Comment by csharpminor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csharpminor | Hacker News Reader

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I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this opinion, as it doesn’t match my experience as a competitive debater in college. Have you ever been on a debate team or is this from observing? I’m genuinely curious!

To refute your points a bit :) ->

1. Debate itself is highly stressful, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My time in debate made defending my honors thesis much less stressful and I’m a very calm presenter as a result.

2. This is exactly what debate research forces you to do. You may not get to choose your side, but you’ve done your best to prep in either direction. You get very good at understanding if the evidence provided has any gaps, and if it supports the impacts claimed.

3. Debaters do read judge profiles to understand the audience and determine strategy.

4. This is a major part of prep, as naturally you need to prepare both sides and understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep.

5. This occurs often, as mentioned in the article linked above. Ks and counter plans allow debaters to reframe the topic in many ways.

On your last paragraph: I experienced the opposite. Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced.

I will say that for my part, debate had a profound impact on my life. It taught me how to research, consider unintuitive perspectives, and articulate a point.

My research in debate directly led to a fellowship, honors thesis, and mentorship - all outside of debate. I leveraged my academic success into a great career and owe a lot to the skills I picked up on my college debate team.

> Have you ever been on a debate team

Agreeing with OP and having participated in debate and mock student legislatures, with some success, from middle school through college — your points in rebuttal illustrate OP's complaints. Your rebuttal plays the prompt before you attempt to understand the point or the person making them.

You aren't effectively rebutting anything with your points; regardless of your intent, you've created a prompt out of OP and then presented a case to win it. The pressure of debate doesn't inherently improve a point; not every disagreement can or should be decided with evidence; reading judge profiles doesn't help exercise empathy and sympathy; "understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep" misses the point of critically self-examining what that statement means in the first place; a solution lying outside of a debate is not an invitation to reframe the topic but to step out of the debate to try to come to a shared understanding on a different level.

Your approach would be, and has been, a natural approach I've turned to when it was the most prominent (or only) way I'd learned to approach a disagreement. If not OP's point, then at least for me it's proven to be a fundamentally flawed one when applied to most venues outside of the structure of competitive debate. It plays well in a lot of modern venues, especially online, but it doesn't accomplish much.

> Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced

This reminds me of an observation that I made far too late in life, though I'm not sure how I could have discovered when it would have been most useful, in high school or thereabouts. That is that although I enjoy getting into debates where I am confident I am prepared to push for my own side in the best of faith, I find that in practice what I what I always end up driving toward is to push for a draw, even when I feel my own position is the stronger.

Even when I feel like if I have "won", it's muffled under a vaguely anticlimactic suspicion that due to limited time or poorly managed tangential sidetracks that the matter is still unsettled, that I didnt do my best to exhaust all of the reasonable avenues of discourse.

I was in high school debate and I would agree with the poster above you. In general, debates are judged based on the stated arguments in the debates, which makes sense. However, what this often leads to is debaters simply preparing rote responses to any argument the opponent may present, and then reading off as many as possible (some even speak extremely quickly, called “speed”).

The trouble with this is that most times, a nuanced or carefully considered argument will be quickly overridden by several generic responses, and when you don’t respond to all of their responses they will argue that you dropped the point and therefore they automatically win.

Debates mostly devolve into a game of tug of war, with very little thought or quality put into the arguments. K’s are in a similar category, and are mostly successful in an attempt to catch the opponent off guard by arbitrarily changing the topic.

Most of the skills I learned in debate have been thoroughly useless when it comes to determining the truth or making decisions. It has made it easy for me to derail discussions, though.

That was the big benefit I saw w/parliamentary debate over policy. The lack of prepared topics and arguments helped you learn how to think critically and rapidly under pressure.

(and if you tried speaking at speed like a policy debater, you would lose points)

Debate has many benefits.

Participating in debate competition does all the things you say. I would say that the biggest benefit is learning how to form a narrative.

As an observer, debate has not so many benefits in the real world. On the competitive debate stage, you have to follow some rules, in the real world, you win by exploiting people.

I do not believe observing debate is effective for finding and deciding facts.

I do not believe observing debate is effective for changing minds. The imposition of 'sides' reinforces many of the biases and fallacies that you're taught not to use; people regularly fight dirty in real life.

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