Intrinsicness Shell

Winning isn’t important to me. It’s a cool benefit, and it’s fun to be competitive, but that’s not why I do debate.

Of the reasons I debate, one of the most important to me is educating myself and others. Part of that means a dedication to improving the community, and part of the way I want to do that is to enable the type of theoretical and practice changes I’d like to see. For example, I think intrinsicness is awesome, and that its use would massively improve debate. However, as someone who’s tried to write theory files before, I know that it can be really difficult to cut theory cards. They’re often inaccessible (JAFA, Speaker and Gavel, Forensic Educator), nonsense, or rarely can be used in round (either they’re obtuse, not efficient enough, don’t have impacts, etc.).

To solve this, there are two long-term goals I’m working on. The first is publishing more theory arguments in peer reviewed debate journals. Doing so creates a lasting theoretical base for debaters that will last long after I’m finished with debate (T.A. McKinney’s original 1991 intrinsicness article is still being used today–it’s actually kind of inspiring to think of some debater 20 years from now, citing Tagher in ’11). Moreover, it adds credibility to my arguments that doesn’t come from citing ‘hacking policy debate.’

The second is that I want to help share basic theory frontlines to kickstart better theory debating. Writing a whole file for the community is counter to my educational goals–but I think that having an intrinsicness shell, or a good 1AR frontline to agent counterplans prepared for them would help encourage debaters to debate theory, and to debate it the right way. Moreover, I find it much more likely that people will read and think about intrinsicness and logical decision making if they win a round with it first.

So without further ado, here’s my first installment of this series. It’s not perfect, and I definitely suck at clinching evidence, so I’d appreciate feedback. The focus of the shell is on longer, more developed theory arguments than blips, but I think that its actually far more effective that way because 1) the reasons to prefer are more true 2) it establishes credibility and 3)it establishes sincerity. Finally, as pointed out by the 3NR, judges can actually call for theory cards, which I think would help massively because flowing theory can be hard. I think this intrinsicness shell and a quick link/impact turn on politics would work quite nicely.

 

Max’s Intrinsicness Shell

A. Interpretation—Affirmatives may run one 1AR intrinsicness argument which it cannot claim net-benefits from. This functions as an aff counterplan.

B. Do the plan and _________. This negates the link of the disad.

100. Legitimacy

1. Debate without intrinsicness is divorced from rational decision making—a real decision maker would do the plan and the intrinsicness position

T.A. McKinney, Debater’s Research Guide, 91 ["Rehabilitating Intrinsicness, top speaker at the NDT 1991] http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/McKinney1991Homeless.htm

The functional equivalent of the intrinsicness argument is made constantly, not only in policymaking circles but also in the every day logic of individual decision making. How many times have fun-loving nine year olds promised to do their homework at 7 :30 if they could just watch the Simpsons at 7:00? This, friends and countrymen, is nothing more than an intrinsicness argument (“Mom, please vote for my plan [the Simpsons], and as for your ‘fail the fourth grade’ disad, studying at 7:30 will solve that”).

Debate without intrinsicness is artificially divorced from real decision making processes. Cases are voted against on the basis of objections that no rational policymaker would consider because they are only incidental and not inherent results of adopting the plan. A vigorous revival of well reasoned and evidenced intrinsicness arguments by the affirmative should go a long way toward chopping the meatball down to size and stimulating more case specific debate, goals toward which all those concerned with quality debates should strive.

2. Logical decision making outweighs all other impacts

L. Paul Strait and Brett Wallace, GMU and GWU, DRG 07 george Mason University and George Washington University, Debater’s Research Guide, 2007["The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making" http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/2007/The%20Scope%20of%20Negative%20Fiat%20and%20the%20Logic%20of%20Decision%20Making.pdf] mgt

