#1 "no one has any leverage for enforcement once you lose the teeth of illegality."
This part didn't make sense to me. You say immediately after that "we enforce that be threatening your standing in society," which doesn't work on drug users, but the implicit previous status quo was that we did enforce drug laws against those people, for differing values of "worked." So what is the solution? Take whatever enforcement/penalty you had for "drug crimes", swap them to "whatever anti-social/destructive behavior that we actually don't want" and then you're done.
#2 " a gullible Verizon employee willing to swap SIM cards. "
My father-in-law got hit by this, but apparently just by someone getting into the phone provider's e-SIM system, so no physical access at all. Thankfully no major financial damage. e-SIM seems like a bad idea?
#3 re: "Crater being removed from Disney+ for cost-cutting reasons"
I don't get this? What are the fixed costs for having a single item listed in your streaming catalog? Zero, right? If no one streams it, it doesn't even consume bandwidth? If people are streaming it, then... shouldn't you be making money from it?
#4 "There are are remarkably large classes of transactions and business were AML/KYC is a gigantic effective tax on activity, often prohibitive. What do we get for this? Almost nothing."
You and I get nothing, but the government gets huge amounts of leverage over upstanding citizens. The question to ask is "what prosecutions/political attacks: "no banking for pot companies"/espionage" have been enabled by the information collected by those laws, and the answer is "a lot, and no way they're gonna give that up easily"
#5 "Many don't use statins, vaccines, or covid-19 therapies. Many choose to smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food."
I want to highlight statins, because it is HIGHLY possible that they are a net negative on life expectancy, and this isn't a crazy opinion held only by anti-vaxxers. It is highly reprehensible - and indeed misinformation! - to list them in the same "great ROI on your life" category as vaccines or not smoking.
#6 "Will Newsome: it's pretty upsetting to see someone order a 10 piece mcnugget at McDonald's when paying one more dollar has gotten you a 20 piece instead for at least two decades years now."
As the parent of young children, I can confidently assert that the utility curve of mcnuggets (from the perspective of the person paying for the food: me) is extremely unorthodox, but for certain numbers of children in the car, that it does indeed bend in a negative direction after ~10 or so. There is value in not having things, or more accurately in this case, not having to do the work to dig them out of seat cushions to throw them out, or sop up the vomit of mcnugget-consumers with bad judgement.
#7 "Lab leak: extremely explicit that they're going to say the opposite in the paper for political reasons, and also lie to reporters."
While it does not justify this in any way, I will say that I distinctly remember articles (I think from India) being published very early on (maybe even before US outbreak?) that explicitly said covid was a designed bioweapon (potentially with HIV genetic extractions, for whatever value of "possible"), and that people were very worried that it would lead to military hostilities. I remember some very quick "debunking" and then never heard about that article or any of the others, ever again.
#8 "10/10: Rao’s"
Precisely correct.
#9 Re: "actual % of causes of death" vs "NYT coverage of causes of death" - doesn't this also constitute "misinformation"? If I start a paper and only headlines [murders by group X], while 100% truthfully, wouldn't it be obvious I was trying to just propagandize against X? Who is "X" for the NYT, or any other paper?
1. On enforcement, we can enforce on people trying to be normal members of society, but drug users care too much about drugs and ignore those considerations, so they stop working.
2. Yeah, whole thing seems like it should be a much bigger disaster than it is. How does anyone hold onto their crypto?
3. Cost cutting is an accounting thing, helps on taxes and sometimes saves you having to pay those involved in production. Very destructive.
4. I do not think the government gets much actual use/leverage out of it either. Not zero, but not the right OOM of benefit versus costs. There are much better options for that.
5. Yep.
6. Oh my yes. There are restaurants where, even only as an adult, if they served a smaller portion at the same price, I would probably go more often...
#2: they managed to actually get into his TD Ameritrade account and execute a sell (but it didn't clear before he locked things down). I know the crypto services I use all use google authenticator (or equiv) and some kind of wait period for adding an external withdrawal address, but obviously not everyone does: almost every "normal" person I know who bought crypto lost large %'s of it in some way. Strangely, my "traditional" accounts like Vanguard/Merrill are far less (on the front end) secure, just often with user/pass. What they do have is a comprehensive customer service (nod to Patrick McKenzie part here) and a clawback system for illicit transfers. From what I see, there is a ton of fraud/theft/friendlyfraud/crime in traditional services, but they just spend on the services to be able to manually prevent or fix it after the fact.
#3: oh, interesting, I didn't realize the mechanism. That does seem like bad incentives.
#6: yeah, I remember being a 16 year old boy and thinking "why would you ever want LESS food for the money?" and now that I'm 42 I think perhaps I did not have a well-calibrated assessment for the "deal" I was getting at the Pizza Hut All You Can Eat Buffet.
On #3: with BROADCAST television it was the case every time a network broadcasts a show this DIRECTLY earned the network money because they're selling ADS against it. Contracts took that into account - it was easy to say we'll pay $X in residuals every time the show is BROADCAST because we expect to make $Y>X in ad revenue directly attributable to having people tune in to that particular show.
Streaming mostly doesn't work like that. There's no ads so you get no extra MARGINAL income attributable to one show being especially popular. Subscribers to Apple TV+ or Disney+ pay the same monthly rate no matter what show they're watching so once there's ENOUGH content to keep folks busy, the network would rather they be watching either CHEAP shows (old ones you own full rights to from long ago) or NEW shows that are still shooting and SO popular they'll induce new subscribers to join or old subscribers to renew to find out what happens next. Given that situation, mediocre shows nobody knows about - especially series that stop short having been canceled too soon - could be a liability. It lowers the perceived quality of your network if people keep finding junky stuff in their searches that they only *kind of* like.
I'm sure they'll eventually figure out a better business model for these streaming contracts - it really sucks for the actors and producers when their work just disappears - but fixing this requires contract negotiation. Which only happens once every 3 years - and this is one of those times.
UPDATE: on reflection, it seems to me streamers have two business models to choose from. They can be more like Netflix and try to have everything for all people OR they can be more like HBO and be a boutique destination with a limited selection of cultivated high-quality content for people with elevated tastes. But you've gotta pick a lane. Both Disney and Apple want to be HBO more than they want to be Netflix. Being HBO means you spend serious money to fund the first season of Willow because it MIGHT turn into a big hit that makes your channel look good and keeps subscribers happy with the quality you provide...but when that first season seems less than compelling you cut it short and terminate with extreme prejudice to protect the brand.
All that said: Zvi, thanks for mentioning Crater! I'd never heard of it but watched it today (via an illicit streaming service) and liked it!
On McNuggets: Having the AMC "A-List" movie subscription means if I order a regular popcorn I can "upgrade" that to a larger "Bucket" size for FREE...which I don't do. The bucket is TOO MUCH popcorn for one person - either I'll eat it (and feel queasy) or I'll have leftover popcorn to throw away (and feel wasteful). That upgrade has negative utility for me. So now I think I finally understand an old Japanese mystery - why Tokyo vending machines dispense cans of soda in *two different size options* for the exact same price!
1) My understanding is that part of the savings from cutting shows is that the services may have to pay residual or licensing payments when the shows are watched or available on streaming services. Also, apparently you can register a tax loss when you pull a show you own, as that show is now worth less than it was when you were showing it.
2) HBO has moved away from the prestige label business and towards Netflix. You can't get HBO anymore, instead you get "Max" which is the HBO line + Warner Brothers and DC + decorating and cooking shows.
"So that means that there is a 2% car break-in rate per day." -- for Hertz, possibly, sure. But not sure that maps to cars more generally. Given known sophistication of modern gangs to track things like Bluetooth signals (see, e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/bluetooth-scanner-car-thefts/), entirely possible there's something distorting this like, "they're tracking Hertz's anti-theft locators to selectively pick off cars full of luggage."
Could easily be broadly predictive, just wanted to flag.
Just got back from a trip to San Francisco, where my sister-in-law's rental car was broken into, and the tactics are much less sophisticated. They hang out in the parking lot of the nearest In-And-Out Burger to the rental shops, and presumably other nearby businesses.
Wedding party also had cars broken into at the beach, so public parking lots where tourists are likely to go may be targets as well.
Who leaves their luggage in the rental car? If anything, ceteris paribus, I would expect non-rental cars to be broken into more. Your regular vehicle is likely to accumulate stuff that a rental car doesn't. For instance, I keep some emergency cash in my car. Other people may have cell phone accessories and other stuff.
If we pick at random across all cars? Sure, the non-rental is probably more likely to have _an_ item.
When picked against areas where you might plausibly expect, especially with a bit of experience, to be full of tourists beginning/ending their vacations, and that locals know to be on lookout? (e.g., they drove their car to see Fisherman's Wharf on the last day before returning it?) I would expect 1. the tourist car to be more likely to have an item and 2. the value of those items to be higher (e.g., a laptop instead of just a random tire iron).
But who knows, you could argue it either way. Only the insurance adjuster knows...
Agreed that this is going to be wrong in a hard to predict direction. I can see the argument that it is much higher for rentals as easy targets that don't know how to protect themselves and won't care to file police reports. I can also see locals getting targeted more because rental companies and tourists stick to safer areas and don't know they're not supposed to file police reports, etc. What we do know is 2% of Hertz rentals per day, which is... very high.
