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.
Am I misinformed on this topic?
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.
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.
(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?)
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.
Sure, it's on me to decide that competitive debate is stupid, optimizing for gimmicks.
Do you think competitive debate are unable to speak slowly when there's not a time limit?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?