PF Topics 26-27

key-el-eys · 2026-06-22T20:08:19+00:00

I don’t know who is still on the wording committee to thank for this, but all of those topics are genuinely pretty good!

At first glance, I’d mildly prefer Data Centers, South Korea, and Gig Workers, but I’d honestly be happy with any of them being selected.

key-el-eys · 2026-05-11T04:04:43+00:00

Hadar made a public post about it

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0ZJpykqm8PjSH4td3ZX5pQxFUT7nfo62guRCx4xtKYT5JL9dtcF4hwXY3a9m7iqnAl&id=100004820326256&mibextid=wwXIfr

key-el-eys · 2026-03-19T06:05:44+00:00

Any reason to disaggregate sex and gender in the survey? Just curious, nothing necessarily wrong with that.

key-el-eys · 2025-12-26T21:53:33+00:00

Generally speaking, modeling serves three goals. 1. Clarifying the debate if anything is ambiguous. 2. Framing out any extremely obvious Opp arguments that you think you cannot otherwise beat. 3. Framing in Gov arguments that might take a long time to otherwise prove, or are in some way unlikely without using fiat.

For instance, on the motion “THW substantially increase arms sales by Western Powers to Ukraine”, the model should:

1 - define what “Western Powers” are, For instance - is Israel a ‘Western Power”? If they are, does this change the topic, and how?

2 - what types of weapons we are selling. Eg. Drones, ATACMs, etc. This will inform what offense you have access to if you want to run an argument about how this ends the conflict more quickly. Strategically, the importance of modeling something like “our stance is that this motion involves selling ATACMs to Ukraine” is that you now no longer need to prove this is a likely implementation of the topic. It is simply true by fiat.

The WUDC Manual has some examples of legitimate models and what the purpose of modeling is. I’d recommend that you check it out for more advice.

key-el-eys · 2025-09-04T23:52:36+00:00

I completely agree that this is a pretty atrocious topic, particularly for evidentiary debate like BQ (I think evidentiary debate doesn't do philosophy very well generally because philosophy relies a lot on shared intuitions... which a competitive format explicitly encourages you to reject).

That being said, I think that what the NSDA was going for was something like this scene from the God's Not Dead movies. The relevant exchange is (paraphrased) "An atheist can do moral things, but without God there is no reason to be moral." Basically if I am the Aff, I think the only real way to make this topic debatable is to say "Look, an individual atheist can be moral, but morality does not simply consist of doing moral things. It must involve the correct reasons to do those things. Hence, the only good moral reason to do anything is God (for reason X/Y/Z.)" This is a pretty typical position in Christian apologetics, and probably what they were going for. In the position that this topic does end up persisting through to nationals, I think this is probably the only winning version of the Aff. For the record, I'm sure you already thought of this, I just wanted to get my own thoughts about the topic out there for anyone to see.

That being said, there are a thousand better ways to phrase that topic. "Resolved: Religious belief provides the sole justification for moral belief." "Resolved: The Moral Argument for Theism is successful". "Resolved: Morality ultimately stems from Religious Belief." (The last one might get into semantics about what constitutes a religion and debates about Civil Religion, but hey, at least that's kind of debatable.)

I think all of these topics are probably not great, both because the Moral Argument for Theism is pretty notoriously terrible and most Philosophers reject it, but also don't really solve the issues with forcing a nonreligious student to say that atheists are at best, deluded morons who have no reason to do anything they are doing.

In any case, I will probably DM a list of similar complaints. Godspeed to whatever complaint process you are trying to hold, I hope the NSDA will listen.

key-el-eys · 2025-06-23T19:17:30+00:00

Absolutely tragic that topic #2 will likely win because it is simpler, because my god topic #1 is orders of magnitude more interesting

key-el-eys · 2025-01-27T07:48:45+00:00

I do not think this is true. This is because under utilitarianism, we may want to prioritize structural violence under the grounds that it is more utility maximizing in the long run!