Re kosher restaurants, I think it boils down to a simple limit: You can only do one thing outstandingly, two things excellently, and three or more things moderately well.
I can see it being that simple, you have an additional thing to focus on. No doubt the cost questions are not helping either, nor is the lack of competition, geography gives you a de facto oligopoly.
On the linked post, I found it interesting but I think I disagree with it. Our traditions must adapt, and they must be justified and argued about. We should ask both whether the logic behind the ruling was correct, and also whether the resulting behavior is adaptive going forward, and if neither is true then we should admit that humans can be wrong. I do not object to 'the Talmud has a mystical meaning here that justifies the action' but if so we are now capable of figuring out what that is, and deciding on it. If we can't, and we can't find other benefit, then it isn't helping us.
The alternative is what we are seeing, which is wide-scale abandonment of observance, and also of paying attention to these questions and arguments.
Concretely, the worm in the apple should be unkosher, but we should lose the extra holidays.
John came to the US with his family when he was 11 or 12 years old. He learned English watching Sesame Street reruns, and then he kept watching TV and practicing until he could speak without an accent. His English is better than mine. He met my brother in college, where they were both studying computer science. Since turning 18 John is here on a student visa, so he wasn't allowed to work. He got jobs under the table during the summers, and apparently did the work of 10 programmers setting up entire services from scratch. To hear my brother tell it, John pretty much dragged my brother across the finish line. After they both graduated, my brother got a mid job at a giant code mill, but John had to find someone willing to sponsor him for a work visa within months or face deportation. He did actually find a company willing to sponsor him, but there were too many applicants that year and apparently he lost some kind of lottery with immigration. His application was denied. Rather than be deported back to a country he hasn't lived in since he was 11, John decided to extend his student visa and get his masters degree. He doesn't particularly want a masters degree, but this buys him more time to get a work visa.
John has lived in the US for the last 15 years. He went to American public schools, drives on American roads, and when he calls 911 it goes to the same emergency services as everyone else. Whatever costs are associated with his immigration, we as a society have already paid them. John is now desperately trying to pay the IRS tens of thousands of dollars a year in income tax, and immigration won't let him. Instead he's paying more tuition to a public university in the hopes of being able to try again. This is the state of US immigration law.
My much milder example of how stupid immigration law is: if you're applying for a green card between November and March, you have to prove you got a flu shot for that flu season. GCs typicallytake a minimum of two years to process, by which at least 2-3 more flu seasons will have passed.
A less fun example was my friend who couldn't see her husband for over a year because marriage based GC applications take that long to process, and he couldn't can't get a tourist visa to visit her while it was pending because you can't get a non immigrant visa while applying for residency.
(And to be clear, these are both maximally good situations where the system works as intended and permits everything relatively fast)
I think Zvi misunderstood the way the sequence is generated. One does not multiply the last two entries (which would give 2, 7, 1, 4, 4, 1, 6, 6, 3, 6, 1, 8, 8, 6, 4, [2, 4, 8, 3, 2, 6, 1, 2] with a period of 8), but rather each consecutive pair of entries, which indeed gives a non-periodic sequence.
By the way, this link "Nabeel S. Quershi on puzzles." is wrongly pointing to the pubmed relevant to the previous paragraph.
I remain intrigued with the idea, which I've seen expressed independently several times by others, that legalizing drugs could work if we would simply enforce _all the other crimes_ that (some) drug users commit. E.g. shooting up is fine, but not _also_ occupying a public restroom for too long, or vandalizing other's property, or assaulting someone. Requiring those arrested (detained) while intoxicated to 'sober up' before being released seems like it could also help.
I think 'mindfulness' isn't quite a scam, just extremely overrated and overly 'mysterized'. I do think that regular periods of quiet reflection or, e.g. staring at the sky/clouds/stars, can be soothing/relaxing/calming, and that that provides _most_ of the benefits from practicing 'mindfulness' or meditation. Some meditation practices _are_ somewhat interesting, independent of whether there are significant benefits from long-term regular practice.
Car colour: same in the UK. I recently bought a new car and started noticing colours, and I too could not believe how large a fraction was monochrome once I started paying attention. We got a blue one.
Re Online Safety Bill, again in the UK: the passage of the bill itself does not create the anti-e2e requirements that these services are finding most objectionable. The Bill grants Ofcom the _power_ to enact such regulations. A lot of coverage and discussion is loose about this distinction.
So if Bill passes I don’t expect anyone to leave immediately, though if Ofcom does follow through then it could well happen then.
It’s worth noting that in addition to the anti-e2e stuff that is drawing these predictions of departures, there are quite a few other vague and onerous requirements that make this a bad bill, so even if the worst doesn’t happen it’s not going to be good for UK.
And finally - if I’m wrong about any of the above, please let me know! It’s incredibly hard to figure any of this out by reading the media.
Ah, yes, actual no one I'd seen had drawn that distinction before. My presumption has always been that the UK wouldn't actually follow through, but stupider things have happened, including there and recently, so...
Given that it is a matter of public record that the Tory party uses WhatsApp groups for all sorts of highly-sensitive discussions, one is curious about how the rule might be applied...
For what it's worth, KYC regulations seem kind of bad now but will probably become more valuable as we try to prevent AI agents from moving money around pretending to be people.
You wrote: "The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight."
Careful reading of the Twitter thread does not support this assertion.
Furthermore, the FAA actually thinks OPD will make flights MORE pleasant, not less (https://www.foxweather.com/lifestyle/airline-industry-changes-faa-airports-opds-descents). The other headlines blaming turbulence on "climate change", may or may not be correct or misleading, but the Twitter user (covfefeanon, -50 rationality points) trying to connect these dots is being excessively speculative.
+1, I had to ragequit reading your post to go to the replies. The answer is much more simple than a conspiracy theory:
1) (regular) greedy companies want to save fuel
2) smooth descend is easier on the engines but more complicated to manage for air traffic controlers
3) FAA is in charge of air taffic controlers
4) FAA *allowed* the practice of doing smooth descend because companies asked for it
5) none of this has any relationship with turbulence.
4.1) smooth descend also makes way less noise, which is the reason London Heathrow mandated it -> here the conflicting interest is that of the non-flying public.
…
By the way, a prediction of the global warming theory is that turbulence will in fact get worse, no matter what kind of flying you do.
"Yes, Substack Notes technically exists, which is what caused Elon’s fit of pique, but I’ve never seen a link to it..." Lots of people -- and a growing number -- use Substack Notes. The reason you haven't seen a link to one is that Twitter/X's algorithm makes them hard to see. That's the case for links to Substack blogs, so it's surely the case for Notes.
The following 2 observations seem mutually contradictory:
> Are we indeed this lame? It seems that we are. We also don’t value unique identifiers sufficiently, also the people choosing this many white cars seem low-level insane.
> He calculated that if materials such as Purdue's ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth's surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.
It's obviously nowhere close to 1-2% of the planet's surface, but there is at least one very good reason to choose a white (or light gray) car over other options, especially if you live in a warmer latitude.
Former debater here (around 2009-2011). The discussion about kritik strategies in policy debate has been frustrating to read, (even where I agree with parts of the critique of kritik!). Frankly, I think the kritik-critical bloggers have been following the model of "strongest statement I can make while still being true", and should be read accordingly. (This makes me sad! They are good people and I wish they would do better!)
Some specific notes, some quite relevant, as sub-comments:
1) K (which is what it's ~always called in the local lingo) is definitely not new. It's old enough that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez would have been doing it if she had debated policy in high school. Sure, it's gotten more prevalent over time, but if you walked into a debate round in 2009 and you couldn't answer "your plan is bad because your entire argument is capitalist", you were going to lose that round in front of nearly any judge. I'm willing to believe that social-location K is getting more popular/prevalent over time, though again, in 2009 critical-race Ks were already in the standard set of things you prepped for if you were in central Maryland. (NB: Likely this isn't nationally representative; the nearby Baltimore urban debate league influenced this some, and the arrival of Daryl Burch as the coach for Howard County's teams influenced it a lot. But HoCo traveled from Columbia to Wake Forest, so really it's more like "there was already plenty of CRT K up and down the East Coast".) If your narrative is that K is a reflection of woke, then no, serious K in CX debate goes at least as far back as the Clinton years. (To her credit, Maya does report this in her post.)
Can confirm: kritiks were, at most, considered _slightly_ novel tech in 2002 in, e.g., Cleveland's least-nationally-exposed league. If you went to a tournament featuring teams that competed nationally, it was in 50% of all rounds, and the usual reason for not seeing it was the Negative team knows that the Affirmative team is good on the particular kritik args they'd prepped, so basically they did the debate equivalent of sideboarding it out before the round started
2) As Zvi would have it, consider how this can be both true and the strongest possible true statement:
> I reviewed all Tournament of Champions semifinal and final round recordings from 2015 to 2023, and found that about two-thirds of Policy rounds and almost half of Lincoln-Douglas rounds featured critical theory.
One huge part of the answer is that Standard Operating Procedure on the Negative side is to throw out several arguments against the Affirmative team's case, suss out where they were weak (or just blundered their reply), sever the rest and pile on that one. I don't think there's a more standard first-year CX debater strategy than starting the first negative speech with "I'll have 4 off and case". Meaning something like:
- Off-case argument 1 (Topicality): Your proposal is not in-bounds on the official resolution because [tiny, dumb, technical reason out of the list of ten I prepared] and therefore you should lose.
