Debate seems like a horrible format in the first place: It incentives willfully misunderstanding the person you're talking to, arguing by volume rather than quality, pouncing on any flimsy excuse to take offense and perform moral outrange, being glib and confident rather than nuanced and acknowledging good objections, etc. It's the intellectual version of professional wrestling - certainly takes some skill and superficially looks like what it's pantomiming, but at the end of the day it's just a parody of real productive discourse.
I think debate is really good in some ways. Virtually nothing else gets high school students doing hours of worthwhile research daily. But there are huge downsides -- this is one of them.
Maybe those habits, and internalizing a preference for "winning" over finding out what's actually true, explain why some of these conversations seem so absurd and awful.
Yeah -- though I just want to flag, I think debate is really good. Doing debate may be the best decision I made in my life -- it made me much smarter and more sophisticated.
Yeah, I don't doubt that a lot of people have a good experience and take something really positive away from it. There aren't a lot of other opportunities in high school for doing critical thinking with someone else playing defense. I just wonder if there are ways to mitigate some of the pathological and perverse aspects while retaining the parts that make it valuable.
There might be. I think it's good, contrary to a lot of people, that people have to defend things they disagree with. Doing debate shows people that there are good arguments made by the other side. One thing about the people who read arguments about their identity in debate rounds is that they often say the same thing on both the affirmative and negative -- they never have to take views that involve criticizing far left views.
In "the old days" (1992ish) moral outrage would get you an immediate loss from the judge. You still had "horizontal attacks" (which is basically a gish gallup firehose of bullshit attack) and some other weird artifacts of the format, but what's described in this article would be unimaginable.
The funny thing I've seen, is apparently the Harvard lawyers defending Affirmative Action before the supreme court literally did the same stuff. They spent all their time talking about how the attorney group who brought the case were white.
I consider myself fairly liberal, but I'm not really sure what the deal is with this. It seems like these are examples of debate moving away from trying to establish what is true to some other sort of scoring.
Maneuvering your opponent into a position where disagreeing with you blasphemes a sacred value and violates a widely observed taboo is probably just good strategy.
This seems to just push the question back a step. Why would woke dogmas become sacred values in the first place and to a greater degree than other parts of college/society?
Read “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law” by Richard Hanania if you haven’t already. Also read “Introduction to the Cathedral” by Curtis Yarvin, or anything he’s written about the Cathedral idea
For the same reason other academic/cultural institutions did (this format of debate is done by students at elite schools). It started in the PC wave in the 90s, died down some, and then began accelerating once more around 2014. Competitors read CRT/postmodern/Maoist/etc. writing in round because it came out of the academy; judges, in part, became true believers, and so reward it and incentivize it to continue. (They have also been abandoning the norms of that keep debate content agnostic with increasingly vague and capacious exceptions.) And of course, when the general environment gets bad enough, then community members begin to leave, or at least are afraid to publicly challenge it.
I'm just now diving your substack, and I have lots of questions. I was captain of my HS debate team in 1992, a very different time, and I've followed some of the stuff you reference. I even watched the first youtube clip when it first came out. A someone who did HS debate recently, how prevalent are these "wokeist incursions" (?) to the normal debate format? Give me a percentage - like what are the odds I'm going to end up having a normal debate instead of having to justify my skin color if I were to walk into a modern HS policy debate tourney running a 2 man switchside team for a typical five round weekend?
You're giving me some great reading material this morning.
What do you think is the ratio of Wokeist wins vs Wokest losses? Is playing the woke card a guaranteed win? What happens when two teams try to outwoke each other?
I agree that the round should not have ended, but I can't help but see that you're saying things about resolutions you know are not true. It's not a rule that the affirmative has to defend a plan which exemplifies the resolution just like it should not be a rule that you can't read conservative authors. It's up for debate. Also, Dan Bannister presented conservative arguments and won the national championship in 2019. It's okay to be upset with the group exclusion, but you're the one defending an emphasis on facts over "psychic violence."
I didn't say that it's a rule that the affirmative has to defend a plan, but it shows that absurdity of the community that people read non topical affs. I think it should be allowed -- I just think it's dumb.