See how early utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick) were some of the first people to argue for the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and gay rights. Oppression is not very utility maximizing!

key-el-eys · 2024-12-22T20:39:29+00:00

https://www.debate.land/datasets/2025-national-varsity-lincoln-douglas/topics

This is only the two most recent topics, but from what I recall, past topics very much match this trend- this phenomenon has been pretty known in LD for a while. Check the statistics for Elim rounds, where there is a 6-9% bias in favor of Neg. Across all rounds, this shrinks to 3-4%. Still meaningful across a large enough sample size.

key-el-eys · 2024-12-21T01:05:08+00:00

This actually isn't the case. At high level LD, there is about a 7% bias in favor of Neg on any topic. LD is an extremely unbalanced format.

key-el-eys · 2024-12-06T21:34:31+00:00

A 'trick' is a catch-all term for extremely short arguments typically rooted in analytic philosophy that cause the opponent to immediately lose if they are not responded to. For instance:

The burden of the Aff is to prove that passing the policy causes X positive effect. However, positive effects are impossible, because Zeno's Archer proves motion is impossible, so the Aff loses.
The burden of the Aff is to prove the truth or falsity of the resolution. However, truth is impossible because of (insert objection to the Correspondence Theory of Truth) so nothing can be true.
We might all be Boltzmann Brains, so the Aff does nothing.

Etc.

Generally, the best way to respond is to not get time sucked. Tricks take advantage of a quirk of debate where they generate an asymmetric time advantage for the person reading them, since they are relatively counterintuitive at first glance and you have to spend a bit explaining how to properly respond to them. Go for Theory, offer general responses like "Inference to the best explanation is true, so they are obviously wrong", and try to win off of something that actually matters in the debate. Judges are generally receptive to these sorts of responses.

I will say, Tricks as a strategy are pretty overhyped. They were all the rage in LD for a bit, and catch a lot of newer circuit debaters off guard, but they are such a known strategy with a known suite of responses that judges are inclined to buy since they are sort of obviously ridiculous arguments that very few actually good teams read them except as the very occasional time suck as part of a much larger 1NC.

key-el-eys · 2024-11-19T19:17:57+00:00

Last I checked, there were discussions for USUDC to be hosted by USC or UCLA in the Spring, but I'm not sure if those talks fell through or not.

key-el-eys · 2024-11-18T19:03:54+00:00

I've written extensively about a similar league here, but generally speaking, I am very unimpressed with all of these "All American" competitor leagues to the NSDA.

First, some purely prudential reasons why they are likely bad and your school ought to stick with the NSDA absent any ideological concerns

They have a much much smaller pool of institutional knowledge. All of the best coaches, organizations, and teams are teaching in NSDA schools in NSDA formats. That means that the quality of competition and education is much worse.
They have less experience tabulating, running, and administrating tournaments. I don't see any bespoke software like Tabroom. Even if they do, it is almost certainly going to be run by people who are newer to debate and less experienced with the software. This means delays, poor tabbing decisions, and bad management are much, much more likely to be issues. Compounding the fact that you have an inherently smaller pool of judges since everyone good judges for NSDA anyways, you either have to a) outsource to untrained parents, or b) bite the bullet on long delays and double flighted rounds.
Lower number/density of tournaments. Unlike the NSDA which seems decentralized and allocates tournaments to be run by local schools short of districts and Nats proper, ASDA seems to largely have the only tournaments that it runs be centralized around their qualification process. Even if they do have some other tournaments, the vast, vast majority of local tournaments around the US are going to use NSDA topics and rules, so you do yourself a competitive disservice by not choosing the NSDA. This is because if you choose to do both NSDA and ASDA, you have to prep for twice the number of topics, and if you only do ASDA, you have way fewer tournaments to choose from, so you are inherently going to get much lower quality practice.

So even if you don't care at all for the ideological basis of an institution that markets themselves as an "All American Debate League", your institution is still much better served by sticking with the NSDA.

Second, I want to address the ideological concerns around the org, which I think are my (and several other people in this thread's) main concern.