- Off-case argument 2 (Politics Disadvantage): Your plan is going to make [political faction] mad and they'll block [other thing] which is more important because it will prevent a nuclear war that kills everyone.
- Off-case argument 3 (States Counterplan): Instead of [your plan], do [basically the same thing] at the state-by-state level. This is good because [something about federalism] and also it avoids the politics disadvantage.
- Off-case argument 4 (Capitalism K): Your plan has [capitalist element], capitalism is bad because [reason], in fact plans that are based on capitalist reasoning categorically suck because [reason].
- On-case arguments: You claim [advantage] but actually you make the problem worse because [reason], also your plan doesn't solve the problems you identified because [reason].
...and _all of that_ will get delivered (with citations and quotes from references) in eight minutes. I said "first-year CX debater" because really this would be considered amateur stuff, and a "real debate" would more often be six or seven off-case arguments (extra Topicality objections, disadvantages, or counterplans), plus case. I can probably still deliver a Topicality argument in 30 seconds, from memory.
So when Maya says that two-thirds of policy rounds "featured" K, I am entirely unimpressed that two-thirds of 1NC speakers stuck some 1-minute K module in their opening speech at least to see if the Aff would fumble it.
(The next thing that happens is the 2AC speaker gets 8 minutes to reply to all of the arguments, then the Neg gets 13(!) minutes to either continue the spray-and-pray or dump on the single contention that the 2AC answered weakest.) Sometimes you would see the second Aff speech throw up a "come on, judge, letting them throw up eight things and sever seven of them is unbalanced and abusive", but I have never, ever seen an Aff team win on that. More often they're just doing it for the "time skew" -- to make the Neg spend more time responding than it took the Aff to make the original claim.
Honestly, I'm shocked it's as low as 2/3 of TOC elimination rounds; I would not have been surprised by something like 7/8.
Very good info, but I will say that I do think that 'they put up 8 quick arguments, and then severed 7 of them' had better be respected as an argument if you don't want that to become standard, and I think you mostly don't? In a real discussion, if someone raised 8 objections and the other side swatted away 7 of them with minimal effort and those stuck, I wouldn't see the objector as arguing in good faith, or else they are out of their depth, which perhaps is OK (e.g. they are asking questions for info and did not do the research because the proposal is weird and unexpected, or whatever).
There also seems to be a strong asymmetry here, where the aff side takes on a burden of proof and the neg side simply has to throw shade on the aff side without offering a valid alternative position that can similarly face examination. How does debate keep this fair, then, while asking interesting questions?
Also, how the hell does topicality even work if you're allowed to argue actual anything? If you raise a dumb technical objection shouldn't the right answer be that technical topicality arguments are less topical than the accused violation and shouldn't matter?
More generally, is this the kind of game that is most useful to place here? What does it have to do with seeking truth, or convincing a judge of the actual resolution? As you ask, whatever is debate actually for, other than learning to talk fast?
This is a downstream effect of the fact that policy debate, relative to other debate formats (e.g., parli, LD) has a couple structural features that are different:
a. Your instinct about the "out of your depth" thing here is not entirely wrong! The deep structural reason to allow the neg to throw a lot of arguments out there, and then abandon the ones they're losing without consequence, is that because the affirmative gets to pick a specific area within a broad topic. At least in theory, Neg doesn't know which area they pick until the start of the round, so Aff structurally has an advantage of knowing and having prepared evidence for that specific area in greater depth (For example, the 2023-24 HS policy debate topic is "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income" -- there are at least 6 obvious cases just combinatorically, even without thinking at all.) As a result, policy normatively allows and expects the Negative team to make some arguments that Don't Hold Up To Detailed Examination, just as you would if you were arguing an area you're unfamiliar with.
Think of it kind of as if every Magic tournament had _decent_ homebrewed decks you'd never seen in testing -- everyone would run a Wish-board as much as possible, even if the average card in that Wish-board was never Wish-tutored for, just to make sure they had something that could potentially interact with and silver-bullet the opponent's plan.
b. Overall, policy debate isn't a persuasive activity for _rhetoric_'s sake; it views itself as occurring almost-entirely on the "flow" (i.e., the notes written by the judge about how each argument interacts). It's a game of speed chess in terms of figuring out arguments interact and counter each other, and where to chump-block an argument in order to save time to make several arguments against another point to win the round. (This is relatively more true than, e.g., parliamentary debate, wherein the flow can become almost irrelevant halfway through the round in favor of re-framing the debate)
c. As rossry notes, debate formats generally (excluding some Parli) believe "Affirmative gets to speak first and last" since they have the burden of defending something, so somewhere in there, you flip the order of speeches and let Neg speak twice in a row. Policy, unlike other formats, lets the Negative divide that time as they'd like (the 13 minutes thing he mentions is theoretically 2 speech blocks, the 2nd Negative Constructive speech and 1st Negative Rebuttal), so the real meat of what Neg is arguing happens there. Back-solve for that and the flow point above, and that encourages spreading in the 1st Negative Constructive speech.
Separately, in regards to your other question, topicality actually does work as, at least in theory, a check on "argue anything" -- I have, as a judge, given the loss to a too-clever Affirmative team on a well-made topicality argument by a Negative team more times than I can count; the trick is usually to impact the topicality violation to the why-are-we-debating question, and argue to the judge that their role is to enforce fair standards for debate as an educative activity. I recognize this is hard to accept in the abstract as actually-occuring if your first point of contact with this format is in the concept of the kritik, but it's true.
I don't doubt that aff-cases can be actually off-topic sometimes, and that calling them out as such needs to be a valid option, and also that not doing so greatly favors aff because neg has to prep for aff's argument, so presenting an invalid one means one that wasn't otherwise prepared for. I was responding to Rossry's idea of the 10 technical arguments, as opposed to a substantive one.
> I will say that I do think that 'they put up 8 quick arguments, and then severed 7 of them' had better be respected as an argument if you don't want that to become standard, and I think you mostly don't?
Honestly, with some distance, I think I agree with you on the substance. I also remember ~3 years, and then some, of never seeing it argued successfully (or honestly, with very much heart). I don't/didn't get the sense that it's disrespected so much as, idk, not a sufficient combination of good tech and good pilots to typically get there.
My check-at-the-door-as-a-judge opinion is probably that it's a weird gotcha for the Aff's second speech to just dogpile the Neg for doing this, since literally every Neg (that hasn't done some all-in K thing) does, and that if you really wanted to bring out the tech to win this, you'd put a minute of it in your first speech, before they had the chance to dig the hole, just to weaken their argument that it was an unexpected gotcha.
And honestly, if you didn't want a spread-based flow-centric debate format, why are you in Policy instead of LD, Parli, or PuFo?
"What is debate actually for?" the right question; the answer I most believe is (as I say below) as an analogy to sports, or chess, or Magic, or such stylized competitions that teach a kind of mental discipline you don't get in PvE outside options.
Oh, and re: T: The Neg's "topicality" objection is "the Aff's specific plan is not an instance of the resolution[1], and so proving their case doesn't prove the resolution; you should vote Neg if the Aff doesn't prove the resolution". I suppose you could win bad-for-debate impacts, but why, if you already have concluded no-reason-to-vote-Aff?
The corresponding move on the Aff's side is a "link defense", effectively "the Neg's argument #5 doesn't apply to us for [reason]; they could be right on all of their other points on #5 and it still should have zero impact on your vote". There is room to go on the offense and argue for their loss for abuse reasons if you can tie them to impacts, but in practice that's most often just used as time skew.
+1 to David Kasten's other points below.
[1] 2023-2024's is: "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income."
3) More generally, there's a (dominant?) school of thought that policy debate judges, unlike any other humans, should be "tabula rasa" -- a blank slate not bringing any conclusions into the round -- and willing to accept the stronger argument on any point that comes up. Does building housing raise or lower property prices? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument. Will 3.5C of warming cause half the planet to die from food system collapse? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument. Will India and Pakistan start a nuclear war if [US trade policy plan]? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument.
By default, and to a shocking degree, this extends to _the rules of debate itself_. The topic says "reduce troops in Afghanistan", the Aff wants to reduce them to zero, and the Neg says that's out-of-bounds? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument, which will very likely be based on what is good for debate. The Aff wants to move troops from Afghanistan to Syria and the Neg says out-of-bounds? Give me the arguments. Team A wants their stronger debater to do both cross-examinations? (Is that even against the rules?) Give me the arguments why that's good or bad for debate. Team B wants one debater to give three of their four speeches? Arguments. Team C says their debater should get an extra two minutes to correct for systemic injustices? Give me the arguments. If the other side convinces me that this is bad for debate, I'll either strike your extra-time arguments from the record, or give you a loss, based on...which has the stronger arguments. Team D wants me to award a double loss with 0/30 speaker points as a protest against the institution of debate? I'll act on the stronger arguments. Team E wants me to vote down the Aff because "Afghanistan" is a colonial construct that they accept and repeat, and silence is violence? And their opponents say "no fair, that's not the topic, plus the topic says Afghanistan and if we proposed withdrawing troops from Khurasan you'd jump down our throats on topicality"? Look, I want both of you to make your cases and explain how I should be using my vote, and the one of you that has the stronger argument that I should vote for you is going to get it.