More to the point, debate certainly helps teach a lot of skills, yet we believe that the way policy debate participation encourages you to think is the most valuable educational benefit, because how someone makes decisions determines how they will employ the rest of their abili- ties, including the research and communication skills that debate builds. Plenty of debate theory articles have explained cither the value of de- bate, or the way in which alternate actor strategies are detrimental to real-world education, but none so far have attempted to tie these con- cepts together. We will now explain howdecision-making skill develop- ment is the foremost value of policy debate and how this benefit is the decision-rule to resolving all theoretical discussions about negative fiat. Why debate? Some do it for scholarships, some do it for social purposes, and many just believe it is fun. These are certainly ail relevant considerations when making the decision to join the debate team, but as debate theorists they aren’t the focus of our concern. Our concern is finding a framework for debate that educates the largest quantity of students with the highest quality of skills, while at the same time pre- serving competitive equity. The ability to make decisions deriving from discussions, argumentation or debate, is the key skill. It is the one thing every single one of us will do every day of our lives besides breathing. Decision-making transcends boundaries between categories of learn-ing like “policy education” and “kritik education,” it makes irrelevant considerations of whether we will eventually be policymakers, and it transcends questions of what substantive content a debate round should contain. The implication for this analysis is that the critical thinking and argumentative skills offered by real-world decision-making are comparatively greater than any educational disadvantage weighed against them. It is the skills we leam, not the content of our arguments, that can best improve all of our lives. While policy comparison skills are going to be learned through debate in one way or another, those skills are use- less if they are not grounded in the kind of logic actually used to make decisions.

3. Reciprocity—Any ground lost to intrinsicness is reciprocal with ground lost to counterplans. Reciprocity ensures fairness

Initial Reactions to “Multiple Conditional Advocacies and Advocating Permutations”

edit: I reread this post and realized its pretty unclear! I will come back to it to add clarity

Today I read “Multiple Conditional Advocacies and Advocating Permutations,” an article in The Last Word by Jarrod Atchison (coach at Wake Forest University) about advocating permutations to kicked positions to respond to contradictory, conditional neg arguments (for example, the Cap K and a Free Market CP). Atchison argues that conditionality has gotten out of hand, citing the 11 (!!) off-case arguments made during the final round of Kansas v WFU at the NDT.

Eleven.

Anyway. Atchison’s defense of permutations to kicked positions (hereafter, “advocacy permutations” to distinguish them from testing-competiveness permutations [1]) largely rests on notions of creating fairness through reciprocity.

How then, should we approach the dilemma presented by multiple conditional advocacies (and the rope-a- dope strategy in particular). Rather than calling for an outright rejection, it makes more sense to return the basic concept of reciprocity. For decades, reciprocity has been the analytic tool used to determine if a debate practice should be emulated or eviscerated. Appeals to reciprocity suggest that the competitive balance between two teams is more important than other values associated education and/or skills. The assumption is that the first question that we should use to determine if a practice should be acceptable or not is whether or not it disrupts the potential for both sides to have an equal opportunity to win the debate.12 Most debaters assume that reciprocity serves as a bright line that determines the acceptability of an argument. If an argument turns out to not be reciprocal for both teams then the judge should reject the argument.

I think that fairness–the reason why reciprocity is important–is an extremely overrated value in debate because it has little practical value, as I elaborate on in my recent article submitted to The Last Word. However, Atchison briefly mentions another type of ‘reciprocity’ that I think is more interesting.

 There is, however, another perspective on reciprocity—that it serves to legitimate practices that might otherwise be deemed as unfair. For example, if a negative team justifies conditionality by arguing that conditionality is legitimate because it encourages the search for the best policy option then the affirmative may have increased legitimacy for a non-intrinsicness argument using the same logic. In order for this understanding of reciprocity to be persuasive, debaters must be able to articulate a connection between the new practices being legitimated through reciprocity in terms of the original practice that creates the inequity. In other words, debaters must answer why a practice justifies something that is routinely dismissed as illegitimate.

