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