| Subject: Much to learn, have you. |
Author:
Paul Musgrave
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Date Posted: 11:20:53 05/21/02 Tue
In reply to:
sibo
's message, "moo" on 10:37:30 05/21/02 Tue
In response, point-by-point:
1)Ext. is more useful
a)In order to be a good debater, yes, you should be able to present information well. But in four years of debating, I never saw a single policy debater (myself, Casey Howard, Stephanie Rose, and Willie Sutherland) who was able to speak well in a debate round as defined by the majority of the public: that is without excessive jargon, reference to vaguely qualified "cards," and a staccato method of argument. If debaters were as excellent at presentation as you suggest, then they wouldn't need to give judges roadmaps; the structure would be apparent in the speech.
Further, to be a competent extemper -- not even a good extemper -- one must develop these qualities in spades.
More importantly, your examples are flawed: A School Board debate (more generally, any committee-style debate) has precisely zero jargon (beyond the technicalities of the motion). When you specified debate, I took it to mean the bipolar style of LD/policy. The multipolar style inherent in parliamentary debate and Discussion is obviously frequent in this world, but I'll point out that it normally consists not of rigid point-by-point refutation but of individual speeches made in sequence (parliamentary) or of continuous multi-actor discussion (committee). Parliamentary debate is therefore more similar to extemp, and both debate and extemp have little relevance to the unstructured free-for-all of discussion.
Your "Nixon won" example overlooks the obvious: eight times as many people watched the Nixon debate on television as listened on radio. The argument is this:
I. The winner of the debate is determined by a majority vote of judges;
II. Kennedy won the overwhelming majority of television viewers (Let TV=television viewers; TV(K)=viewers voting for Kennedy; TV(N)=viewers voting for Nixon; assume TV(K)+TV(N)=TV)
III. Nixon won a majority of radio listeners (Let RL=radio listeners; RL(K), RL(N) similar to above under a similar assumption that RL(K)+RL(N)=RL);
IV. Therefore, if TV(K)+RL(K) > TV(N)+RL(N), Kennedy wins.
From the above, we can predict that it is likely the winner of the TV audience will win the overall, based solely on relative audience sizes and the reasonable assumption that judgements are rarely overwhelmingly decisive (that is, RL(K) will rarely be below 40%). Empirically, we can also demonstrate easily that Kennedy defeated the incumbent Vice President and that TV(K) was substantially greater than TV(N).
2)
Higher-quality cites? What defines a poor cite? Perhaps a poor cite is one that is unjustly biased, as in the case of Heritage or Cato. That means that a good cite would be one that was impartial. That's why I was under the (either "post-Paul" or "wrong") impression that cites in extemp should not be opinionated for the most part, but rather just facts. Then, impacting these facts would be done mostly be the extempers own words. Well, debaters use these impartial cites in many cases as well. Maybe not all cases, but the most effective rebuttals are built upon facts and personal impact, not appeal to biased authority.
Anyhow, how is it more useful to work with higher-quality cites? Either way, one learns to use cites and present them in an effective way. A debater could, if provided with a 'high-quality' cite, use that cite just as well as he/she could a poor cite.
I reprint your argument here for posterity's sake, because in two years you'll reread this and wonder how you could have written it. Let's dissect this argument, because Indiana state law requires an anatomy whenever there's an unexplained death. And this argument is dead on arrival.
Who defines a poor cite? The is in some ways subjective, but not entirely. The amount of bias is certainly a consideration, but not an overriding one; more importantly is the quality of scholarship and the value of the information presented in the argument. Heritage, Cato, etc. all bastardize their arguments and play with statistics; further, they frequently make elementary logical errors (probably on purpose) in making their arguments. A good citation would have none of these sources.
In Extemp, the rules for judging quality of sources are the same as those outlined above; however, due to time constraints and the inherent uncertainty of topic selection, extempers will typically have less time to research any given area than debaters. Therefore, "branding" frequently stands in for objective analysis of each article -- which is why you read the New York Times, the Economist, and the Washington Post instead of just plugging in keywords in Google.
How is it more useful to work with higher-quality cites? This should be prima facie evident, the way a nutritionist's suggestion that some broccoli would be better for you than a plate of Ho-Hos. If your information is incomplete or biased, then your argumentation will be flawed and you will negate the educational value of any researched-based activity. Taken to extremes, your argument suggests that I should treat David Duke's colums for the Arab News as seriously as Paul Krugman's for the New York Times. Your contention that a debater could "present" a high-quality cite as well as a low-quality one proves my point that extempers have higher standards about the use of evidence because they're not tied to arguing against or for a given question -- are, in fact, free to give opposing evidence in their speeches. This argument is not about the relative merits of presentation in the two activities, but about the quality of research used. Again, see the Duke-Krugman example: if a debater could "present" evidence from either analyst equally well, then he is no more than an automaton with the ability to speak, but not analyze (or he is morally bankrupt).
About breadth v. depth: I note that you concede that breadth precedes depth. This is an implicit concession that pedagogically, extemp is better than debate, since high school precedes college (which in turn precedes graduate school, which is when you really specialize). I am arguing in this debate the specific principle that for a bright high schooler (such as you, obviously), extemp is better by teaching you more about more of the world than debate. I will not seek to prove here that breadth is always better than depth; that is anti-Smithian. But viewed as a lifecycle, extemp contributes more to your well-being than locking you into a narrow topic.
I also note that you dropped the "artificial specialization" versus "organic specialization" argument. I'll take this as a tacit admission that the specialization of debate occurs not because tens of thousands of high schoolers simultaneously discover an interest in US FP toward Russia, but because some fat old men choose a resolution. As a strong free-marketeer, I happen to like organic outcomes better. You may argue against me, but unless you use some highly specialized arguments, you'll have to do so from an authoritarian paradigm.
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