Can confirm (my judging paradigm is basically, "I'm tabula rasa, tell me how to weigh the arguments and judge the round, if you don't, I'll default to judging on best-policy. Also, talk slower, my ears are getting old.")
Can, more interestingly, confirm that the average team does not take nearly enough advantage of this fact.
My understanding is you are one of several judges? And also that they've learned that people who say this are often lying. So they are hedging their bets versus what looks to you like the proper response?
So in preliminary rounds, you're almost always* a single judge. In the top-N elimination bracket, it's almost always a multi-judge panel.
I honestly don't agree with the characterization that they think people who say this are lying (beyond the degree that anyone can't just be truly tabula rasa). Most of the examples brought up in the various current-state-of-debate pieces rely on the teams largely trusting the judge's public judging paradigm statements as accurately describing their biases (e.g., that random college student judge from State University X that says they are a Marxist -- in a statement every team can read prior to the round -- are indeed a Marxist or whatever). And even if they thought I was lying, then they'd just tell me "you're tabula rasa, we assert you should judge [as we secretly think you are already judging]" and then proceed through that abstraction layer to argue in line with my perceived biases. Few teams do that.
My point is, rather, even assuming arguendo that they do think judges are lying, they still don't adopt optimum strategies -- far too many average-performing teams try to do just a sort of "fight as hard as I can on every single argument and hope that gives a general impression of winning" strategy rather that optimizing around a perceived judging paradigm and allocating their time and arguments accordingly to maximizing their win probability.
Ah, ok, if it's single-judge then that's a lot easier to say people are messing up. I still wouldn't entirely trust it, but helps a lot. The other consideration, now that I think about it, is that if this is not a common situation, then anyone who is playing a fast-moving game is going to get all this stuff drilled into their patterns and it is going to be difficult to adjust - think about what happens on 4th down and how often players in NCAAF correctly drop the interception.
Tabula rosa is not a thing, as many Ks would point out, everyone brings with them their prior knowledge of the world, if you tell me the moon is made of green cheese so we couldn't have landed on it so the US Government can't be trusted, I shouldn't have to bring a citation or argument that it isn't or lose the fight, and so on.
It also seems to encourage people to go super-meta about debate rules and what is 'good for' debate, which seems to greatly favor social arguments and also act-utilitarian arguments in a rather foolish way? Isn't that how we are getting into this mess, that essentially people are holding debate scores hostage to outside-debate concerns, and it is working quite often?
I would also argue that obviously Tabula Rosa judging is not what we are talking about here from many of these judges. If you say that certain arguments result in an automatic loss, that is the opposite of tabula rosa. If you say you can't defend capitalism, not only is that not tabula rosa, that is being unopen to debate at all and also is going to give everyone an incentive to K everything as capitalist.
More than that, if you can't be anti-K conceptually because there such talk is 'not good for debate' or generally ungood, and you believe the world is about such struggles, then these arguments are trump and nothing else matters and also every debate is the same. You can't 'give me the arguments' tabula rosa in a world in which there is an underlying accepted worldview that judges will auto-loss you for lifting fingers against. Instead what it is saying is some sort of 'local' tabula rosa which means facts locally don't matter but general ideologies do, so everything is about ideology.
The role of woke in this is that it invalidates the tabula rosa, and gives you judges with a 'good for debate' prior that has little to do with good for debate and everything to do with good for woke, which then massively shifts the playing field and incentives, from K being a 'you can try this if you see an opening' into something that breaks the format.
Yeah, sorry, some stuff gets contracted in writing, but to be explicit: There totally are (and were in 2010) judges that are exactly as they say and will not give a specific class of arguments any air under any circumstance, or will insta-lose a team for stepping over some line, or etc. Judges gonna judge, and so on. (As with many things, I believe the first cases of this came from the political right, can't disrespect the flag -type stuff, and is now exclusively a tactic of the political left.)
And yes, I waffled while writing my post on how much to qualify and hedge my tabula rasa claim. I can construct claims that I would allow Affs to win against with no citations and three clear sentences, and so of course I'm not a blank slate. I dunno, it's a thing we gesture at to distinguish ourselves (for the debaters' benefit) from differently-philosophized judges who will hand you an automatic loss if the wrong partner does the cross-ex, or they just think capitalism is good, or any of the pro-social-justice philosophies on display at the links.
I think two things are being unintentionally conflated here: 1. is it OK for a judge to write a judging paradigm that says, "many held-by-most-of-American-society arguments are out of bounds/auto loss"? 2. Is a kritik a _reasonable_ argument to run in a debate round, if it's treated on _roughly the same grounds_ as more old-school arguments?
(My answers are No to 1 and Yes to 2.)
On 1:
I 100% agree that there are some judges that do not have tabula rasa as their judging paradigm; I do firmly believe that tabula rasa is indeed the _default and predominant_ judging paradigm.
I did some spot-checking of the paradigms listed in the Slow Boring article, and as far as I can tell, none of them assert that they are tabula rasa or have tabula-rasa-ish vibes. ( At least two of them, when read in their entirety, however, are somewhat less favorable to a team running kritiks than when only the excerpted text is read; at least one of them, in the balance of their non-excerpeted comments on other more conventional strategies, is saying "kritiks aren't an auto-lose, I'm not a boomer," rather than that kritiks are an auto-win.
I'd also note that I judged in the late 2010s in the same Los Angeles circuit as one of those judges linked in Slow Boring (I don't think I know him or overlapped with him) and in that circuit I saw many, many judges that personally were the archetype of neon-haired leftists _give the loss_ to the team running a kritik or, for that matter, the loss to just normal arguments that appeal more to the left.
On 2:
A judge saying kritiks being _reasonable_ to run in rounds does not equal only Marxist judging. Lots of arguments are reasonable to run in a debate round, but are not auto-wins and have little VAR; I actually think that kritiks generally have negative VAR at high skill levels because they're hard to pilot well in a high-end debate round.
The reason is perhaps unsurprising on reflection -- they're by definition articulating a separate philosophical world, so it's hard for a Negative team to make kritik arguments about Capitalism bad and also say things like, "the Affirmative's policy is bad because it will cause a budget deficit." It's absolutely doable as rossry noted, but very hard to do well or in a way that has as much clash of arguments as ideal. (This is the actual reason I think kritiks are bad; at its worst, it's the Krark-Clan Ironworks deck of debate rounds)
But I do believe that there is something good and right about giving kids the chance in high school and college to argue about big ideas. I think a Marxist 17-year-old seeing, and feeling _viscerally_, the total failure of a critical theory argument in a debate round is a good thing. Especially in -- as I don't think rossry or I have articulated yet -- in policy debate, where a judge usually delivers their decision verbally to the competitors after reviewing their notes, and explains why. The aformentioned neon-haired leftist explaining politely, but in exquisite detail, why the kritik _didn't convince them_ is an important teaching moment. After all, debate judges are usually former debaters, and debaters usually like to tear arguments apart more than putting them together.
> it requires arguing obvious nonsense, with failure to accept such nonsense as the baseline of discussion, or insisting that it is irrelevant to the topic, treated as a de facto automatic loss.
On the contrary, an argument that [insert K here] is irrelevant to the topic, this is bad for debate, and the _Neg_ should suffer an instant loss (we'd call this "framework") is bog-standard in the Aff reply. Only rookies get caught without their framework file.
On one hand, this is mostly the sort of nonsense flak that the Neg's topicality argument was -- spend 30sec setting up the skeleton of an argument that you can put real meat on if the other side really flubs their reply. But in a very real sense, if the Neg spends 13 minutes dumping critical Marxist theory on you, it is entirely valid to spend 4.5 minutes of your 5-minute reply on some flavor of "this is off-topic and bad for debate, this judge-is-a-revolutionary-historian bit is a fiction, we are high school students and you are a debate coach and I wanted to debate military policy because debate in high school is important for shaping a future generation of political leaders who can solve real problems so can you please give this Neg team the loss to avoid this whole activity going off the rails?" I have done exactly that, multiple times. Won on it about as often as we won on any other off-case stuff.
The biggest thing that makes policy different, as a format, is that it's expected that it's valid to debate the rules of debate. The majority of TOC judges in 2010 would vote for a K -- if the Neg won the debate-about-what-debate-is-for to put the K in-bounds -- or vote against a K, if the Aff won that it should be out-of-bounds. I'd bet at 1:1 odds that that's still true today.
4) Some judges gonna judge judge judge judge judge, but that's why teams get (or at least got -- I'm not current) a fixed number of "no, not that judge" vetoes at most tournaments. We called these "strikes", and yes they were used by K-disliking teams to avoid being judged by the most K-friendly judges, and by K-liking teams to avoid being judged by judges that wouldn't ever vote for the K even if their opponent was a dead fish.
That is good to hear and also highlights the problem. You can choose to pull out a K or not pull out a K. If you do, then you win if you win the meta-argument on whether the K is a valid tactic (since under their own frameworks Ks invalidate literal everything) or you lose if it is rejected. Which means you'll pull it out if it gives you a better chance than not doing so (or if you inherently value using it). Including using Ks to flat out challenge the entire rules of debate to say that Ks matter more than debate so whoever raises the bigger K should win automatically.