I think Atchison muddles the issue here. The reason that advocating for conditionality with the warrant that it allows us to search for the best policy helps legitimize intrinsicness is that they rely on the same internal link to their impact. To illustrate:

(LINK) Conditionality good because it allows for best policy option –> (INTERNAL LINK) searching for the best policy option is good because this search is most applicable to the decisions we make in our everyday lives, thus its educational

Several different theory advocacies–counterplans good, conditionality good, intrinsicness good–might access the internal link of best policy option. So it’s not ‘reciprocity’ that debaters are appealing to when they argue that the best policy warrant helps justify intrinsicness, anymore than it’s ‘reciprocity’ when the aff reads an internal link that improving the economy reduces the likelihood of war, and the neg reads a CP that improves the economy, and claims to also solve for the aff impact.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, though, because you can still believe in promoting logical decision making by allowing neg fiat, but also believe that unlimited conditionality is bad. This is because theoretical beliefs are more nuanced than complete devotion to a single goal (like best policy option)–rather debate theorists are also concerned about the practicality of theory, fairness concerns, etc. For example, Strait and Wallace in The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making (DRG, 2007) strongly advocate for logical decision making in debate, but say that their advocacy is limited by fairness concerns that are absolute (in other words, if some theory was SO unfair that one side lost every time, they wouldn’t support that theory (because they believe it would reduce participation, and thus the education from debating)). So, when Atchison suggests that neg debaters answer that “supporting conditionality because of best policy option justifies intrisicness,” neg debaters can respond, “no, because concerns of unfair infinite regression apply to intrinsicness but not to conditionality, thus accepting conditionality doesn’t necessarily mean accepting intrinsicness.” (and ideally they would word it better than I did here).

How could the aff preempt that? Because debaters are unlikely to fully elaborate on their paradigm for choosing debate theories like Strait and Wallace did, you can set them up in CX. For example

1NC: multiple conditional counterplans

Aff CX: Why are conditional counterplans legitimate?

Neg: Because they promote the search for the best policy option.

Aff CX: Does that mean that intrinsicness arguments are legitimate?

If the neg says “yes”: then the aff can use intrinsicness as a reason why searching for the best policy is bad

Neg: No, because intrinsicness doesn’t give the neg stable ground for DA links (the concession here is that stable ground is more important than best policy option)

Now the aff can use that internal link that stable ground is good (and that it outweighs the best-policy-option benefit of intrinsicness) to make arguments against conditionality.

2AC: Conditionality is bad because it doesn’t give the aff stable ground against the neg–if we read a DA to their CP, they’ll just kick it. In CX the neg concedes that this outweighs any benefits from searching for the best policy option.

Now that we understand that, we can look to a much better justification for advocacy perms. First, we should just think of ‘advocacy perms’ as a perm+intrinsicness, because that is what they are. To demonstrate this, look to example 4 in Atchison’s article:

Example #4

1NC

Security Representations Critique Alternative: Reject Security Discourse

Consult Japan Counterplan
Net-Benefit: Alliance Key to Solving War in East Asia

Deterrence Disad

Example #4 was taken from a summer workshop practice debate. During the debate, the second negative rebuttalist kicked both conditional options and won the debate on the deterrence disadvantage. The impact to the deterrence disadvantage included two scenarios: deterring Chinese aggression against Taiwan and preventing Japanese rearmament. Interestingly enough, both of those impact areas had been a part of the negative’s extension of the consultation counterplan in the block. Had the affirmative had the ability toadvocate the permutation in this debate then the permutation would have had the potential to solve the baseline impacts for the deterrence disad using the negative’s own evidence from the block. In this instance, the rope-a-dope would have been performed by the affirmative rather than the negative.

Now, the advocacy perm here is plan+consult japan (which solves for the deterrence disad). But really, that’s no different from plan+ the intrinsicness argument that consulting japan solves the DA impact. Thus, arguments for intrinsicness equally apply to advocacy perms (there would be some differences–advocacy perms clearly don’t have the infinite regression problem, and they’re extremely predictable. On a more practical level, the neg is much more likely to make arguments why their CP solves the DA, than why your intrinsicness argument does).

Now, the neg undoubtedly will defend conditionality through logical decision making. Likely, several of the arguments they make (like best policy option) will really be internal links to logical decision making. And since we know that logical decision making is a very strong argument for intrinsicness, the aff now has a much better argument than just reciprocity for advocacy perms.