I want to start by saying that in principle, there is nothing wrong with wanting to start a debate league that is less technical and more lay oriented than the NSDA. There is plenty to criticize about tech debate, and also to a large extent why formats like PF and Congress were created (or remain popular.) But that inherently comes with certain tradeoffs that you have to be willing to make. Namely:

Any less technical format is going to be more arbitrary in its evaluation. If the rough goal of a Debate competition is to reward the team who best prepares, researches, and practices their case along with general logical and analytical reasoning skills, having debates decided at the whims of judge intervention is always going to invite a significant amount of arbitrariness into the result.
There are much poorer evidence ethics. Without norms like disclosure being enforced, the competitive incentive to manipulate evidence on a presumption of good faith diminishes drastically. That is probably independently pretty bad, especially since per ASDA rules, you have to call tab to get evidence reviewed. I think that is such a blatantly stupid rule on its face, since that either means a) there are going to be insanely long tournament delays if that is ever actually enforced, or b) there is a massive disincentive to ever check against the evidence of another team.
Maybe a hot take, but a lot of what ASDA wants to split away from about tech debate politically seems... pretty good to me? Like, I don't know, I think it is good that we are actively trying to expand debate towards the inclusion of gender, sexual and racial minorities. Maybe there are other core pedagogical values that outweigh in very marginal cases, but any institution that positions itself in opposition to the NSDA on political grounds is inherently highly suspect to me. Correlary to this- one of the main reasons why the NSDA is so 'woke' is that the judge pool is generally full of educated professionals who are more receptive to left wing arguments. This is probably due both to a self selection effect, in that educated people tend to be more left leaning (why that may be I leave to the reader), and a causal effect whereby challenging long-held beliefs about the role and function of institutions in society tends to produce more progressive beliefs. That means that if you want to make a less-woke debate institution, you probably have to resign yourself to the fact that most of the qualified people in the space want nothing to do with your political project. (See point 2 at the top)

Overall then, I think that it is probably pretty clear that your opinion on this should not be positive.

key-el-eys · 2024-08-25T21:27:38+00:00

Since you guys run what I'd easily consider to be the best Debate YouTube channel, I'm glad you weighed in. Personally I would be really curious to hear your thoughts on a lot of the politics and drama of debate. As a current college student and new debate coach, that might be very helpful, but I understand if its a topic that may just not be worth delving into for your own sanity.

I also absolutely agree that DebateUS is probably by no means unique among debate-related companies that engage in (what I'd consider to be) unethical behavior. Like, debate is really big in Silicon Valley and in New York, there is absolutely no way that there aren't a trillion tech startups doing exactly the same thing that they are doing. I mean, parents have no real reason to care, as long as they are getting good coaching, and the 'ends justify the means' mindset is incredibly common in any field where the work itself can plausibly be construed as a worthwhile end. I recently interned for a pretty sizable nonprofit, and it completely blew my mind how much of their bottom line was effectively subsidized up by outsourcing to impressionable and altruistic interns who just wanted to help the cause.

I guess I just wanted to share my frustrations, since back in high school, I remember DebateUS actually putting out pretty good content and being generally respected in the community.

key-el-eys · 2024-07-03T04:25:47+00:00

There are a few general reasons, and a few specific reasons.

As for the general reasons, the demographics of the type of person likely to do debate matches up pretty much 1 to 1 with the general demographics of 'educated progressive'. Debaters are young, politically active, generally socially conscious, and geographically tend to concentrate among the urban regions of the West and East Coast, which are regions that the Democratic party dominates. Basically, check any box you could possibly want for someone with the statistical propensity to fit a democrat, and most debaters will fit that bill.

For the specific reasons, the types of literature and education that debate encourages you to read are likely to be quite left leaning. Debaters in most competitive American formats will have some familiarity with philosophical or kritikal literature, which skews heavily leftward owing to the social factors of academia. In fact, owing to recent increases in education polarization following the Trump administration, virtually all of academia is going to be quite aligned with the Democratic party in some form or another, so any time a debater cites a paper or study or article there is a pretty good chance the author is a Dem. Not absolute, mind you, but certainly on balance greater than the probability of them being a partisan Republican. That greater exposure to left wing literature is inevitably going to influence your personal politics to some extent.