Which is fine in your time, or mostly fine, because if you made such arguments against a prepared opponent you would lose, and the question now is whether such arguments actually work - it's fine to say 'you have to win the debate over in-bound-ness' but you have to do that with a bunch of people who think nothing else is in bounds and that anyone who disagrees is a horrible person and a bunch of similar land mines, so in practice that doesn't obviously matter.
I suspect there _is_ a problem in the state of debate, which was not present in my time to nearly this extent, but which has not been clearly characterized by the first/second rounds of criticism I read.
And I agree with your instinct that it's the shift in the judges that is the real action, rather than the tech or the (meta-)format.
5) More fundamentally, what is debate _for_? Should it be practicing good, persuasive, honest argumentation by doing exactly that? Is it practice thinking about the _structure_ of arguments, or their _form_, or their _truth_? Other?.
My $0.02 is that it's perfectly reasonable that policy debate bears the same relationship to persuasion that fencing bears to martial prowess. I think that training for _this_ sport with _these_ rules is good even though none of the constituent skills make any sense for self-defense.
In this view, CX isn't useful because debaters practice the whole of good persuasive speaking (seriously, watch any twenty seconds of any policy debate video from the last 10 years); but it's more narrowly good for practicing _thinking critically about how arguments fit together into conclusions_. I have -- exactly once -- made the mistake of arguing that their plan makes X worse and also (three arguments later) that X is good actually; that loss stung so much that I think I never did that again. I still think about the difference between "impact defense" (if I'm right, you get none of your claimed Y) and "impact offense" (if I'm right, you get bad Z) -- which are diametrically different in their implications if they're 95% to be true. The debate-the-rules-of-the-game stuff isn't useful for its _content_, but is mostly just fine for its _structure_.
I would affirm that training almost any skills at all, or any rhetorical skills or competitive skills, has some inherent value, and that thinking through logic is useful even if it is logic that follows highly impractical rules. If these were rather arbitrary rules sets, similar to fencing bears, then I would say that it would be better if we instead put far more weight on truth and good, persuasive, honest arguments presented in good faith and how to ensure that those dominated, with a focus on where we can be guided by the beauty of our weapons. But that it would be fine, and far better than the median use of time. If debate was about what you want it to be about.
The problem is that this structure is, it seems, no longer neutral. Instead, we are teaching students (if the allegations are correct) argumentation within a CRT/Marxist/Far-Left framework, where many important things are unthinkable and grounds for automatic loss, and saying the right Shibboleths gets consistently rewarded, and normalizes and teaches that system and way of being and talking. This then gets carried through to the outside. And that's terrible.
I'll acknowledge and even nod along to the claim that "what epistemic-discursive rules are we demonstrating / proving / reinforcing, and are they what we want the world to have?" is the right question. I think we agree about at least the broad strokes of an answer as well.
That said, it's not the discussion that I particularly want to have right now, so I want to politely back away from it.
6) I haven't judged a CX round in ten(?) years, but if I did tomorrow, I'd give a pre-round disclosure that I'm not going to put down my pen or throw anyone out of the round for what they say or how they say it, and if you have a legitimate problem with what the other side is doing -- and you're right that it's bad for debate -- you should have an easy time winning on that and convincing me to hand them a loss.
7) Look, I dunno, all of this is years out of date. Maybe the game really done changed. But nothing that I've read from the concerned side makes me think that they've got a clear picture of what's on the ground (and in this way, I am not acting like a tabula rasa judge).
Yep, it's always all huge if true. As I said, the first attempt left me highly unpersuaded, because I did spot checks, and you've definitely thrown a bunch of shade on the second set of claims. The thing is that when I think through the logical implications of your account, it does lead to an equilibrium where debate ceases to be the thing you experienced - the debate lacks defenses against this kind of attack, in the context of a youth that is highly left-wing especially among those most likely to do debate.
Yes, a bit that I elided somewhat is how much it was unclear to me in 2010 that the K (any K, really) was just overpowered and should eat everything if teams prepped it right and judges were at least tab-rasa to it. Which is why, good game-player that I was (and with the coach that I had), I picked up exactly those weapons and rolled over teams unprepared for them as main-deck tech (on Aff and Neg -- military drawdown, I think you meant decolonization...). Present-me would not be sure whether to roll eyes, tip hat, or both.
First off, +1 to this format of reply, and to the engagement here, and also you should write this up on your blog so I can link to it, even if it's literally copy/pasting what is below. There was a ton of stuff here that I completely did not know.
Second, yeah, that is... not at all what I thought debate was, or even something I considered that a debate might actually be, and I have no idea what to think about it at first glance, seems much closer to Monty Python argument sketch than I would have expected for both better and worse. And I can totally see why this makes the evidence presented not strong evidence of much of anything.
I would expect to see links to Notes in a Substack Post. With Twitter, the tweet is the main thing (most of the time). It's where you want people to engage you. On Substack, it seems to me that the Post is clearly the main thing. Notes are primarily to enable more people to find your blog, so the links would be from Notes to Post and rarely the other way around. Sorry, I don't have any numbers on usage. It's quite new so probably the numbers are still developing. It's silly of Musk to see Notes as a threat to X. They serve quite different purposes. Perhaps Notes will develop in a direction that makes it more of a threat but I suspect that would raise objections from bloggers who don't want another Twitter/X.
This is not the kind of mistake I'd expect to see you make so it's surprising to see two instances of it here: $40 million on tax prep lobbying and ~1% recovered from AML are equilibrium quantities not indicators of fundamentals. Intuit et al would spend more if they felt more threatened and $40m is likely nowhere close to the actual max they're willing to spend. Budgetary return on AML was never the point, complete success would look like 0% return and if returns are anywhere near 100% you're trivially spending too little; AML is semi-deliberately burning money to deter hard-to-measure negative-sum activity elsewhere (ie crime). $300b / year is certainly excessive (FBI only spends $10b / year?!) but it's not obvious that scaling it back would net the economy 90% let alone 99% of the difference.
In short: solve for the equilibrium! Surely >90% of good-faith policy mistakes come from holding quantities constant that are likely to change under intervention...
On tax prep yes we should consider that they'd ramp up, but it's not clear to me they could ramp up all that much in an effective way. Could have said more here.
On AML, I do realize the equilibrium issue, once again I could have said more, and... I really don't think this is that big a deal, radically scaling back the laws would have very little effect even in equilibrium. It's true that I didn't mention that claim, but I definitely do believe it.
#1 "no one has any leverage for enforcement once you lose the teeth of illegality."
This part didn't make sense to me. You say immediately after that "we enforce that be threatening your standing in society," which doesn't work on drug users, but the implicit previous status quo was that we did enforce drug laws against those people, for differing values of "worked." So what is the solution? Take whatever enforcement/penalty you had for "drug crimes", swap them to "whatever anti-social/destructive behavior that we actually don't want" and then you're done.
#2 " a gullible Verizon employee willing to swap SIM cards. "
My father-in-law got hit by this, but apparently just by someone getting into the phone provider's e-SIM system, so no physical access at all. Thankfully no major financial damage. e-SIM seems like a bad idea?
#3 re: "Crater being removed from Disney+ for cost-cutting reasons"
I don't get this? What are the fixed costs for having a single item listed in your streaming catalog? Zero, right? If no one streams it, it doesn't even consume bandwidth? If people are streaming it, then... shouldn't you be making money from it?
#4 "There are are remarkably large classes of transactions and business were AML/KYC is a gigantic effective tax on activity, often prohibitive. What do we get for this? Almost nothing."
You and I get nothing, but the government gets huge amounts of leverage over upstanding citizens. The question to ask is "what prosecutions/political attacks: "no banking for pot companies"/espionage" have been enabled by the information collected by those laws, and the answer is "a lot, and no way they're gonna give that up easily"
#5 "Many don't use statins, vaccines, or covid-19 therapies. Many choose to smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food."
I want to highlight statins, because it is HIGHLY possible that they are a net negative on life expectancy, and this isn't a crazy opinion held only by anti-vaxxers. It is highly reprehensible - and indeed misinformation! - to list them in the same "great ROI on your life" category as vaccines or not smoking.
#6 "Will Newsome: it's pretty upsetting to see someone order a 10 piece mcnugget at McDonald's when paying one more dollar has gotten you a 20 piece instead for at least two decades years now."
As the parent of young children, I can confidently assert that the utility curve of mcnuggets (from the perspective of the person paying for the food: me) is extremely unorthodox, but for certain numbers of children in the car, that it does indeed bend in a negative direction after ~10 or so. There is value in not having things, or more accurately in this case, not having to do the work to dig them out of seat cushions to throw them out, or sop up the vomit of mcnugget-consumers with bad judgement.
#7 "Lab leak: extremely explicit that they're going to say the opposite in the paper for political reasons, and also lie to reporters."
While it does not justify this in any way, I will say that I distinctly remember articles (I think from India) being published very early on (maybe even before US outbreak?) that explicitly said covid was a designed bioweapon (potentially with HIV genetic extractions, for whatever value of "possible"), and that people were very worried that it would lead to military hostilities. I remember some very quick "debunking" and then never heard about that article or any of the others, ever again.
#8 "10/10: Rao’s"
Precisely correct.
