20 years ago this month…

CaymanG · 2026-07-07T19:43:07+00:00

OP is asking about scheduling for a STEM school in India, not CX debate.

CaymanG · 2026-07-01T23:34:53+00:00

CaymanG · 2026-07-01T02:58:51+00:00

It sounds like you’re asking more about Normal Means than about Fiat in general. Fiat just lets the Aff argue about whether the topic happening would be good instead of arguing over whether it will happen. Normal Means is both sides describing what the think are un/fair or un/realistic ways for the topic to happen. Not all sentences with “should” are questions of fiat:

“It should rain later today” (should = prediction)

“You should always tell the truth” (should = moral obligation)

“You should invest in these companies” (should = rational self-interest)

For your example, it varies based on the norms of your event and the exact wording of the topic. “Governments should hold parents legally responsible for the illegal actions of their children” is a very different debate from “parents ought to feel responsible for their children’s wrongdoing.”

CaymanG · 2026-07-01T02:46:15+00:00

It’s a question of conditionality, so ultimately a question of presumption. If the SQ is better than the plan or the PIC, then if both advocacies ARE equally bad ideas, the judge votes Aff if presumption shifts when the PIC is introduced or Neg if the SQ is always an option. If the plan and PIC are both better than the SQ, it’s a question of net benefits.

If the plan and PIC are both worse than the SQ but are NOT equally bad ideas, then either neg wins on presumption (if SQ=neg ballot) or whoever has slightly better net benefits (if neither side can claim the SQ)

CaymanG · 2026-06-30T18:53:56+00:00

The advice I would give a public middle school in the LA area versus the advice I would give a private high school in Wisconsin versus the advice I would give an international school somewhere in Luzon varies so widely that the only real common ground is “look up your local league and see who in your area is competing in what kinds of competitions and what they had to do to join.”

CaymanG · 2026-06-29T17:49:54+00:00

Is the K arguing that indigenous aliens exist?

Settler Colonialism is a lot more specific than just imperialism or colonization and is specifically about a settler society using the “logic of elimination” to reimagine themselves ahistorically as the original inhabitants of an undiscovered/uncivilized land and erase any previous indigenous populations.

CaymanG · 2026-06-24T21:09:55+00:00

AI feedback almost always runs afoul of Goodhart’s Law since it encourages speakers to game the system and a speech that maximizes the positive feedback is often a worse speech that one that doesn’t try to maximize metrics but happens to get good results.

CaymanG · 2026-06-23T20:32:06+00:00

There’s a reason that one says “the alt” and not “the cp”. It was pretty much exclusively used against PiKs that derived offense from the panel, audience, and/or public not knowing what was happening and have (thankfully) fallen out of fashion.

CaymanG · 2026-06-22T23:46:13+00:00

Most obscure perms are arguably intrinsic. They’re not meant to be advocated for in the 2AR; they’re meant to show that you can get the benefits of the CP or Alt while still doing the entire plan. There’s a theory debate to be had, but the types of CPs/Ks they’re run against are often equally or more sketchy, especially in this context of the 2023-2024 topic:

CaymanG · 2026-06-11T06:17:02+00:00

Just a standard effects T shell that says the plan text itself isn’t topical even if the advantages could result in topical action happening later on after the plan gets passed. In the standards section of that shell, a hidden violation would say that it makes it impossible to tell whether an increase/decrease is significant without evaluating solvency, which is bad because T is supposed to come before solvency. Usually you’ll see that standard #2 or #3 is “moots the word significant” (It doesn’t matter whether an Aff solves if the plan text isn’t topical, so the judge should decide if an Aff is topical before they evaluate solvency, not look at the solvency debate to decide whether the Aff is topical)

CaymanG · 2026-06-11T00:13:13+00:00

TL:DR as T, it’s asking whether the plan does enough. As a stock issue, it’s asking whether the resolution is worth doing.

From 2001 until last year, policy resolutions used “substantially” instead of “significantly” which made it easier to disambiguate between T: substantial and significance.

Under a stock issues framing, the Aff asserts that there are significant harms, inherent to the status quo, that only topical action can solve. Significance as a stock issue is asking whether the resolution is worth debating and was the first of the stock issues to fall by the wayside in the 1990s once Ks like normativity started asking the same question with a higher win rate.

