Imitiation policy

I'd post a simple comment to PJ's comment, but I think it's worth some discussion of its own.

I go back a long way, and can remember from the 90s the various attractions of policy luring LDers down the road to perdition enlightenment. These were students who saw the strong use of logic and rhetoric in the elder activity, as compared to the sloppiness of much of LD. Bringing in evidence for, well, everything, became quite the fashion.

The problem is that most of us are not policians, and while we wear the fashions of policians on occasion, they don't really suit us. We look like goobers wearing costumes, attempting to blend in and, when the real policians come along, failing miserably. I don't think there's much solution for this except, perhaps, that coaches on occasion force their students to actually watch and flow some policy rounds, rather than just imagining them. Which I think is the core of the problem, that LDers imagine what they think policy is, rather than derive any knowledge from actual empirical evidence, or direct firsthand experience. Think of the blind men and the elephant, without the elephant. That's what most LDers' recapitulation of policy tends to look like. It's not a pretty sight.

-- Menick

Comment on evidence

This comment was worth pulling up to entry level.

The reluctance of many LDers to argue evidence is indeed a problem for the reasons you outline.

This mindset also contributes to why LDers do a rather slipshod job when it comes to taking policy approaches to resolutions. Whatever one might say about qualitative evidence, it is far less controversial (I hope) to postulate that quantitative claims require backing. With statistics debaters may make some blurb on causation and correlation. Non statistical evidence, forget about it.

At best, LDers may have some clashing evidence, though even that is none too common. The idea of actually analytically taking apart the opponent's evidence is not what ninety percent of LDers are doing at the moment.

--PJ Wexler

Reply to Evidence and Research

Menick replied originally to the evidence and research point on his blog.

Let’s look at point 2 of the Bietz manifesto. To wit, he is explaining that we have no great rules about evidence, and that we are about as sloppy with the stuff as is conceivable. (All right, I'm paraphrasing, or maybe more to the point, translating into the Coachean bile dialect). Even if some among us are neat as individuals, we certainly haven’t established any norms for the activity at large.

Yep.

First of all, as he points out, people just usually read an author’s last name. More.

Evidence and Research

We'll pull out the material from MB's article on evidence and research. That's a good starting point for a specific discussion.

A typical citation that is read in a debate round is simply an author’s last name. Qualifications, publication and year are rarely given and rarely checked. I was at the NDT a couple weekends back and watched and listened to a few debate rounds. In nearly every round, evidence comparisons were being made which, in many cases, including comparing an author’s qualifications. I understand why LD has a culture of ignoring citations. To some degree the lack of proper citation is a holdover from the old days of LD when the authors quoted were obvious and known philosophers and political theorists (Rawls, Aristotle, Kant, etc).

In addition to citation, there are two more issues that we are facing when it comes to research and evidence. First, there needs to be some consensus of what it means for something to be “published.” As the Editor-and-Chief of VictoryBriefsDaily.com, I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with what is written on VBD being cited as evidence – whether that be articles or comments. Although, if we allow other credible blogs or credible commenters, then maybe “Bietz from VBD in 2008” is an inevitable citation in the future. As a community we need to discuss what passes as proper evidence.

The second big issue is how evidence is read in round in the context of strikethroughs, underlining, etc. There should be some community norm for how evidence is cut and what is available for opponents to read during a round.

Bietz on 9 issues facing the LD coaching community

This was the article that started it all, originally published in May 2008 Rostrum.

This is a re-post a Rostrum article I wrote in May 2008. Jim Menick, over on his blog, has been commenting on each of the nine things I mention in this article. I think his comments on my article deserve their own category or tag on his website so people can easily read them, but its his site and he’ll run it how he wants. In his latest post, he challenges us, or me, even... More