[1] I actually hate the concept of ‘testing’ positions and think it makes no sense. But its a helpful metaphor for now

Claiming Advantages from Intrinsicness Positions and Extra-T Plan Planks

So in writing my response to Bricker, there are inevitably thoughts that don’t quite fit into the rebuttal nature of the article. One of those is the interaction between intrinsicness arguments (also extra-topical plan planks, hereafter grouped as intrinsicness arguments) and proving the resolution true. If the affirmative’s extra-topical planks/intrinsicness arguments are conditional, then obviously those are just dropped from consideration if found disadvantageous. The rest of the post will explore unconditional intrinsicness arguments, and presume that the affirmative doesn’t respond to disads to the intrinsicness-position with another intrinsicness-position (infinite regress).

The position I take is that the affirmative can claim advantages from their intrinsicness argument, but these are not reasons the resolution is true. That is, when tallying up the net-benefits of the aff at the end of the round, the judge shouldn’t consider intrinsicness-advantages as reasons to vote aff. However, the advantages from intrinsicness positions can be used to answer the disadvantages to that intrinsicness argument.

For example, let’s say that the aff, in order to fund its plan to build hospitals, cut missile defense spending (remember, extra-topical plan planks and intrinsicness arguments are basically equivalent). The neg might run a disad to hospitals, and a disad saying that missile defense programs are essential to preventing North Korea from nuking us. The affirmative might argue that missile defense research encourages vertical proliferation which increases the possible destruction from war. There are four interesting cases that arise:

Intrinsicness article for The Last Word

Hey, its been awhile since I’ve posted on the blog, I hope to rectify that now that I’m back into debate.  Anyway, I’ve just completed an article responding to Brett Bricker’s Against Intrinsicness that appeared in the first issue of The Last Word, which is a peer-reviewed debate journal started by The3NR/Scotty P. My response isn’t ‘Intrinsicness Good’, but it does address some cool issues like logical decision making and inherency/topicality/intrinsicness.

The article is 95% complete now. If you’d like to help me review it before sending it to The Last Word, drop me an email

Max

 

edit: Thanks so far to the following reviewers:

Chad Meadows, Spencer Orlowski, Susan Taylor, Joe Dudek, and Martin Harris

James Hilbert, “Crushing us left and right” 5 recordings

James Hilbert (LAF) was our biggest competition this year, and I suspect the rest of the community felt the same way. We were desperate to beat James–I think WKU’s record against James was like 1-13 before the Spring Lafayette tournament, crushing us left and right.

Most of the year, James ran ban solitary confinement for the CMI. This case was a tough nut to crack–we didn’t have anything persuasive to say against it besides Cheshier (as a result of that Cheshier got up to 3 minutes!) until NFA where we broke some new disads and case turns. James won the Fall Lafayette tournament, the first half of OSU/Otterbein (he wasn’t at the second half), Webster, and the second half of the Spring Lafayette tournament (and I’m sure an assortment of others). James dropped in octos at NFA, which was really disappointing because he was such a strong contender for champion. To paraphrase Chad, it didn’t feel like as much of a real victory without actually beating Tim and James ourselves. To quote him once more, James was “strategic, persuasive, polite, and had excellent line by line coverage.”

I started recording rounds at the Webster tournament, so I have three audios of James from that tournament: two against people whose names I don’t remember, and his semis round against Spencer Orlowski. I also have his round against me from the Spring Lafayette tournament, as well as (bonus video!) my quarters round against Sam Sangenito from the Spring Lafayette tournament.

An excellent year for Tim Vaughan: 3 recordings

Tim Vaughan (St As) has had an extremely impressive year. Tim’s time allocation is immaculate, and he has nigh flawless coverage in the 1AR. In addition to winning the second half of the OSU/Otterbein swing (and I’m sure many other tournaments I didn’t go to–St As is in Massachusetts), Tim made it to semi-finals at NFA, where he dropped to Jeff Jones (McKendree). Most impressively, Tim had excellent evidence coming even from a small school of three debaters, which according to Chad Meadows, lead to him to have excellent mastery of arguments and the evidence he’s reading.

Tim (as well as his competitors) gave me permission to add some of the audio I have of his rounds. I only have audio from Tim from one tournament, and always of him on the aff unfortunately. These videos reflect some unique strategies versus Tim, and his excellent crystallization of the debate on his own terms in each rebuttal. Tim’s aff was to have the Supreme Court uphold the Rogers standard for involuntary treatment.

