November 18, 2014

Op-Ed: The Cult of Cards: Evidence, Analytics, and Rational Judging

By Christian Chessman

I am quite public about my opinion that Public Forum Debate consistently benefits from its interrelationship with Policy Debate. Policy Debate has influenced Public Forum towards flow-driven argument, tried-and-true argument structures, and deeper argument analysis. Unfortunately, Public Forum Debate is not immune from influence by the less desirable elements of Policy Debate as well.

Policy Debate has succumbed to a phenomena I call "the Cult of Cards". Debaters worship at the altar of evidence, treating written word as definitive regardless of the author's qualifications or underlying logic. Policy Debaters regularly decline to pursue logical, analytic strategic avenues when responding to arguments - even arguments particularly succeptible to incisive logical analysis¹ - because they do not have pre-written carded blocks.

The Cult of Cards has made its way into Public Forum Debate as well. I judged rounds of varying quality on both the September/October Public Subsidies Topic and the November Genetically Modified Foods topic and found an almost universal over-reliance on evidence by debaters. This reliance extended to such a point that mere rote recitation² constituted the substance of a large number of debates.

Debaters on the Public Subsidies topic spat a staccato stream of stadium names, random percentages, and author citations with little regard for coherence - let alone a judge's ability to flow. GM Foods debaters fared about as well - in literally every round I judged or observed, I was inundated with a mass of crop names, yield percentages, and herbicide increase/decreate rates which were delivered in a matter of seconds. No further analysis of these statistics occurred - debaters did not explain whether "GM soy" was an important or representative crop, and left me scratching my head wondering if I should consider cotton a food³ through the final focus.

For a while, I was stymied as to the prevalence of this practice - even debaters I know to be qualified participate in it to varying extents.

Why It's Popular

There are two major reasons debaters cut and (over)cite cards.

It's effective. As an original practice, cards were cited only as necessary to establish a factual point. For example, a scholar with a Ph.D. in Latin American studies who spent twenty years in Costa Rica is likely more able to describe the ethnic conflict in the country than a high school debater who had never left the United States. The scholar is primarily more qualified because the presence or absence of ethnic conflict is a factual question; it cannot be determined by analysis alone. When debates turned on questions of fact, debaters who had evidence suggesting the existence of a fact were substantially more likely to win.

As time progressed, the debate community also began citing evidence for phrasing. Scholars who spent time parsing and analyzing a topic have a level of engagement - and a resultant vocabulary - that results in passionate, well-worded scholarship. As a result, debaters would cite well-written or even polemic peer-reviewed articles for their phrasing and verbal construction as much as they cited for references of fact. These articles were nonetheless selected because of their peer review and publication in journals or books.

Modern debate citation practice is perhaps the third wave of stylized citation in debate. Its definining characteristics are the perfunctory reference to authors, the absence context for the citation's scope or claims, and the dearth of analysis of the citations once referenced. When so described, many of the reasons why this practice is unstrategic become apparent. If those disadvantages are so simple, why has the third wave of stylized citation remained, instead of shifting?

The answer is that it's trendy⁴. Current practices are essentially the result of a cross-generational game of telephone⁵. Debaters see older debaters reading cards and assume that they too must read cards; and often, little more thought goes into the practice. As a result, debaters substitute evidence for analysis - and are rewarded for it by first-year-out judges who adopted similar practices as debaters. The trend is thus self-enforcing - young debaters see old debaters reading cards, but do not fully understand the process of selecting which cards (and how many cards) to read. They emulate what is apparent to them: the simple, dual practices of "read cards = good" and "more cards = better". As they get older, they become the models for new younger debaters - and more is lost in translation. Finally, they become the next generation of judges who reward "more cards = better" with ballots⁶.

Why It's Unstrategic.

I hinted at several reasons why it might be unstrategic in the above section - this section will expand on those more thoroughly.

First, it's hard to flow. Its hard to flow. A dozen different cards – each referencing half a sentence, read quickly – is functionally impossible to flow. I am approaching my tenth year in this activity, four of which were spent in policy debate and I struggled to flow some of these cases on my laptop. Parent judges and (f)lay judges are not even going to hear those sentences, let alone digest them as voting issues.

Second, it's a risky habit. Debaters inevitably hit arguments to which they do not have carded answers. Debaters who are entirely or predominantly reliant on carded blocks to argue will be at a substantial disadvantage in these rounds because they will be inexperienced at defeating contentions with pure analysis.

Third, it's ineffective. Judges - like debaters - crave not only to know what, but why. A debater who explains why GM foods produce higher yields is incomparably more likely to win the point than a debater who merely cites a statistic. Cards are raw materials. What debaters do with those cards determines who wins rounds. Debaters often treat “I read evidence on this argument” as sufficient, and could not be more wrong.

Fourth, it trades off with analysis. Debaters have a limited amount of time to speak⁷ by definition, because of finite speech times. Reading additional cards thus comes at the cost of explaining, analyzing, and contextualizing evidence already read in the debate. Since debaters seem particularly ill-adept at identifying argument interaction⁸ or comparing their impacts to the impacts of other debaters⁹, a trend which exacerbates these existing problems only serves to further risk winning ballots.