#9 Re: "actual % of causes of death" vs "NYT coverage of causes of death" - doesn't this also constitute "misinformation"? If I start a paper and only headlines [murders by group X], while 100% truthfully, wouldn't it be obvious I was trying to just propagandize against X? Who is "X" for the NYT, or any other paper?
1. On enforcement, we can enforce on people trying to be normal members of society, but drug users care too much about drugs and ignore those considerations, so they stop working.
2. Yeah, whole thing seems like it should be a much bigger disaster than it is. How does anyone hold onto their crypto?
3. Cost cutting is an accounting thing, helps on taxes and sometimes saves you having to pay those involved in production. Very destructive.
4. I do not think the government gets much actual use/leverage out of it either. Not zero, but not the right OOM of benefit versus costs. There are much better options for that.
5. Yep.
6. Oh my yes. There are restaurants where, even only as an adult, if they served a smaller portion at the same price, I would probably go more often...
#2: they managed to actually get into his TD Ameritrade account and execute a sell (but it didn't clear before he locked things down). I know the crypto services I use all use google authenticator (or equiv) and some kind of wait period for adding an external withdrawal address, but obviously not everyone does: almost every "normal" person I know who bought crypto lost large %'s of it in some way. Strangely, my "traditional" accounts like Vanguard/Merrill are far less (on the front end) secure, just often with user/pass. What they do have is a comprehensive customer service (nod to Patrick McKenzie part here) and a clawback system for illicit transfers. From what I see, there is a ton of fraud/theft/friendlyfraud/crime in traditional services, but they just spend on the services to be able to manually prevent or fix it after the fact.
#3: oh, interesting, I didn't realize the mechanism. That does seem like bad incentives.
#6: yeah, I remember being a 16 year old boy and thinking "why would you ever want LESS food for the money?" and now that I'm 42 I think perhaps I did not have a well-calibrated assessment for the "deal" I was getting at the Pizza Hut All You Can Eat Buffet.
On #3: with BROADCAST television it was the case every time a network broadcasts a show this DIRECTLY earned the network money because they're selling ADS against it. Contracts took that into account - it was easy to say we'll pay $X in residuals every time the show is BROADCAST because we expect to make $Y>X in ad revenue directly attributable to having people tune in to that particular show.
Streaming mostly doesn't work like that. There's no ads so you get no extra MARGINAL income attributable to one show being especially popular. Subscribers to Apple TV+ or Disney+ pay the same monthly rate no matter what show they're watching so once there's ENOUGH content to keep folks busy, the network would rather they be watching either CHEAP shows (old ones you own full rights to from long ago) or NEW shows that are still shooting and SO popular they'll induce new subscribers to join or old subscribers to renew to find out what happens next. Given that situation, mediocre shows nobody knows about - especially series that stop short having been canceled too soon - could be a liability. It lowers the perceived quality of your network if people keep finding junky stuff in their searches that they only *kind of* like.
I'm sure they'll eventually figure out a better business model for these streaming contracts - it really sucks for the actors and producers when their work just disappears - but fixing this requires contract negotiation. Which only happens once every 3 years - and this is one of those times.
UPDATE: on reflection, it seems to me streamers have two business models to choose from. They can be more like Netflix and try to have everything for all people OR they can be more like HBO and be a boutique destination with a limited selection of cultivated high-quality content for people with elevated tastes. But you've gotta pick a lane. Both Disney and Apple want to be HBO more than they want to be Netflix. Being HBO means you spend serious money to fund the first season of Willow because it MIGHT turn into a big hit that makes your channel look good and keeps subscribers happy with the quality you provide...but when that first season seems less than compelling you cut it short and terminate with extreme prejudice to protect the brand.
All that said: Zvi, thanks for mentioning Crater! I'd never heard of it but watched it today (via an illicit streaming service) and liked it!
On McNuggets: Having the AMC "A-List" movie subscription means if I order a regular popcorn I can "upgrade" that to a larger "Bucket" size for FREE...which I don't do. The bucket is TOO MUCH popcorn for one person - either I'll eat it (and feel queasy) or I'll have leftover popcorn to throw away (and feel wasteful). That upgrade has negative utility for me. So now I think I finally understand an old Japanese mystery - why Tokyo vending machines dispense cans of soda in *two different size options* for the exact same price!
Thanks for the detail on streaming vs broadcast, that explained why I was confused by it!
re: mcnuggets, yes, definitely movie theatre popcorn is definitely in the "eventually negative returns" category.
1) My understanding is that part of the savings from cutting shows is that the services may have to pay residual or licensing payments when the shows are watched or available on streaming services. Also, apparently you can register a tax loss when you pull a show you own, as that show is now worth less than it was when you were showing it.
2) HBO has moved away from the prestige label business and towards Netflix. You can't get HBO anymore, instead you get "Max" which is the HBO line + Warner Brothers and DC + decorating and cooking shows.
"So that means that there is a 2% car break-in rate per day." -- for Hertz, possibly, sure. But not sure that maps to cars more generally. Given known sophistication of modern gangs to track things like Bluetooth signals (see, e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/bluetooth-scanner-car-thefts/), entirely possible there's something distorting this like, "they're tracking Hertz's anti-theft locators to selectively pick off cars full of luggage."
Could easily be broadly predictive, just wanted to flag.
Just got back from a trip to San Francisco, where my sister-in-law's rental car was broken into, and the tactics are much less sophisticated. They hang out in the parking lot of the nearest In-And-Out Burger to the rental shops, and presumably other nearby businesses.
Wedding party also had cars broken into at the beach, so public parking lots where tourists are likely to go may be targets as well.
Who leaves their luggage in the rental car? If anything, ceteris paribus, I would expect non-rental cars to be broken into more. Your regular vehicle is likely to accumulate stuff that a rental car doesn't. For instance, I keep some emergency cash in my car. Other people may have cell phone accessories and other stuff.
If we pick at random across all cars? Sure, the non-rental is probably more likely to have _an_ item.
When picked against areas where you might plausibly expect, especially with a bit of experience, to be full of tourists beginning/ending their vacations, and that locals know to be on lookout? (e.g., they drove their car to see Fisherman's Wharf on the last day before returning it?) I would expect 1. the tourist car to be more likely to have an item and 2. the value of those items to be higher (e.g., a laptop instead of just a random tire iron).
But who knows, you could argue it either way. Only the insurance adjuster knows...
Agreed that this is going to be wrong in a hard to predict direction. I can see the argument that it is much higher for rentals as easy targets that don't know how to protect themselves and won't care to file police reports. I can also see locals getting targeted more because rental companies and tourists stick to safer areas and don't know they're not supposed to file police reports, etc. What we do know is 2% of Hertz rentals per day, which is... very high.
Re kosher restaurants, I think it boils down to a simple limit: You can only do one thing outstandingly, two things excellently, and three or more things moderately well.
Also, would love if some people read this: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/tsuyoku-naritai-does-the-torah-weaken
I can see it being that simple, you have an additional thing to focus on. No doubt the cost questions are not helping either, nor is the lack of competition, geography gives you a de facto oligopoly.
On the linked post, I found it interesting but I think I disagree with it. Our traditions must adapt, and they must be justified and argued about. We should ask both whether the logic behind the ruling was correct, and also whether the resulting behavior is adaptive going forward, and if neither is true then we should admit that humans can be wrong. I do not object to 'the Talmud has a mystical meaning here that justifies the action' but if so we are now capable of figuring out what that is, and deciding on it. If we can't, and we can't find other benefit, then it isn't helping us.
The alternative is what we are seeing, which is wide-scale abandonment of observance, and also of paying attention to these questions and arguments.
Concretely, the worm in the apple should be unkosher, but we should lose the extra holidays.
Interesting take. Thank you for reading and responding, it means a lot to me!
Bug: Nabeel S. Qureshi link is wrong, goes to unrelated journal post
Re Immigration:
My brother has a friend, let's call him John.
John came to the US with his family when he was 11 or 12 years old. He learned English watching Sesame Street reruns, and then he kept watching TV and practicing until he could speak without an accent. His English is better than mine. He met my brother in college, where they were both studying computer science. Since turning 18 John is here on a student visa, so he wasn't allowed to work. He got jobs under the table during the summers, and apparently did the work of 10 programmers setting up entire services from scratch. To hear my brother tell it, John pretty much dragged my brother across the finish line. After they both graduated, my brother got a mid job at a giant code mill, but John had to find someone willing to sponsor him for a work visa within months or face deportation. He did actually find a company willing to sponsor him, but there were too many applicants that year and apparently he lost some kind of lottery with immigration. His application was denied. Rather than be deported back to a country he hasn't lived in since he was 11, John decided to extend his student visa and get his masters degree. He doesn't particularly want a masters degree, but this buys him more time to get a work visa.
John has lived in the US for the last 15 years. He went to American public schools, drives on American roads, and when he calls 911 it goes to the same emergency services as everyone else. Whatever costs are associated with his immigration, we as a society have already paid them. John is now desperately trying to pay the IRS tens of thousands of dollars a year in income tax, and immigration won't let him. Instead he's paying more tuition to a public university in the hopes of being able to try again. This is the state of US immigration law.
My much milder example of how stupid immigration law is: if you're applying for a green card between November and March, you have to prove you got a flu shot for that flu season. GCs typicallytake a minimum of two years to process, by which at least 2-3 more flu seasons will have passed.
