<story><title>&quot;Yes, but what are your credentials, Mr Stross?&quot;</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/yes-but-what-are-your-credenti.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MaxGabriel</author><text>Ah, this isn&apos;t actually a student writing an essay, this is a high school policy debater. Their topic this year is space.  If you aren&apos;t familiar with this activity, it has some pretty outrageous elements--300 wpm speed-reading, often surface-level analysis, and preference for gamesmanship over quality of argumentation. But if you put the right kind of work into it, you do learn alot.&lt;p&gt;The reason the student needs the source is that &apos;quals&apos; are used to quickly legitimize a person&apos;s argument. In policy debate, unrefuted arguments are considered &lt;i&gt;true.&lt;/i&gt; Thus, there&apos;s little time for intelligently evaluating what a person is saying, as long as they have &apos;quals&apos; and you can get to the next piece of evidence (&apos;cards&apos;). The most outrageous argument from a PhD might be preferred in debate over a rational argument from an intelligent person, like Charlie Stross. edit: That&apos;s why he can&apos;t just say &apos;as Stross says...&apos; like the commenters suggest. As an example, this past year my debate topic was mental health. I often cited Robert Whitaker, who is a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for psychiatric journalism, was the former director of publications at HMS, and has written two books on psychiatric medications. Yet, because he did not have an MD or PhD, debaters sneered at his qualifications, rather than evaluate his arguments.&lt;p&gt;I also find it highly likely that Stross&apos;s article is being used because of this paragraph &quot;Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.&quot;&lt;p&gt;This is because debaters often don&apos;t respond to the other&apos;s policy proposition, but rather &lt;i&gt;kritik&lt;/i&gt; their position by indicting the philosophical ideas behind it. For example, an affirmative debater might advocate colonizing a planet, and a negative debater could ignore this and talk about how the affirmative is really based on white-power dominance of other cultures, and thus they should lose.&lt;p&gt;My quals: debater in a different type of debate</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nbashaw</author><text>I debated in High School and College. I don&apos;t think you&apos;re giving competitive policy debate a fair treatment here.&lt;p&gt;On the surface it seems stupid to think that an un-refuted argument should be considered true. But arguments are evaluated that way in policy debates for a very specific reason -- the purpose of debate is not to discover the truth, it is to win an argument. That&apos;s the whole point of the activity. If you don&apos;t like it, you don&apos;t have to play.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s actually the reason I quit during my sophomore year, but it doesn&apos;t make debate a worthless activity. Nothing taught me to work harder or think faster.&lt;p&gt;Debate is like working out. It&apos;s not real, so certain considerations go out the window. Under your logic, running on a treadmill is a bad idea because you&apos;re not actually going anywhere. But the point of debate isn&apos;t to discover the truth, it&apos;s to sharpen your understanding and wit.&lt;p&gt;Where debate goes wrong is when you stay in it too long. After a certain point the skills become harder and harder to transfer to other parts of your life. And a lot of the people in it, as you might be able to imagine, are pretty arrogant know-it-alls.&lt;p&gt;After I left debate, I had to re-socialize myself back into the world of normal people who don&apos;t argue with each other all day for fun. It sounds like I&apos;m exaggerating, but all my friends were debaters and all my time was spent researching, debating, or arguing with them about literally everything. That&apos;s just how debaters tend to spend their free time.</text></comment>
<story><title>&quot;Yes, but what are your credentials, Mr Stross?&quot;</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/yes-but-what-are-your-credenti.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MaxGabriel</author><text>Ah, this isn&apos;t actually a student writing an essay, this is a high school policy debater. Their topic this year is space.  If you aren&apos;t familiar with this activity, it has some pretty outrageous elements--300 wpm speed-reading, often surface-level analysis, and preference for gamesmanship over quality of argumentation. But if you put the right kind of work into it, you do learn alot.&lt;p&gt;The reason the student needs the source is that &apos;quals&apos; are used to quickly legitimize a person&apos;s argument. In policy debate, unrefuted arguments are considered &lt;i&gt;true.&lt;/i&gt; Thus, there&apos;s little time for intelligently evaluating what a person is saying, as long as they have &apos;quals&apos; and you can get to the next piece of evidence (&apos;cards&apos;). The most outrageous argument from a PhD might be preferred in debate over a rational argument from an intelligent person, like Charlie Stross. edit: That&apos;s why he can&apos;t just say &apos;as Stross says...&apos; like the commenters suggest. As an example, this past year my debate topic was mental health. I often cited Robert Whitaker, who is a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for psychiatric journalism, was the former director of publications at HMS, and has written two books on psychiatric medications. Yet, because he did not have an MD or PhD, debaters sneered at his qualifications, rather than evaluate his arguments.&lt;p&gt;I also find it highly likely that Stross&apos;s article is being used because of this paragraph &quot;Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.&quot;&lt;p&gt;This is because debaters often don&apos;t respond to the other&apos;s policy proposition, but rather &lt;i&gt;kritik&lt;/i&gt; their position by indicting the philosophical ideas behind it. For example, an affirmative debater might advocate colonizing a planet, and a negative debater could ignore this and talk about how the affirmative is really based on white-power dominance of other cultures, and thus they should lose.&lt;p&gt;My quals: debater in a different type of debate</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>It sounds almost as if you&apos;re saying high schools now &lt;i&gt;teach&lt;/i&gt; forum trolling.</text></comment>