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Comment by atypicaluser | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.

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Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.

This kind of argument is starting to really bother me. Do you really think that the only part of the debate that matters is the actual debate itself? Are you ignorant of the massive amounts of shit that we learned when researching a topic?

I'm bringing up some old memories now, but lets go with some random topics that I recall

a) We should increase USAID funding to Africa to fight HIV/AIDS

b) We should increase alternative energy incentives in the US.

With the USAID topic, we had to learn in high school:

- What is USAID, how does it work

- How does foreign aid to Africa work

- How does the Govt actually allocate funds

- What is HIV/AIDS, how does it spread, and what work is done to prevent/cure it

With the alternative energy topic, we learned:

- How does national alternative energy policy work

- How do states deal with their own energy security vs others

- Does nuclear count as alternative energy

What high schooler is being tought these topics in class. I definitely see debates on HN that are FAR worse than a High School debate since so much research and planning is done by debaters on these topics, and probably know far more than most people.

This is a long battle, "Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist

To many an audience, that's all that matters. I have a persuasive essay due tomorrow night. Part of that is transferable rhetorical strategies removed from the actual specifics. On the flip side of your argument, just presenting a list of facts is not persuasive.

But a) and b) aren't really topics of learning.

Which I want to point out as the root of the problem. Debate is not really about learning, not in the arts and sciences sense.

I remember once an MIT lecture made the point that medicine is not really science. I'll extend that and say, debate is not really about the truth. There's nothing to learn, all it is is learning the rationalizations to serve one side.

So the purpose of debate is to teach high schoolers things? If only there was some other institution they were a part of that could do that. Do HS students no longer take AP history and economics?

You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.

But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.

Here is the nihilism

Except it's not nihilism at all? There are all kinds of ways to increase your and the public's understanding and knowledge. Competitive debate is not it any more than a trial by combat is.

Because its all part of learning how to think critically. Policy Debate is not about actually expecting policy outcomes. It's about learning how to think and argue.

These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy.

Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back.

You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time.

By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.

I didn’t do debate in high school, but I remember a class in the late 80s we had a class “world crisis” which covered the past/current states of Chile, Cuba, Ireland, Israel and South Africa.

We were supposed to debate a South African about apartheid. He couldn’t make it so we debated our teacher (who made his opinions known he was not a fan). He destroyed our arguments one by one. We knew for the rest of the class we would have to up our game.

> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

This! I actually laughed out loud at the following line from tfa:

> A Public Forum debater who reached Semifinals at the Tournament of Champions told me: “I had to know critical theory to win... you have to be prepared in case you have to run it or go against it.”

Literally what? That's the entire fucking point. This is like people complaining about squirrels in debate or cheese in an RTS: if it worked, you suck, so maybe try not to suck instead of whining about it? I mean, I, personally, find arguments and worldviews rooted in appeals to authority to be quite gross, but I don't pretend that I can bury my head in the sand and cry unfair if someone deploys an argument like that against me and I can't deal with it due to lack of familiarity. Not really seeing how this scenario is any different.

Even in the extreme case of an outright biased judge, that's still in the game: inverting the K to demonstrate that, actually, the side that raised it are arguing for structural racism or whatever is both a ton of fun and really good experience.

Bias disclaimer: ran/defended against Ks in PF to great success long ago

The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space. A negative side that sticks to refuting the particular details of that policy is putting themselves at a severe disadvantage - they're always going to be behind in research and debate experience on that topic relative the affirmative (unless maybe they happen to use that same policy proposal themselves when assigned the affirmative). So debaters have used generic negative strategies for many decades, not just meta-critiques of their opponents discursive approach or assumptions ("Ks") but also "disadvantages" based on generalities like "your proposal will use up political capital and prevent Y from happening", and topicality arguments, where e.g. there might be two (or more) facially plausible interpretations of what's in scope for the topic, and they'll argue that whichever the affirmative has used to justify their proposal is incorrect.

Debate is competitive. Yes, each side wants to "get one over" or "blindside" their opponent, but that's not different with the K than with any other creative argument or novel bit of research, and at higher competitive levels everyone is going to be quite comfortable debating the K (at least since the 1990s).

> The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space.

This seems like an advantage to the affirmative side. in that light, Ks are a strategy to negate the affirmative advantage.

It is. The main advantage that the negative has is that they only need to win 1 of what are called the 5 "stock issues" in order to win a policy debate round. Furthermore, the negative can also run something called a "counter-plan," which I talked about in another comment. That's basically something structured a bit like the affirmative plan, but which (typically) does not affirm the resolution. That's frequently enough to put the affirmative off balance, because the negative has essentially free reign to argue for anything outside of the resolution.

> Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all?

Why do people cheat at anything? Because they want to win.

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