A less fun example was my friend who couldn't see her husband for over a year because marriage based GC applications take that long to process, and he couldn't can't get a tourist visa to visit her while it was pending because you can't get a non immigrant visa while applying for residency.
(And to be clear, these are both maximally good situations where the system works as intended and permits everything relatively fast)
> sequence has limited memory so it will repeat in a loop
I used a script to generate the sequence. It is very clearly not periodic.
I think Zvi misunderstood the way the sequence is generated. One does not multiply the last two entries (which would give 2, 7, 1, 4, 4, 1, 6, 6, 3, 6, 1, 8, 8, 6, 4, [2, 4, 8, 3, 2, 6, 1, 2] with a period of 8), but rather each consecutive pair of entries, which indeed gives a non-periodic sequence.
By the way, this link "Nabeel S. Quershi on puzzles." is wrongly pointing to the pubmed relevant to the previous paragraph.
Thanks for the post!
I remain intrigued with the idea, which I've seen expressed independently several times by others, that legalizing drugs could work if we would simply enforce _all the other crimes_ that (some) drug users commit. E.g. shooting up is fine, but not _also_ occupying a public restroom for too long, or vandalizing other's property, or assaulting someone. Requiring those arrested (detained) while intoxicated to 'sober up' before being released seems like it could also help.
I think 'mindfulness' isn't quite a scam, just extremely overrated and overly 'mysterized'. I do think that regular periods of quiet reflection or, e.g. staring at the sky/clouds/stars, can be soothing/relaxing/calming, and that that provides _most_ of the benefits from practicing 'mindfulness' or meditation. Some meditation practices _are_ somewhat interesting, independent of whether there are significant benefits from long-term regular practice.
Car colour: same in the UK. I recently bought a new car and started noticing colours, and I too could not believe how large a fraction was monochrome once I started paying attention. We got a blue one.
Re Online Safety Bill, again in the UK: the passage of the bill itself does not create the anti-e2e requirements that these services are finding most objectionable. The Bill grants Ofcom the _power_ to enact such regulations. A lot of coverage and discussion is loose about this distinction.
So if Bill passes I don’t expect anyone to leave immediately, though if Ofcom does follow through then it could well happen then.
It’s worth noting that in addition to the anti-e2e stuff that is drawing these predictions of departures, there are quite a few other vague and onerous requirements that make this a bad bill, so even if the worst doesn’t happen it’s not going to be good for UK.
And finally - if I’m wrong about any of the above, please let me know! It’s incredibly hard to figure any of this out by reading the media.
Ah, yes, actual no one I'd seen had drawn that distinction before. My presumption has always been that the UK wouldn't actually follow through, but stupider things have happened, including there and recently, so...
Given that it is a matter of public record that the Tory party uses WhatsApp groups for all sorts of highly-sensitive discussions, one is curious about how the rule might be applied...
For what it's worth, KYC regulations seem kind of bad now but will probably become more valuable as we try to prevent AI agents from moving money around pretending to be people.
You wrote: "The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight."
Careful reading of the Twitter thread does not support this assertion.
Furthermore, the FAA actually thinks OPD will make flights MORE pleasant, not less (https://www.foxweather.com/lifestyle/airline-industry-changes-faa-airports-opds-descents). The other headlines blaming turbulence on "climate change", may or may not be correct or misleading, but the Twitter user (covfefeanon, -50 rationality points) trying to connect these dots is being excessively speculative.
+1, I had to ragequit reading your post to go to the replies. The answer is much more simple than a conspiracy theory:
1) (regular) greedy companies want to save fuel
2) smooth descend is easier on the engines but more complicated to manage for air traffic controlers
3) FAA is in charge of air taffic controlers
4) FAA *allowed* the practice of doing smooth descend because companies asked for it
5) none of this has any relationship with turbulence.
4.1) smooth descend also makes way less noise, which is the reason London Heathrow mandated it -> here the conflicting interest is that of the non-flying public.
…
By the way, a prediction of the global warming theory is that turbulence will in fact get worse, no matter what kind of flying you do.
"Yes, Substack Notes technically exists, which is what caused Elon’s fit of pique, but I’ve never seen a link to it..." Lots of people -- and a growing number -- use Substack Notes. The reason you haven't seen a link to one is that Twitter/X's algorithm makes them hard to see. That's the case for links to Substack blogs, so it's surely the case for Notes.
I mean I've never seen a link to it in a Substack post, either, which you'd think would be a good fit? Do you have numbers on usage?
The following 2 observations seem mutually contradictory:
> Are we indeed this lame? It seems that we are. We also don’t value unique identifiers sufficiently, also the people choosing this many white cars seem low-level insane.
> He calculated that if materials such as Purdue's ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth's surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.
It's obviously nowhere close to 1-2% of the planet's surface, but there is at least one very good reason to choose a white (or light gray) car over other options, especially if you live in a warmer latitude.
Former debater here (around 2009-2011). The discussion about kritik strategies in policy debate has been frustrating to read, (even where I agree with parts of the critique of kritik!). Frankly, I think the kritik-critical bloggers have been following the model of "strongest statement I can make while still being true", and should be read accordingly. (This makes me sad! They are good people and I wish they would do better!)
Some specific notes, some quite relevant, as sub-comments:
1) K (which is what it's ~always called in the local lingo) is definitely not new. It's old enough that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez would have been doing it if she had debated policy in high school. Sure, it's gotten more prevalent over time, but if you walked into a debate round in 2009 and you couldn't answer "your plan is bad because your entire argument is capitalist", you were going to lose that round in front of nearly any judge. I'm willing to believe that social-location K is getting more popular/prevalent over time, though again, in 2009 critical-race Ks were already in the standard set of things you prepped for if you were in central Maryland. (NB: Likely this isn't nationally representative; the nearby Baltimore urban debate league influenced this some, and the arrival of Daryl Burch as the coach for Howard County's teams influenced it a lot. But HoCo traveled from Columbia to Wake Forest, so really it's more like "there was already plenty of CRT K up and down the East Coast".) If your narrative is that K is a reflection of woke, then no, serious K in CX debate goes at least as far back as the Clinton years. (To her credit, Maya does report this in her post.)
Can confirm: kritiks were, at most, considered _slightly_ novel tech in 2002 in, e.g., Cleveland's least-nationally-exposed league. If you went to a tournament featuring teams that competed nationally, it was in 50% of all rounds, and the usual reason for not seeing it was the Negative team knows that the Affirmative team is good on the particular kritik args they'd prepped, so basically they did the debate equivalent of sideboarding it out before the round started
2) As Zvi would have it, consider how this can be both true and the strongest possible true statement:
> I reviewed all Tournament of Champions semifinal and final round recordings from 2015 to 2023, and found that about two-thirds of Policy rounds and almost half of Lincoln-Douglas rounds featured critical theory.
One huge part of the answer is that Standard Operating Procedure on the Negative side is to throw out several arguments against the Affirmative team's case, suss out where they were weak (or just blundered their reply), sever the rest and pile on that one. I don't think there's a more standard first-year CX debater strategy than starting the first negative speech with "I'll have 4 off and case". Meaning something like:
- Off-case argument 1 (Topicality): Your proposal is not in-bounds on the official resolution because [tiny, dumb, technical reason out of the list of ten I prepared] and therefore you should lose.
- Off-case argument 2 (Politics Disadvantage): Your plan is going to make [political faction] mad and they'll block [other thing] which is more important because it will prevent a nuclear war that kills everyone.
- Off-case argument 3 (States Counterplan): Instead of [your plan], do [basically the same thing] at the state-by-state level. This is good because [something about federalism] and also it avoids the politics disadvantage.
- Off-case argument 4 (Capitalism K): Your plan has [capitalist element], capitalism is bad because [reason], in fact plans that are based on capitalist reasoning categorically suck because [reason].
- On-case arguments: You claim [advantage] but actually you make the problem worse because [reason], also your plan doesn't solve the problems you identified because [reason].
...and _all of that_ will get delivered (with citations and quotes from references) in eight minutes. I said "first-year CX debater" because really this would be considered amateur stuff, and a "real debate" would more often be six or seven off-case arguments (extra Topicality objections, disadvantages, or counterplans), plus case. I can probably still deliver a Topicality argument in 30 seconds, from memory.
So when Maya says that two-thirds of policy rounds "featured" K, I am entirely unimpressed that two-thirds of 1NC speakers stuck some 1-minute K module in their opening speech at least to see if the Aff would fumble it.
(The next thing that happens is the 2AC speaker gets 8 minutes to reply to all of the arguments, then the Neg gets 13(!) minutes to either continue the spray-and-pray or dump on the single contention that the 2AC answered weakest.) Sometimes you would see the second Aff speech throw up a "come on, judge, letting them throw up eight things and sever seven of them is unbalanced and abusive", but I have never, ever seen an Aff team win on that. More often they're just doing it for the "time skew" -- to make the Neg spend more time responding than it took the Aff to make the original claim.
Honestly, I'm shocked it's as low as 2/3 of TOC elimination rounds; I would not have been surprised by something like 7/8.