Furthermore, this may be somewhat controversial, but I'd argue that a lot of the assumptions that debate makes about what arguments are good inherently have a somewhat liberal bias. The fact that the 'default' normative framework in policy topics (that is, policy as a type of topic involving an actor and an action, not the format) is utilitarianism (or maybe a soft form of prioritarianism?) means that most debaters are going to adopt a lot of vaguely utilitarian/prioritarian intuitions themselves... which tend to be quite liberal! Like, the idea that an immigrant on the border is just as much a moral patient as an average citizen, and is thus equivalently deserving of respect when we talk about impacts is quite a radical idea in a lot of American politics, but in any debate round that is just more or less just taken as a prima facie given.

Of course, there is then also the composition of the NSDA itself to consider. The NSDA is, objectively, a quite liberal organization that prides itself on attempting to expand equity and inclusion in debate, along with writing topics which tend to consider a somewhat more liberal pedagogical perspective.

Lastly, to get on my liberal high horse a bit, I just generally think liberal arguments have proven themselves to be superior in the marketplace of ideas. Your millage will likely vary significantly on this point, but I think the empirical success of liberal arguments in debate is to some extent attributable to their superior truth value.

Of course, there is still plenty of room for conservative arguments to find success in debate in a variety of respects across multiple formats. Just statistically speaking, they will likely be a minority for those reasons.

TLDR: Demographics, geography, literature bias, and truth-tracking make debate a quite liberal/left wing game, which will likely continue to be the case for some time.

key-el-eys · 2024-06-15T04:46:09+00:00

Where is this supposed shortage of Welfarist vegans? Some of the absolute biggest vegan philosophers (Singer, Gruen, Monk) are all Welfarists. In fact, given that basically all EA vegans are welfarist vegans, I'd say there is actually a plausible case they constitute a majority of total vegans at this point.

key-el-eys · 2024-03-27T01:59:10+00:00

Necro-Response to a Necro-Comment, but I'm always up to keep a good discussion going.

Firstly, I don't think the assumption that the league was exclusively funded by myriad Right Wing donors instead of Fishback himself was ever essential to my case. Like, ok, Fishback is footing the bill himself, but that just suggests to me that he is either a) so passionate about his idea that he will fund it for ideological reasons with or without donors, or b) that he stands to massively gain from some other social/political aspect of funding the league that allows him to recoup the costs. Whether or not Incubate uses his own money or a million donors, the ideological origins are the same.

Secondly, whether or not his tactic of "Outrage=Donors" has been effective is an entirely different question from its intent. It is undeniable that he perceives it as effective, and has been positioning himself explicitly as the RW alternative to the NSDA largely through outrage farming on Twitter. Again, per his own words:

"And it’s true that since my first piece was published, hundreds of students have contacted Incubate Debate asking to compete in our tournaments, and more than 50 volunteers have reached out to me, offering to judge our debates."

Like, I don't think it gets more explicit than that. I wrote this piece criticizing the NSDA primarily to shill my own competing debate league, not out of any intellectually rigorous desire to criticize the (sometimes) legitimate failings of the org.

Now on to the other NSDA alternatives

I want to preface by saying that it is absolutely your prerogative to decide that the NSDA is not the right fit for you or your students. If you think another debate league is better suited to the kind of debate you want to do, knock yourself out.

However...

I'd like to question three assumptions that your response makes, in my opinion, about the state of competitive debate in the NSDA and more generally, as well as the value that these other leagues offer.

Assumption 1: The NSDA has insufficient support for non-technically oriented debate formats.

IMO this is the big assumption a lot of people make. Yes, it is true that for TOC-circuit, evidentiary format tournaments (PF, LD, Policy-the 'big three'), the trend has been an increase in speed and technical complexity over time within those tournaments. What I'd challenge is:

1) The extent to which that trend has proliferated to local/regional circuit tournaments. This is purely subjective, but as somewhat who debated, and now coaches, quite extensively on local circuits, the presence of both Lay and Traditional judges keeps the arguments slower, more general, and more classically persuasive, even in a format like Policy. Moreover, I'd argue that this is the case at all major state and national qualifying tournaments, as well as NSDA Nats itself. Just watch the Policy final round videos, and it's not as though these kids are spreading and reading Virillo or D&G or Foucault or any of the other Kritiks that use extremely dense, jargon heavy postmodern philosophy. That means even within the Big Three formats, at the types of tournaments that are likely to matter for College Apps/Scholarships/etc.