You can read some conservative arguments -- for example, you can argue that US hegemony is good. But you can't read arguments that are conservative on social issues or criminal justice issues, or basically, anything that real conservatives care about. There's a reason that, in response to the claim that the affirmative would have the effect of overturning Roe V Wade, no one argued that Roe v Wade was bad, despite it being believed by roughly a third of the country. You can be a foreign policy hawk in debate rounds -- but you can't be socially conservative.
Additionally, conservative arguments are rejected dogmatically. Here's one example -- very often people will compare things to all lives matter. All lives matter isn't obviously bad -- maybe it's bad, maybe it's not, but ALM people are not HItler. And yet the debate community seems to collectively take it as an axiom that ALM is really horrible.
I personally read an argument that said everyone in debate should become insane libertarian youth entrepreneurs. I don't see a horde of flaming liberals after me.
I am also aware of teams that have read and won on "locking people up decreases crime", a quintessential conservative position. And, more outlandishly, that prison slave labor was key to maintaining us dominance over China.
Hell, *you* read a bunch of batshit insane arguments, which resulted in zero twitter shaming until you started making inflammatory statements.
People can read outlandish comments. They can't read arguments that are right wing on culture issues. Locking people up decreases crime is also a centrist argument. You can read Romney conservative arguments, but nothing more.
Michael didn't do prefs at this tournament, and so he received the JD's single most favorable judge. If the tournament had just given them the reverse sheet of their opponents, he still probably would've lost immediately because judges wouldn't take him seriously, but it wouldn't've been a fiasco where the round was stopped.
I'm the former teammate of the two debaters who were affirmative in the video you shared where the judge stopped the round.
I don't think this video should have been made, posted, or shared. My teammates were not aware of this recording at the time and did not want it to occur. They were pretty scared and upset by its posting and the bunch of critical comments they received. People are cool to criticize things they disagree with ofc, but the fact that my teammates did not assent to this video makes the harm done to them the fault of the dude who posted it. I do not think its right to do that, regardless of who's being recording without consent and I do not think it is right to share it. I hope that you will remove this video and your discussion of it from this post.
I do not think that the non-consensual nature of this recording is public knowledge, so I don't want to sound like I'm mad at you for doing something you probably had no way of knowing why it could be wrong. Additionally, I'm not sure if you can edit posts or not. But please do so if possible.
Hi Hank, thanks for the reply, though I fear you will not like my answer. My basic view is that, while maybe as a result of this it shouldn't have been recorded in the first place, I'm happy sharing it given that I think it makes an important point, is anonymous, and is already public information that has received hundreds of thousands of views.
Much apprctd. Well transcripted. Thank you. Jeremy bentham imagined the panopticon is that right? As well as a compassionate streak of utilitarianism? Am I right? About the debating community? Let some bold teacher introduce Nietzches idea that sex is an illuminating flaming light with inherent narratives. And let the whole thing deflate. I don't know they are kids of a serialized age so they should be allowed to compete in theater of their mothers most exaggerated compassionate pieces? When their mothers on average say Co2 is bad because it is a poison? It seems the moderators in these should be signed off on according to their passing the bar of 1964 science baselines. Had the tectonic plate even come in by then? Maybe not for 5 or 8 more years. Shiit you do not know why the pimple of a volcano erupts, why shld you be allowed to critique, as they say, a person who believes fluid magma moves under pressure. Give us another transcript before you take your degree. Nietzche says the most organized way to combat a thing is to attack it. But the youthful debaters here will find they are just put out of a job or an apartment if they say their landlord wld not accept rent 10 days late because those ten days relatively were serving whiteness?
Hello, sir. In the section on the Professor arguing on Space policy, isn't it possible that he's making these arguments to play Devil's Advocate and he did it in exteme?
I haven't watched the video and researched about the professor as I'm reading it on a train. Once I'm home, I'll update here.
These woke debaters/professors are just generally fairly stupid and are covering for it with nonsense. That is the real bottom line. They found a cheat code in the current academic milieu (yell "racism!"), and it allows them to advance beyond their actual abilities. They need to defend this giant edifice they have built on all points, because they cannot survive without it.
Debate seems like a horrible format in the first place: It incentives willfully misunderstanding the person you're talking to, arguing by volume rather than quality, pouncing on any flimsy excuse to take offense and perform moral outrange, being glib and confident rather than nuanced and acknowledging good objections, etc. It's the intellectual version of professional wrestling - certainly takes some skill and superficially looks like what it's pantomiming, but at the end of the day it's just a parody of real productive discourse.
