more powerful group B to enforce a new constraint on all competitors to group A. Generally the constraint is a marginal impediment to group A and so “levels the playing field” *wink*

So the idea that there’s some pure form of rhetoric that is actually worth practicing, given that human conflict (from the minor to the major) is rarely to never solved via this mechanism (even in formal legal proceedings) - it’s not clear what is actually being learned here

Other than later in life realizing how formal debate has almost no application and it’s all about how you refine and evaluate your own arguments.

The one time I've been to a debate they asked everyone's opinion on the topic before and after the debate, and then the winners were the ones who persuaded the most people to change their minds. So you can still win even if you're arguing for an unpopular opinion.

It was such an elegant metric I assumed all competitive debates used it. From this article it sounds like they just have judges that vote for the winner though? Crazy.

Intelligence Squared does this but I think most debates suck anyways.

I think this is called an "Oxford style" debate.

thesohoforum.org puts on a lot of good ones.

This is in the tradition of the Oxford/Cambridge union, where you enter the hall using the door of the side you initially prefer, and sit on their side of the room during the debate, and then leave the hall through the door of your preferred side at the end of the debate. The winner of the debate is the side that shifts more people, as measured by the popularity of each door at the beginning and end of the night.

Yeah it was at the Cambridge Union. I guess the only downside is that you don't find out who wins until after everyone has left.

Still you could do it using an app these days.

Competitive debate is a joke. It's verbal form of runaway selection like the evolution of the peacock.

So called competitive debate is really just a joke about who talk faster. There is no positive feedback loops where either side should take a moment to think and gives feedback. Sometimes agree to disagree is the best option. You learn nothing from the competitive debate.

It's basically twitter debate before twitter exists where ppl talking over each other

Completely wrong. The fast talking is worthless if you don't have good arguments and anyone worth their shit can see right through that.

As it turns out the best debaters can talk fast AND make good arguments simultaneously.

If you can't think fast on the fly about how to refute a position, that's on you.

Regarding the fast talkimg - as I understand it, points are deducted heavily if you fail to address the entirety of the oppositions position, so it often devolves into verbal diarrhea where one position will attempt to overwhelm the other with sheer volume.

Am I misinformed on this topic?

Yes, you are misinformed. That kind of shit works with entry level debate since

a) The debtors tend to suck since they are new.

b) The judges tend to just be randoms or not high quality (ie some are just random parents who volunteer who may not have actually debated) so they don't have the ability to parse through what actually happened during the debate properly.

When you get better, you have to learn what arguments matter and don't matter. The skill part of debate is knowing how to throw away as much useless arguments as possible and argume defensively and offensively against the parts that do matter.

You do not have to bother with any of the opposing sides arguments if you have concluded they are pieces of trash. I myself have won debates just by proving in 10 seconds that 4 minutes of the opposing teams arguments was irrelevant and just moved on.

Sheer volume is a valid tactic, since the opposing team COULD drop important arguments that actually matter, so that's part of the skill. I've watched plenty of top level debates where people talk both fast and slow.

Nobody wins just by being fast.

As much as I instinctively feel a pretty strong sense of approval about the structure of high level competitive debate, I wonder if it's bordering on a certain niche admiration for form which doesn't prepare one for what I assume debate is supposed to prepare one for, engaging with the whole spectrum of the public on issues of importance to both them and yourself.

It reminds me of what happened to the cloistered world of esteemed traditional martial arts masters when MMA came along.

This is part of the reason why Twitter ended up controlling so much of the world's publc discourse.

Yes, but you still have to point out that the opposing teams arguments are irrelevant. If you just drop the argument, you will lose points.

(Caveat: I'm speaking as a parliamentary debater, I have extremely limited experience with policy debate. In policy, can you just drop an argument without responding to it at all?)

So in policy there aren't 'points', it's just a ballot decision, and I haven't seen speaker points deducted for dropping arguments that didn't factor into the ballot.

The danger in dropping an argument is that dropped arguments are supposed to be accepted as true, since they were unchallenged. So it's essentially conceding that particular argument, which unless it's really dumb and tactically useless, can be pretty dangerous of it's a potential "voter" (which not all arguments are). But there's no need to spend a bunch of time on each one.

> If you can't think fast on the fly about how to refute a position, that's on you.

Sure, it's on me to decide that competitive debate is stupid, optimizing for gimmicks.

You not being good at arguing and lacking the skills to parse through lots of information and pick out the important bits does not make debate a gimmick.

Do you think the characters in the Socratic dialogues Plato writes about are terrible at arguing, because they speak in a normal cadence instead of scrambling through rhetoric as fast as possible?

No, I think they weren't bound by a time limit in a competitive activity. If they had been, and not spread, I'd think they were terrible at debating, yes.

Do you think competitive debate are unable to speak slowly when there's not a time limit?

Unable? No. The format of competitive debates often lends itself to awarding 'points' based on the number of arguments that can be put out, rather than examining their validity. A time limit only makes that pressure worse.

The Socratic dialogues are written like normal human conversations in an attempt to give the audience the ability to read and understand the ideas being spoken. That's why they are still studied, thousands of years later. The insane drivel-speak of competitive debates will be lucky to be remembered for any few years after the topics they regurgitate stop being relevant.