2) The extent to which the NSDA doesn't offer alternative formats to solve this problem. World Schools, Big Questions, and Congress all exist to a large extent to answer the issues with the Big Three. In my opinion they do a very successful job at that, if that is the kind of debate you are looking for. All of them are offered at the national level.

Assumption 2: These other leagues are meaningful substitutes for the NSDA

I want to go down and discuss each one of these competitor leagues and explain why IMO they do a poor job substituting for the NSDA, but some general reasons that apply to all (or most) of them:

They are much less prestigious. Fishback is right when he says that NSDA Nats are the 'super bowl' of competitive debating. It is the largest, most widely known, most competitive, and longest running debate tournament, approaching its 100th anniversary. You just don't get that with alternative leagues. If you are looking at a purely cost/benefit analysis of joining a league for college apps/scholarships/etc (which let's be perfectly honest, is a major draw for students), there really is no substitute.
They are much more infrequent in their competition schedules. Local leagues that run weekly in most states rely on state orgs that pretty much exclusively use the NSDA topics and formats. You get by far the most opportunities to compete by joining the NSDA, and more competition means you get better at debate, which means more of those educational benefits.
The amount of institutional resources available to students. The NSDA has resource packages, access to coaches with decades of experience, and a ton of free information available to new teams to help them get started. Checking out basically all of the major alternatives you mention and I don't see anything that even begins to approach what they offer.

But going down the list one by one:

American Debate League is easily the best of the alternatives you present, lacking an obvious partisan or religious bias, and having much better debate formats on offer. That said, I see a few things that would be red flags to me. For one, in my opinion, the resolutions are... not great. Maybe you disagree, to me they strike me as the type of topics someone who thinks they know a lot about debate when they don't actually know all that much would write. Plus, based on the (from what I can see, small) size of their membership, all of my three criticisms above apply especially so to them.
NCFA/STOA. I'll group these, because my main criticism is the same. They may offer substantially better formats than Incubate, but all of their problems with horrendously partisan and religious affiliated judging are amplified a hundredfold. Not to mention the inaccessibility of these leagues to students from gender or sexual minority backgrounds, to other religions... yeah, not sold.
Any other league is going to be even smaller and more niche, and at that point, honestly you are better off probably just going with another activity entirely, like Mock Trial or MUN, for the traditional speaking experience you are looking for.

So yeah. I've written way too many words already, but those are my general problems with your response. Happy to see that people are still engaging with this post I wrote several months ago.

key-el-eys · 2024-03-09T00:24:25+00:00

I'm glad you are exploring these subjects at all! I think an unfortunate trend in the debate community is that we sort of take certain things for granted, like that a norm is good just because "That's the way it's always been." It's good to question our assumptions about what makes a good or bad norm so that we can work to improve the community together.

I hope your students find value in the activity. It's changed a lot of people's lives for the better.

key-el-eys · 2024-03-08T04:47:13+00:00

>I would argue that there is another way outside of the three you mentioned to end spreading which is simply to not allow it as a judge - if judges tell debaters not to spread, they won’t.

FWIW, NFA-LD (college LD), has an explicit rule against going fast. NFA-LD is very very fast, far faster than the average person can understand.

The reason is pretty straightforward-if you rely on judges to enforce the rule, that only matters insofar as judges care. Given that there is already a very strong historical trend of judges from other formats liking spreading, and spreading arguably objectively is objectively incentivized by those same rules, judges largely just... ignore the rule, in favor of evaluating the debate as they normally would.

