Recently gave me the tiniest of glimpses into the world of competitive policy debate and oh wow I am still a naive idiot about this subculture but I am SO! FASCINATED!
First! Some of them make arguments at ~six trillion WPM?? Please listen:
Conversation
These arguments draw on huge libraries of cards which they prepare in advance, individually summarizing various speeches, policy documents, positions, etc! Teams use these plastic tubs to transport these papers b/c they maximize checked baggage volume! nytimes.com/2010/04/18/edu
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They "cut" 1000s of these cards by using a multi-level scale of underlining, bolding, highlighting, font size, etc to make the key points of a primary source rapidly visible on the page! There are plugins for word processors to help do this more quickly! chrome.google.com/webstore/detai
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The highlighting technique makes me wonder whether some of How to Read a Book's approach could be executed this way, surfacing the text's structural skeleton through levels of inline markup, rather than by making a parallel summarizing outline. I'll need to try these plugins!
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Also: any claims one team makes which aren't specifically refuted by the opposing team are taken to be true! The fast-talkers are fast-talking to make as many claims as possible—and the opposing team has to track and then refute each one!
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I still don't understand anything that's going on when I watch one of these things, but I'm totally fascinated and impressed! (And my apologies, , for my inevitable butchery of what you described)
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I also find the policy debate community totally fascinating—my partner Lingxi is a recovering debater—but somehow argumentation games where you have to reach a predestined conclusion don't sit right with me.
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Then again, maybe participants end up with the tools required to understand arguments from multiple perspectives? I go back and forth on this. Probably in large part a matter of team culture and coaching.
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This seems more like "its own thing"—like its own game / art form—than like what I think of as argumentation? But maybe if I slow down all the words and listen carefully, these arguments are coherent, compelling, meaning-dense, etc? Maybe my sense of argumentation is broken?
Interesting, I had never really thought about it in those terms; as a practice completely independent and apart from argumentation. Let me ask Lingxi about that...
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Lingxi insists that debate really is about making quality arguments, and that most of the time that's what you get. Which seems consistent with how most debaters I know talk about it.
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