An explanation of the Rogers and Rennie Cases: Rogers v Okin (later Rogers v Commissioner) was a landmark ‘right to refuse’ case in Massachusetts. It determined that patients had the right to judicial review for forced medication. In Rennie v Kline, the court determined that patients had a right to professional review for forced medication (First, the doctor consults the patient, then the whole treatment team consults the patient, and then there is a hearing in front of the hospital’s director with a ‘Rennie advocate’ to defend the person). While preference for Rennie was hinted by the Supreme Court in Youngberg v Romeo, neither Rogers nor Rennie was decided by the top court. Differing opinions from lower justices about whether Youngberg applied to forced medication of the mentally ill  led to the states splitting between judicial review and professional review. A Supreme Court ruling would make it clear which states had to use, which is the solvency mechanism for Tim’s case.

Its my hope that these recordings will shed some light on an excellent debater. Additionally, it is my goal to compile many more recordings over time, which would allow current NFA debaters to actually watch rounds from their own organization, and learn from those debaters.

This round was the first opportunity we had to break neg I had cut over winter break. I cut Torrey’s The Insanity Offense and some supporting cards. I didn’t have a very strong grasp on Rogers at the time, I was just focusing on the generic of this mostly. Thus, we were a little unprepared for Tim breaking his first new advantage. After this tournament I had the opportunity to cut substantially more case neg, but unfortunately we never got the chance to run it against Tim.

I believe that Tim won this round. Later this day, I beat Tim on a 2-1 decision on the final round.

The next day, Tim broke some crucial new evidence, from Jost, which concludes that based off of an Appelbaum study (Appelbaum is the #2 author on the Rogers case literature base, slightly behind Gutheil), 100% of patients are determined by judges to be incompetent. This was a major shift in how the debate went down (he beat me in round 1 of that day…we actually had one of the same judges from finals), so Western switched up our strategy and ran a counterplan for states to close mental institutions (as it turns out, by the way, this is not competitive. Rogers applies to nursing homes and a whole host of other institutions. This was the premise of a T I wrote about Rogers applying to mental retardation, which I suspected would prompt the CI of hospitalized, getting you either an easy ‘you don’t meet your interp’ or competition for the CP). Sarah ran the CP in round 4, and Susan in semifinals.

I am unsure of the results between Sarah and Tim.

Susan won this round on a 2-1 decision.

NFA 2011-2012 Resolutions Announced

UPDATE: Shortly after the resolutions were announced, there was a strong response from the community to revise some of the topic wordings. Most importantly it appears, Nick Matthews (UCLA) wrote a message on the IE-L which offered some analysis (see below in comments) and new resolutions. The topic committee revised the resolutions, as per much of Tanner’s advice. The updates are adding the word ‘its’ to the economic engagement resolution, making adding an apostrophe to “People’s” and a pretty complete reword of the environment/energy topic. The updated resolutions are below.

Special thanks to Nick Matthews for offering his advice, as well as to the committee for taking them into consideration. Looks like I’ll have to talk to Nick when writing next year’s resolutions.

After the China topic paper was selected, the NFA LD committee collaborated to create five resolutions for the community to vote on. This committee consisted of Dave Trumble, Kelly Larson, Nichelle McNabb, Ray Quiel, and Student Representative Frank Murdock (WKU). The resolutions have just been released to the NFA website.

“The final 5 resolutions for voting are as follows:

• The United States Federal Government should substantially change its military capability in regards to the People’s Republic of China.
• The United States Federal Government  should take action to protect U.S. legal rights in regards to the People’s Republic of China.
• The United States Federal Government should significantly change its trade policy and/or practices with the People’s Republic of China.
• The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its engagement with the People’s Republic of China in one or more of the following areas: energy, environment.
• The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its economic engagement with the People’s Republic of China.

Member schools may vote – all 5 resolutions must be ranked in order for the ballot to count. 1st will count as 5 points, 2nd counts as 4 points, 3rd counts as 3 points, 4th counts as 2 points, and 5th counts as 1 point. The resolution with the highest points will be the LD debate resolution for 2011-2012.”