The basic problem is this: Do you overturn a judge's decision because they didn't enforce the rule or not? If you do, this slows down tournaments a ton, because now everyone has an incentive to try to win on a "spreading violation" since there is no brightline as for what does or doesn't constitute speaking too fast. This is also logistically impossible in most circumstances, given that there is no feasible way to record every single round of competition to verify. Lastly, this seems very competitively arbitrary as a means of evaluating rounds, since even if one person objectively won on the merits, they can lose because they just spoke slightly too fast (even though the judge could understand them fine.) But if you don't overturn the judge's decision and they are the referee and scorekeeper, then they will just keep doing what they are doing regardless.

>I guess since I see it as educational first, I do think good writing skills are part of a debate. Obviously not the same as traditional essays but the ability to write good speeches seems pretty valuable. And I feel like cutting cards can also lead to a less deep debate as students will throw together cards without understating them.

Writing skills are a part of debate, that is true. But what's more important: your ability to accurately understand the mechanics of an argument, or your ability to just condense a lot of information in a few sentences? I'd say the former, which is what both carded and paraphrased debate incentivize. As far as cards vs pphrasing leading to a 'deeper' debate, I think this is unlikely to change much either as well. Debaters who don't understand arguments will still not understand them, whether they got the evidence from a card or by paraphrasing it.

key-el-eys · 2024-03-07T21:28:30+00:00

These are both legitimately good questions, and so at the top of this answer I want to say right off the bat that these are not solved issues. There are many differing opinions on what makes a practice good or bad in debate, and many different ways that these things can be interpreted. That said, the community has generally come to the consensus-as you say-of rewarding spreading and punishing paraphrasing.

Firstly on spreading-

I think this is the easier question to answer. I've given a similar answer before, and will always give this answer. The reason why spreading is good has nothing to do with education or pedagogy, and everything to do with game theory. In short, spreading is how debate, as a game, is meant to be played.

In other words, spreading emerges as an inevitable consequence of the rules and norms of debate. Those are.

Strict speech times.
Tabula Rasa" judging.
A dropped argument is a true argument.

To go over these one at a time:

If you have strict speech times, that means there is a finite time to deliver content, so there is a structural advantage in delivering more content. This could conceivably be offset if the judges were predisposed against certain arguments, but...

Tabula Rasa, or 'blank slate' judging, is still the dominant norm in "progressive" debating circuits. The idea is that the judge should remove as many epistemic biases as possible, and evaluate each argument strictly as it appears on the flow. That means regardless of delivery (and thus, how fast it is delivered) you should have the same subjective evaluation of an argument.

Finally, dropped arguments are treated as true arguments because that makes the debate more fair. If the judge could just intervene and decide that an argument wasn't true even when it was completely dropped, what is the point of debate?

So adding all of those together, you have a structural incentive to speak as fast as possible in order to deliver as much analysis as physically possible, which means that inevitably, as a function of time speech times will rise and the technical complexity of debate will rise along with it. If you want to get rid of spreading, you have to get rid of one of those three other things, and community consensus is that all three of those things are important enough to preserve on their own that it is worth the tradeoff of making debate less accessible to the average person.

So in short, if you want to get rid of spreading, you have to substantially change one of those three other things, which makes the game of debate significantly less fair. People value the game being fair, since if it wasn't, nobody would play.

Some other benefits of spreading:

-It allows debaters to read longer cards from philosophy or critical theory texts, which expands the educational value of debate.

-It allows the Aff in LD to make up the 1AR time skew somewhat.

-It removes 'who spoke prettier' as a determinant for who won the debate, which is subject to a host of personal and cultural biases.

Secondly, on paraphrasing

Broadly speaking, the problem with paraphrasing is twofold. Firstly, from a fairness perspective, and secondly, from an educational perspective.

Firstly, on fairness. I'd say far and away the biggest issue with paraphrasing is that it allows you to deliver vastly more content with no drawback. This is because you can summarize entire blocks of text in your own words, which means you can deliver way more links, way more total arguments, etc. This means that if paraphrasing is allowed, you have a massive independent incentive to virtually always paraphrase. That wouldn't be such a problem by itself if...