Just because you are incapable of understanding it doesn't make it drivel. The fact you are trying to discount high school debate on the basis of it not being the Socratic Dialogues (which, to be clear, nothing you have ever done or will do will stand up to those either), just shows you're not arguing in good faith.

High school debate will not be on the same level as Plato, not unless they are miraculously talented high schoolers involved. The techniques that are taught in high school debate still make it far less resembling Plato's writings, or anything coherent. A high schooler taught to argue in a coherent way would produce something that is not drivel. The content of high school debates is drivel. It is a torrent of pre written, basic arguments designed to be quickly heard and given points by judges who already memorized all of those points. No one trying to persuade in the real world talks like a competitive high school debate. Not presidents, not angry college students, not smarmy news anchor talking heads. It's only worth is inside the academic setting where you win points for how many crappy arguments you can cram in a sentence. That's what makes it drivel.

You keep saying "points", but rounds are not decided based on points. Do you actually have any idea how competitive debate works?

Spreading arguments doesn't help you if they're bad arguments. If you think that just laying out more (bad) arguments will win against an experienced team, you're either delusional, or you've never actually watched high-level policy debate.

There are judges, and they incentive verbal diarrhea by making the winners the one who can produce the most 'correct' arguments in the least amount of time. This perverse incentive structure does not exist anywhere else except in competitive debate.

>If you think that just laying out more (bad) arguments will win against an experienced team, you're either delusional, or you've never actually watched high-level policy debate.

I think any argument that is spread is bad. Some are a worse kind of bad. But none are good.

> and they incentive verbal diarrhea by making the winners the one who can produce the most 'correct' arguments in the least amount of time

No, this may happen at low-level tournaments which still have lay/'mommy' judges, but no actual high-preff'd tournament judges are giving out ballots based on the number of arguments run.

Policy is a back-and-forth activity, and whatever arguments are made in the constructives have to actually hold up to the responses to them. If a team is running 9 T arguments, and the Aff team doesn't address their shitty "'The' means a specific singular entity, so using only one part of the USFG is a violation' T argument but covers 3 of the actual strong ones and runs a T-abuse argument as well, no judge is handing Neg the ballot for that.

And none of that is even beginning to touch on Condo (conditionality), which is a whole area of theory arguments specifically addressing Neg running arguments that they don't extend (and why they shouldn't be allowed to). That's especially effective when they're doing some kind off-case abuse like T or competing CPs.

Also, what do you mean "argument that is spread"? You either spread your speech or you don't. No one spreads arguments individually.

> As it turns out the best debaters can talk fast AND make good arguments simultaneously.

Ideally yes, that's what's its SUPPOSED to be like. But I have seldom or never seen it in practice.

It's on the system and judge to stop the students from talking over each other. I don't blame the students. They are just playing the game. If they get rewarded by short-cutting the debate, why not?

Talking over each other? What form of debate did you do? In policy there only one speaker at a time, and no one interrupts the other team's time to try to talk over them. That would be a sure loss, assuming the judge didn't straight end the round immediately.

It’s somewhat beneficial to lawyers etc simply because it exposes people to a different way of thinking. It’s roughly equivalent to science fairs, popsicle bridges, or math competitions for STEM students.

Back when they had corporal punishment (i.e. "spanking") in US schools I had to debate against it in high-school.

One teacher, who used the punishment frequently, was the judge and simply awarded the debate to the pro paddling side and all my (sourced and referenced) arguments were ignored. I always knew it was BS. Then they banned the practice. And I quit the debate team in anger.

So, I guess I really kind of won the debate, it just took a couple more decades.

> Often the only way to succeed is by reframing the stupid position you are supposed to argue for entirely, which appears to be what this is talking about.

Winning seems like a low-value goal here. Classroom simulations exist so students can be exposed to the reality of consequences and outcomes.

I feel better goals here would be how to immerse yourself in an unfamiliar/unwanted position and how to understand the dynamics of a scenario with competing, entrenched positions.

I agree! Which is why I think it's a shame that this is an activity where the best way to win is in fact to not do that at all :(

What this article is leaving out is that you do need an extremely deep understanding of the opposing arguments to be a good K-debater. There are tons of tools to defeat Kritiks, and if all you can do as the K debater is say, "but thing bad", you won't actually win.

On the contrary, there are a lot of non-K policy debaters who want to be able to parrot the same generics at each other each round, and they don't know how to engage with Ks precisely because they don't understand their own position well enough to argue why the basic assumptions it relies upon are the way they are (or aren't what the K is proposing they are).

Opponents of abortion would argue that the same "this isn't really a human" tactics that the Nazis used are still alive; if everyone is comfortable, it sounds like there's a lot of "at least we're not the baddies" going on.

I mean… they might try to, but that line of reasoning doesn’t hold up to even cursory examination.

The position itself—about othering certain groups—would hold up by itself of course. Unfortunately for those you mention it’s most often employed by those on their side of the debate about groups they dislike (Muslims, gay, trans, etc).

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