What to do about it.

Perhaps most simply, debaters should embrace explanation over adding information. Because of the Cult of Cards, debaters tend to favor evidence and shy away from "analytical arguments" - the label traditionally given to logical analysis done by debaters without additional support from evidence.

The move away from analytical argumentation is undoubtedly the biggest mistake made by Public Forum Debaters in this era. Parsimonious and targeted reasoning can reduce even the most well-evidenced contentions to shambles. Such reasoning is also necessary because of the way debate moulds literature to fit its purposes. Most scholars discuss topic areas differently from the way debaters discuss the topic; therefore debaters cannot find a full response to every position read by other debaters from the literature, and must come up with their own based on analytical reasoning.

Analytical reasoning also fosters a skillset which is independently valuable for debaters. The ability to quickly and parsimoniously reason is perhaps the most valuable return that debate offers. Those skills also give debaters the ability to determine the crux of the debate, to identify arguments which can be grouped, and to adapt to the proclivities of a particular judge panel. In that sense, analytical reasoning creates both a substantive advantage and a procedural advantage.

The second step debaters can take in embracing analysis is to employ a logical test in constructing their cases and blocks for rebuttals for the purpose of minimizing the unnecessary use of evidence. Before adding a card to a case, debaters should ask themselves, “how will I use this particular piece of evidence in the final focus?". If a piece of evidence does not have an immediately apparent place in the final crystallization speech - or if, after several rounds on the topic, it simply tends not to appear - then the evidence should be cut.

Conclusion

Evidence certainly has a proper place in Public Forum Debate. It is unreasonable to ask the average high school student to interpret complex regression analyses - let alone to perform them. Studies which find and explain results bring value to cases specifically and to the event writ large.

The use and prevalence of evidence must also be conditioned by necessity. If evidence is superfluous, unnecessarily wordy, or otherwise unstrategic, it should be omitted from the debate. For strategic and educational reasons, debaters should instead cultivate the process of analytical reasoning to deconstruct the cases read by their opponents. Champion debaters will strive to balance the need for evidence with the effectiveness of analysis when constructing cases and positions.

Footnotes

The alternatives to most kritiks do not solve the harms identified in the 1NC shell and include implications that are facially morally repugnant without further alternative specification - and I say that as a (now graduated) kritik debater.
I mean that in the most literal sense of the term - debaters would cite to a statistic without explanation, context, scope, or application to the arguments in the debate, and then cite it again during later speeches in an identical manner - literally, re-citing.
Even vegetarians have our limits.
For debaters interested in Jean Baudrillard's take on simulation and reality, this situation presents a prime example of a simulacrum; despite having an identical name, the practice of citing cards in present day bears absolutely no resemblance to the actual original practice of citing cards either in Public Forum (circa 2008) or Policy Debate (since roughly 1965). This is especially ironic because the process of citing cards (and indeed the act of calling evidence 'cards') is primarily a result of the perceived weight of tradition; "my lab leader/older debaters did it so I have to too!". In that sense, modern debate citation of "cards" is a simulation of a perceived past that never existed - debaters are practicing a model of debate citation that most older debaters never actually did (and typically find slipshod when they are exposed to the practice). Debaters interested in this branch of philosophy should examine the introductory book, "Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings", ISBN 0804742731.
The game telephone - likely familiar to many debaters - involves getting a group of people together in a line and whispering a statement to the first person in the line. The first person repeats the statement to the second, without deliberate modification, who repeats it to the third, etc. By the time the statement has reached the final person, it regularly bears little resemblence to the original statement. The game stands for the simple proposition that repetition is an imperfect representation of the original, even when done in optimal conditions.
This piece is as much a call to the judges in our community as it is to the debaters - be open about your willingness to vote on analytic arguments when asked for preferences.
The phrase "brief off time roadmap" is typically an attempt to sneak extra speech time in, and represents an especially tacky example of mimickry absent understanding. The practice originates from policy debate, where different arguments are flowed on different sheets of paper, often as many as six or seven separate sheets. "Roadmaps" in policy debate allow judges to physically order the sheets so that they will not spend time between arguments searching for the right paper. Roadmaps in Public Forum are unhelpful (debaters rarely follow them as articulated), presumptuous (declaring, rather than asking, that the roadmap is off time is unspeakably arrogant - especially because some 'roadmaps' venture into substantive commentary on the arguments), and ineffective (judges forget the roadmap approximately .01 seconds after it is articulated).
Every neg debater who makes an argument about "superbugs" or "superweeds" and "bee extinction" has, at a minimum, argument tension. If pests and plants rapidly evolve to adapt to pesticides, then bees - which have an enormously high reproduction rate - are no less capable of adapting. Smart aff debaters identify (or will identify) the interaction between these arguments in neg cases, and have a likely comically awkward thirty seconds of stuttering or silence from their opponents in cross-x.
In literally every round I judged this past weekend with the exception of octo-finals, I explicitly told debaters that the words "Our argument outweighs their argument because..." were the fastest way to win my ballot. Exactly zero of the approximately seventy debaters I judged ultimately made such comparisons. I am either exceptionally unlucky, or debaters are pervasively rigid in their debate styles – to their disadvantage.