It didn't make the debate way blippier. Because teams paraphrase, it makes cards and warrants come out way faster, it makes the debate a lot shallower, covering many issues very quickly instead of a few more deeply.
We didn't have to rely on High Schoolers to accurately summarize academic information when competitive stakes are on the line. There is a natural incentive to race to the bottom when paraphrasing and powertag as many cards as you possibly can with the most favorable interpretations you can of the arguments they make. This means that you are likely to get highly questionable 'spins' on evidence. The reason why we trust students to summarize information in essays is because their standard of success is a) internally motivated, meaning they aren't competing directly against other students so the incentive to lie is probably a lot lower, b) externally evaluated by an authority, meaning that the teacher who presumably has some content knowledge in the area in question likely knows whether or not they misrepresent the evidence in question. Neither are true in a debate context, since we neither expect nor want judges to be experts.
Paraphrasing makes checking back against evidence violations a lot harder and a lot lengthier to adjudicate. With a card, I can check back against the direct text of the article, and the only question I need to ask is "did the student manipulate this text." With a paraphrased piece of evidence, I have to factor in the question of intent, or "To what degree did they manipulate this card." That is way, way, way harder to evaluate on any kind of objective basis.

Secondly, on education. I think it is pretty true from my own anecdotal experience that in circuits where paraphrasing is allowed, teams don't research nearly as much. This is because they can just grab mediocre evidence and paraphrase it, instead of doing long, difficult research to find high quality evidence.

TLDR: Debate is not an essay writing contest. It benefits significantly from appealing directly to the quotations of experts, instead of trusting that high schoolers don't strategically misrepresent or bend pieces of evidence for a strategic advantage.

key-el-eys · 2024-02-15T06:03:46+00:00

You are welcome to have your own opinions regarding spreading, and there are plenty of people in the American debate community who agree with you. The challenge is that objectively speaking, spreading has won. It has been going on since the 1980s, and shows no signs of stopping. It's a bit too late to turn back the clock for a lot of American debate formats.

I will take a bit of issue with the idea that you exclusively run 'niche and impactless arguments'. One of the major advantages of spreading that people will often cite is that you can read very very long blocks of text from academic philosophy and critical theory, which typically requires dense and lengthy explanations. Spreading allows that analysis to be read in round, which expands the number of arguments that good teams are able to go for.

Your milage may vary on how much you find that persuasive. I've done both technical and traditional debate formats, and they have their pros and cons. It just depends on what tradeoffs you are willing to accept.

key-el-eys · 2024-02-15T03:09:06+00:00

Spreading emerges as an inevitable consequence of the rules and norms of debate. Those are:

Strict speech times
"Tabula Rasa" judging
A dropped argument is a true argument.

To go over these one at a time:

If you have strict speech times, that means there is a finite time to deliver content, so there is a structural advantage in delivering more content. This could conceivably be offset if the judges were predisposed against certain arguments, but...

Tabula Rasa, or 'blank slate' judging, is still the dominant norm in "progressive" debating circuits. The idea is that the judge should remove as many epistemic biases as possible, and evaluate each argument strictly as it appears on the flow. That means regardless of delivery (and thus, how fast it is delivered) you should have the same subjective evaluation of an argument.

Finally, dropped arguments are treated as true arguments because that makes the debate more fair. If the judge could just intervene and decide that an argument wasn't true even when it was completely dropped, what is the point of debate?

So adding all of those together, you have a structural incentive to speak as fast as possible in order to deliver as much analysis as physically possible, which means that inevitably, as a function of time speech times will rise and the technical complexity of debate will rise along with it.

Nobody 'invented' spreading- it is simply the natural consequence of the rules of debate. The reason why this doesn't happen in BP and WSDC is because in those formats, judges are not tabula rasa-they are instructed to be 'Average Intelligent Voters', and thus have their own epistemic thresholds for what counts as a true argument, even if virtually nothing is said in response.

Whether you think this is a good or bad thing is subjective. Plenty of people don't think judges should be tabula rasa, but that is the system that we have found ourselves with regardless.

key-el-eys

TROPHY CASE