I think debate is really good in some ways. Virtually nothing else gets high school students doing hours of worthwhile research daily. But there are huge downsides -- this is one of them.
Maybe those habits, and internalizing a preference for "winning" over finding out what's actually true, explain why some of these conversations seem so absurd and awful.
Yeah -- though I just want to flag, I think debate is really good. Doing debate may be the best decision I made in my life -- it made me much smarter and more sophisticated.
Yeah, I don't doubt that a lot of people have a good experience and take something really positive away from it. There aren't a lot of other opportunities in high school for doing critical thinking with someone else playing defense. I just wonder if there are ways to mitigate some of the pathological and perverse aspects while retaining the parts that make it valuable.
There might be. I think it's good, contrary to a lot of people, that people have to defend things they disagree with. Doing debate shows people that there are good arguments made by the other side. One thing about the people who read arguments about their identity in debate rounds is that they often say the same thing on both the affirmative and negative -- they never have to take views that involve criticizing far left views.
In "the old days" (1992ish) moral outrage would get you an immediate loss from the judge. You still had "horizontal attacks" (which is basically a gish gallup firehose of bullshit attack) and some other weird artifacts of the format, but what's described in this article would be unimaginable.
The funny thing I've seen, is apparently the Harvard lawyers defending Affirmative Action before the supreme court literally did the same stuff. They spent all their time talking about how the attorney group who brought the case were white.
I consider myself fairly liberal, but I'm not really sure what the deal is with this. It seems like these are examples of debate moving away from trying to establish what is true to some other sort of scoring.
Weird.
Yeah, it's crazy. I'm also pretty liberal.
How do you think the debate community came to be so woke?
I'm really not sure.
Maneuvering your opponent into a position where disagreeing with you blasphemes a sacred value and violates a widely observed taboo is probably just good strategy.
This seems to just push the question back a step. Why would woke dogmas become sacred values in the first place and to a greater degree than other parts of college/society?
Read “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law” by Richard Hanania if you haven’t already. Also read “Introduction to the Cathedral” by Curtis Yarvin, or anything he’s written about the Cathedral idea
For the same reason other academic/cultural institutions did (this format of debate is done by students at elite schools). It started in the PC wave in the 90s, died down some, and then began accelerating once more around 2014. Competitors read CRT/postmodern/Maoist/etc. writing in round because it came out of the academy; judges, in part, became true believers, and so reward it and incentivize it to continue. (They have also been abandoning the norms of that keep debate content agnostic with increasingly vague and capacious exceptions.) And of course, when the general environment gets bad enough, then community members begin to leave, or at least are afraid to publicly challenge it.
I'm just now diving your substack, and I have lots of questions. I was captain of my HS debate team in 1992, a very different time, and I've followed some of the stuff you reference. I even watched the first youtube clip when it first came out. A someone who did HS debate recently, how prevalent are these "wokeist incursions" (?) to the normal debate format? Give me a percentage - like what are the odds I'm going to end up having a normal debate instead of having to justify my skin color if I were to walk into a modern HS policy debate tourney running a 2 man switchside team for a typical five round weekend?
They happen in maybe 1/3 of rounds https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-national-debate-tournament-as?utm_source=publication-search
You're giving me some great reading material this morning.
What do you think is the ratio of Wokeist wins vs Wokest losses? Is playing the woke card a guaranteed win? What happens when two teams try to outwoke each other?
About 50%
Corollary question - where are the judges pulled from for college debates? In HS they were usually other experienced HS debaters or coaches.
HAha, I linked that link in the HWFO Slack and one of the first responses was "Sounds like you bigots are quite disimbricated."
I agree that the round should not have ended, but I can't help but see that you're saying things about resolutions you know are not true. It's not a rule that the affirmative has to defend a plan which exemplifies the resolution just like it should not be a rule that you can't read conservative authors. It's up for debate. Also, Dan Bannister presented conservative arguments and won the national championship in 2019. It's okay to be upset with the group exclusion, but you're the one defending an emphasis on facts over "psychic violence."
I didn't say that it's a rule that the affirmative has to defend a plan, but it shows that absurdity of the community that people read non topical affs. I think it should be allowed -- I just think it's dumb.