The previous resolution on the env/energy topic was “The United States Federal Government should adopt an energy or environmental policy that directly
involves the Peoples Republic of China.”

Some analysis:

First, I am very disappointed in the first resolution. I think military/security issues would have been a very exciting topic, but unfortunately the topic wording of this resolution makes it unworkable. How does one determine what military capability is “in regards to” China? This is literally the only limiting phrase–and it justifies improving our carriers (a la the transportation topic), changing missile defense, moving troops out of Taiwan, moving ships out of the South China Sea, moving troops out of Japan (a la the 2010-2011 high school topic), literally ANYTHING you can relate to the Chinese military. China putting mines 1000 km off its coast? Sounds like we need to shift our military away from carriers to smaller fleet groups!  Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Even if you think some of these plans wouldn’t be topical, 1) have fun with T every round and 2) there’s still no generic ground.

Unfortunately, this topic is bidirectional–which is exactly the opposite of what myself, Frank Murdock, and others have called for. The problem with bidirectionality is that negative counterplans can’t be topical as per NFA rules. And when a topic is bidirectional, nearly every counterplan is topical. The result is that negatives are stuck with the present uniqueness situation, which is often 1)seriously flawed or 2)non-uniques your disads. Moreover, bidirectionality (or in the case of the verb ‘change’, omni-directionality…) devastates generic ground. First, the aff has substantially more options for their plan, and can choose ‘squirrel’ cases at will, dramatically increasing the research burden for small schools. Second, and much more importantly, you have no consistent disads to run. If we were “increasing pressure” on China, as a previous China topic from NDT-CEDA called for, the neg could be confident in their generic disads linking. Words like reform lead to topics where you need to answer Ban Neuroleptics (WKU), End Solitary Confinement (LAF, WKU), Change the procedure for forced medication from professional to court review (StA), emotional support animals (TRUMAN), and end forced medication for the CMI in prison on death row (yes that was a real plan).

Second, the fifth topic could be really great. Its extremely similar to the high school topic that was proposed (but was beat out by Space). The high school topic limited the area the economic engagement could apply to though, to trade, economy or environment. I think I would have much preferred to have the areas set, but on the bright side economic engagement is atleast a term of art in the literature base.

Third–comments redacted in light of the new resolution for energy/environment.

The trade topic, I could probably live with.

The legal rights topic, I think I would actually really like. ESPECIALLY intellectual property debates. I love that debate. Having a mechanism would be nice though.

So, its not like we’re doomed next year–its just…is this really the best we can do? Barely any of these resolutions seem to use terms of art from the literature base. This is extremely disappointing given that e.g. Chad Meadows was able to do extensive research on the resolution “The USFG should substantially increase the role of peacetime military engagement in its foreign policy towards China” and yet we’re stuck with an unworkable military resolution. There’s probably more to be critical of, but I’ll leave my thoughts honed for now.

All this said, I am the NFA-LD student rep for next year. I really want to work to improve this situation–but I need help from the community. First, people’s ideas are obviously critical to improving both the process of selecting resolutions and crafting the particular resolutions themselves. Second, if you have an opinion on what you like/dislike about these resolutions, voice it. Here or in person, and especially to the members of the NFA committee for next year (Dave Trumble, Marty Birckhold, Nichelle McNabb, Ray Quiel, and myself).

After seeing this process, one idea I would really like to push for is that rather than the committee all drafting up a bunch of resolutions, and then voting on what the top 5 should be, is that each member could craft their own resolution. The voting process I suspect leads to underdeveloped topic wordings, because there isn’t necessarily intensive research to make a perfect resolution. Additionally, I think it would accelerate the development of NFA resolutions. In the squo, you need 5 people to vote a certain way to achieve change. If each member wrote their own resolution, suddenly just convincing Marty that such and such is a REALLY good mechanism for the  whatever topic could get it into the pool of resolutions. This is something I’ll talk about with the members of the committee as I see them. Who knows, I just have conjecture and Frank’s experience from last year to work off at this point. Maybe I’m completely wrong about some of the topic wordings (some hidden “in regards to” literature base seems unlikely–but me being wrong is altogether likely at this point). But I suspect that we can do better.

Max