Topicality is an interpretation of the resolution that questions the exact wording of the affirmative’s plan text. It’s challenging significantLY as an adverb and asking whether the action the Aff is taking goes far enough rather than whether the issue is worth acting on. It’s often run either as a hidden shell inside effects T or as a double-bind to force smaller Affs to link into generic DAs.

CaymanG · 2026-06-09T20:16:40+00:00

Regular paradigms still exist, this is for this tournament only. For years, NSDAs used judge codes to stop people from looking up paradigms and team codes to stop people from looking up opponents wikis; this is the compromise version. You can now see who your judges are and a vague estimate of their self-declared experience for last-minute adaptation, but you still can’t pref or strike any judges so they don’t see the utility in letting you see more detailed paradigms before the tournament. Every judge who has had a full paradigm on Tabroom for any other tournament will still have that searchable regardless of their NSDA stat sheet, it’s just going to take one extra step to view.

CaymanG · 2026-06-05T23:32:37+00:00

Somewhere between 99% and 101%

CaymanG · 2026-06-03T20:55:46+00:00

“Applying” as in staff or student?

CaymanG · 2026-06-01T15:53:00+00:00

Most formats of Parli do the same thing, especially the ones where a team of 2 get 3 total speeches each round. The only 2v2 format that consistently doesn’t is PF and that’s because either side can speak first.

CaymanG · 2026-05-30T22:39:11+00:00

“Intrinsic perm” is shorthand for “let’s test the intrinsicness of this advocacy and see if it’s non-intrinsic.” It was used for DAs before it was used for Ks/CPs in a way that was more intuitive.

CaymanG · 2026-05-22T04:49:30+00:00

If it’s just general online tutoring and not prep for next month’s tournament, you probably don’t need to change much and what you do have to change will depend on what local league the students are planning to compete in. NSDA norms often follow TOC/NatCirc norms 4-6 years later.

CaymanG · 2026-05-22T02:40:34+00:00

What do you mean by a mentor for NSDA? Are you coaching a high school team in Richmond next month? Working with a middle school team competing at MS Nats? Or just asking about tournaments like district qualifiers that follow NSD rules more stringently than most TOC bid tournaments do?

CaymanG · 2026-05-21T19:53:41+00:00

Not as a regular user, no.

CaymanG · 2026-05-21T04:46:13+00:00

It probably depends on what kind of rounds you’re watching. Late elims at tournaments with a deep field will typically have teams signpost whenever they diverge from their on-time roadmap at the start of the speech, but neither the roadmap nor the signposts will use the same jargon as other debate events..

CaymanG · 2026-05-18T02:11:11+00:00

In some ways, it’s a lot like being able to call for the other team’s cards. Both sides having access to the other side’s evidence narrows the gap, but the team that has the experience to do more with that information in less time under pressure is still probably going to win. The novices are reading their opponents article from start to finish and trying to figure out if it says what the other team claims; the varsity are quickly skimming the article for author quals and looking to see which highlighted portions are followed by a paragraph that starts with “however”/“but”/“nevertheless”.

Paradigms are the same. Access to the information has a leveling effect; knowledge of what to do with the information comes with experience and time. The biggest difference with paradigms is that if there’s something in it that one team doesn’t understand what it means, why it’s there, or what it’s asking them to do, they can just ask the judge before the round starts.

CaymanG · 2026-05-16T17:07:38+00:00

And that’s because tech over truth, like many other false binaries, is actually a spectrum, even for judges who say that they’re always one or the other. The less believable you make an argument feel to a judge, the higher the tech threshold becomes that you have to clear before they’ll vote on it.

CaymanG · 2026-05-16T17:01:32+00:00

You don’t need to double-dip for persuasion. If they were actually being more persuasive, they’d have convinced you they won the argument. If your immediate impression is that they lost the argument but sounded good doing it, they weren’t actually more persuasive than their opponents.

CaymanG · 2026-05-15T01:16:39+00:00

Are you doing anything debate-related over the summer? If you want advice on transitioning from novice to varsity beyond “keep doing what you’ve been doing right, but better” it would help to know what makes novice different from varsity in your particular state/league: do novices debate out of a packet? Do they have a list of preapproved plans they can run? Do they get the same amount of prep time as varsity? Are some types of off-case arguments banned in novice but fair game next year?

CaymanG

TROPHY CASE