You can read some conservative arguments -- for example, you can argue that US hegemony is good. But you can't read arguments that are conservative on social issues or criminal justice issues, or basically, anything that real conservatives care about. There's a reason that, in response to the claim that the affirmative would have the effect of overturning Roe V Wade, no one argued that Roe v Wade was bad, despite it being believed by roughly a third of the country. You can be a foreign policy hawk in debate rounds -- but you can't be socially conservative.
Additionally, conservative arguments are rejected dogmatically. Here's one example -- very often people will compare things to all lives matter. All lives matter isn't obviously bad -- maybe it's bad, maybe it's not, but ALM people are not HItler. And yet the debate community seems to collectively take it as an axiom that ALM is really horrible.
uh what?
I personally read an argument that said everyone in debate should become insane libertarian youth entrepreneurs. I don't see a horde of flaming liberals after me.
I am also aware of teams that have read and won on "locking people up decreases crime", a quintessential conservative position. And, more outlandishly, that prison slave labor was key to maintaining us dominance over China.
Hell, *you* read a bunch of batshit insane arguments, which resulted in zero twitter shaming until you started making inflammatory statements.
People can read outlandish comments. They can't read arguments that are right wing on culture issues. Locking people up decreases crime is also a centrist argument. You can read Romney conservative arguments, but nothing more.
Michael didn't do prefs at this tournament, and so he received the JD's single most favorable judge. If the tournament had just given them the reverse sheet of their opponents, he still probably would've lost immediately because judges wouldn't take him seriously, but it wouldn't've been a fiasco where the round was stopped.
I always think that's a funny story
I'm the former teammate of the two debaters who were affirmative in the video you shared where the judge stopped the round.
I don't think this video should have been made, posted, or shared. My teammates were not aware of this recording at the time and did not want it to occur. They were pretty scared and upset by its posting and the bunch of critical comments they received. People are cool to criticize things they disagree with ofc, but the fact that my teammates did not assent to this video makes the harm done to them the fault of the dude who posted it. I do not think its right to do that, regardless of who's being recording without consent and I do not think it is right to share it. I hope that you will remove this video and your discussion of it from this post.
I do not think that the non-consensual nature of this recording is public knowledge, so I don't want to sound like I'm mad at you for doing something you probably had no way of knowing why it could be wrong. Additionally, I'm not sure if you can edit posts or not. But please do so if possible.
Hi Hank, thanks for the reply, though I fear you will not like my answer. My basic view is that, while maybe as a result of this it shouldn't have been recorded in the first place, I'm happy sharing it given that I think it makes an important point, is anonymous, and is already public information that has received hundreds of thousands of views.
Much apprctd. Well transcripted. Thank you. Jeremy bentham imagined the panopticon is that right? As well as a compassionate streak of utilitarianism? Am I right? About the debating community? Let some bold teacher introduce Nietzches idea that sex is an illuminating flaming light with inherent narratives. And let the whole thing deflate. I don't know they are kids of a serialized age so they should be allowed to compete in theater of their mothers most exaggerated compassionate pieces? When their mothers on average say Co2 is bad because it is a poison? It seems the moderators in these should be signed off on according to their passing the bar of 1964 science baselines. Had the tectonic plate even come in by then? Maybe not for 5 or 8 more years. Shiit you do not know why the pimple of a volcano erupts, why shld you be allowed to critique, as they say, a person who believes fluid magma moves under pressure. Give us another transcript before you take your degree. Nietzche says the most organized way to combat a thing is to attack it. But the youthful debaters here will find they are just put out of a job or an apartment if they say their landlord wld not accept rent 10 days late because those ten days relatively were serving whiteness?
Hello, sir. In the section on the Professor arguing on Space policy, isn't it possible that he's making these arguments to play Devil's Advocate and he did it in exteme?
I haven't watched the video and researched about the professor as I'm reading it on a train. Once I'm home, I'll update here.
I found it. It turns out professor is a very successful debator and coach and he was pushing the guy to be able to defend himself if such claims are ever made in debates. Here's a nice comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/dnfbqj/comment/f5d5l3i/
These woke debaters/professors are just generally fairly stupid and are covering for it with nonsense. That is the real bottom line. They found a cheat code in the current academic milieu (yell "racism!"), and it allows them to advance beyond their actual abilities. They need to defend this giant edifice they have built on all points, because they cannot survive without it.
L