Very good info, but I will say that I do think that 'they put up 8 quick arguments, and then severed 7 of them' had better be respected as an argument if you don't want that to become standard, and I think you mostly don't? In a real discussion, if someone raised 8 objections and the other side swatted away 7 of them with minimal effort and those stuck, I wouldn't see the objector as arguing in good faith, or else they are out of their depth, which perhaps is OK (e.g. they are asking questions for info and did not do the research because the proposal is weird and unexpected, or whatever).
There also seems to be a strong asymmetry here, where the aff side takes on a burden of proof and the neg side simply has to throw shade on the aff side without offering a valid alternative position that can similarly face examination. How does debate keep this fair, then, while asking interesting questions?
Also, how the hell does topicality even work if you're allowed to argue actual anything? If you raise a dumb technical objection shouldn't the right answer be that technical topicality arguments are less topical than the accused violation and shouldn't matter?
More generally, is this the kind of game that is most useful to place here? What does it have to do with seeking truth, or convincing a judge of the actual resolution? As you ask, whatever is debate actually for, other than learning to talk fast?
This is a downstream effect of the fact that policy debate, relative to other debate formats (e.g., parli, LD) has a couple structural features that are different:
a. Your instinct about the "out of your depth" thing here is not entirely wrong! The deep structural reason to allow the neg to throw a lot of arguments out there, and then abandon the ones they're losing without consequence, is that because the affirmative gets to pick a specific area within a broad topic. At least in theory, Neg doesn't know which area they pick until the start of the round, so Aff structurally has an advantage of knowing and having prepared evidence for that specific area in greater depth (For example, the 2023-24 HS policy debate topic is "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income" -- there are at least 6 obvious cases just combinatorically, even without thinking at all.) As a result, policy normatively allows and expects the Negative team to make some arguments that Don't Hold Up To Detailed Examination, just as you would if you were arguing an area you're unfamiliar with.
Think of it kind of as if every Magic tournament had _decent_ homebrewed decks you'd never seen in testing -- everyone would run a Wish-board as much as possible, even if the average card in that Wish-board was never Wish-tutored for, just to make sure they had something that could potentially interact with and silver-bullet the opponent's plan.
b. Overall, policy debate isn't a persuasive activity for _rhetoric_'s sake; it views itself as occurring almost-entirely on the "flow" (i.e., the notes written by the judge about how each argument interacts). It's a game of speed chess in terms of figuring out arguments interact and counter each other, and where to chump-block an argument in order to save time to make several arguments against another point to win the round. (This is relatively more true than, e.g., parliamentary debate, wherein the flow can become almost irrelevant halfway through the round in favor of re-framing the debate)
c. As rossry notes, debate formats generally (excluding some Parli) believe "Affirmative gets to speak first and last" since they have the burden of defending something, so somewhere in there, you flip the order of speeches and let Neg speak twice in a row. Policy, unlike other formats, lets the Negative divide that time as they'd like (the 13 minutes thing he mentions is theoretically 2 speech blocks, the 2nd Negative Constructive speech and 1st Negative Rebuttal), so the real meat of what Neg is arguing happens there. Back-solve for that and the flow point above, and that encourages spreading in the 1st Negative Constructive speech.
Separately, in regards to your other question, topicality actually does work as, at least in theory, a check on "argue anything" -- I have, as a judge, given the loss to a too-clever Affirmative team on a well-made topicality argument by a Negative team more times than I can count; the trick is usually to impact the topicality violation to the why-are-we-debating question, and argue to the judge that their role is to enforce fair standards for debate as an educative activity. I recognize this is hard to accept in the abstract as actually-occuring if your first point of contact with this format is in the concept of the kritik, but it's true.
I don't doubt that aff-cases can be actually off-topic sometimes, and that calling them out as such needs to be a valid option, and also that not doing so greatly favors aff because neg has to prep for aff's argument, so presenting an invalid one means one that wasn't otherwise prepared for. I was responding to Rossry's idea of the 10 technical arguments, as opposed to a substantive one.
> I will say that I do think that 'they put up 8 quick arguments, and then severed 7 of them' had better be respected as an argument if you don't want that to become standard, and I think you mostly don't?
Honestly, with some distance, I think I agree with you on the substance. I also remember ~3 years, and then some, of never seeing it argued successfully (or honestly, with very much heart). I don't/didn't get the sense that it's disrespected so much as, idk, not a sufficient combination of good tech and good pilots to typically get there.
My check-at-the-door-as-a-judge opinion is probably that it's a weird gotcha for the Aff's second speech to just dogpile the Neg for doing this, since literally every Neg (that hasn't done some all-in K thing) does, and that if you really wanted to bring out the tech to win this, you'd put a minute of it in your first speech, before they had the chance to dig the hole, just to weaken their argument that it was an unexpected gotcha.
And honestly, if you didn't want a spread-based flow-centric debate format, why are you in Policy instead of LD, Parli, or PuFo?
"What is debate actually for?" the right question; the answer I most believe is (as I say below) as an analogy to sports, or chess, or Magic, or such stylized competitions that teach a kind of mental discipline you don't get in PvE outside options.
Oh, and re: T: The Neg's "topicality" objection is "the Aff's specific plan is not an instance of the resolution[1], and so proving their case doesn't prove the resolution; you should vote Neg if the Aff doesn't prove the resolution". I suppose you could win bad-for-debate impacts, but why, if you already have concluded no-reason-to-vote-Aff?
The corresponding move on the Aff's side is a "link defense", effectively "the Neg's argument #5 doesn't apply to us for [reason]; they could be right on all of their other points on #5 and it still should have zero impact on your vote". There is room to go on the offense and argue for their loss for abuse reasons if you can tie them to impacts, but in practice that's most often just used as time skew.
+1 to David Kasten's other points below.
[1] 2023-2024's is: "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income."
3) More generally, there's a (dominant?) school of thought that policy debate judges, unlike any other humans, should be "tabula rasa" -- a blank slate not bringing any conclusions into the round -- and willing to accept the stronger argument on any point that comes up. Does building housing raise or lower property prices? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument. Will 3.5C of warming cause half the planet to die from food system collapse? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument. Will India and Pakistan start a nuclear war if [US trade policy plan]? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument.
By default, and to a shocking degree, this extends to _the rules of debate itself_. The topic says "reduce troops in Afghanistan", the Aff wants to reduce them to zero, and the Neg says that's out-of-bounds? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument, which will very likely be based on what is good for debate. The Aff wants to move troops from Afghanistan to Syria and the Neg says out-of-bounds? Give me the arguments. Team A wants their stronger debater to do both cross-examinations? (Is that even against the rules?) Give me the arguments why that's good or bad for debate. Team B wants one debater to give three of their four speeches? Arguments. Team C says their debater should get an extra two minutes to correct for systemic injustices? Give me the arguments. If the other side convinces me that this is bad for debate, I'll either strike your extra-time arguments from the record, or give you a loss, based on...which has the stronger arguments. Team D wants me to award a double loss with 0/30 speaker points as a protest against the institution of debate? I'll act on the stronger arguments. Team E wants me to vote down the Aff because "Afghanistan" is a colonial construct that they accept and repeat, and silence is violence? And their opponents say "no fair, that's not the topic, plus the topic says Afghanistan and if we proposed withdrawing troops from Khurasan you'd jump down our throats on topicality"? Look, I want both of you to make your cases and explain how I should be using my vote, and the one of you that has the stronger argument that I should vote for you is going to get it.
Can confirm (my judging paradigm is basically, "I'm tabula rasa, tell me how to weigh the arguments and judge the round, if you don't, I'll default to judging on best-policy. Also, talk slower, my ears are getting old.")
Can, more interestingly, confirm that the average team does not take nearly enough advantage of this fact.
My understanding is you are one of several judges? And also that they've learned that people who say this are often lying. So they are hedging their bets versus what looks to you like the proper response?
So in preliminary rounds, you're almost always* a single judge. In the top-N elimination bracket, it's almost always a multi-judge panel.
I honestly don't agree with the characterization that they think people who say this are lying (beyond the degree that anyone can't just be truly tabula rasa). Most of the examples brought up in the various current-state-of-debate pieces rely on the teams largely trusting the judge's public judging paradigm statements as accurately describing their biases (e.g., that random college student judge from State University X that says they are a Marxist -- in a statement every team can read prior to the round -- are indeed a Marxist or whatever). And even if they thought I was lying, then they'd just tell me "you're tabula rasa, we assert you should judge [as we secretly think you are already judging]" and then proceed through that abstraction layer to argue in line with my perceived biases. Few teams do that.
My point is, rather, even assuming arguendo that they do think judges are lying, they still don't adopt optimum strategies -- far too many average-performing teams try to do just a sort of "fight as hard as I can on every single argument and hope that gives a general impression of winning" strategy rather that optimizing around a perceived judging paradigm and allocating their time and arguments accordingly to maximizing their win probability.
*Barring some weird corner cases.
Ah, ok, if it's single-judge then that's a lot easier to say people are messing up. I still wouldn't entirely trust it, but helps a lot. The other consideration, now that I think about it, is that if this is not a common situation, then anyone who is playing a fast-moving game is going to get all this stuff drilled into their patterns and it is going to be difficult to adjust - think about what happens on 4th down and how often players in NCAAF correctly drop the interception.
Tabula rosa is not a thing, as many Ks would point out, everyone brings with them their prior knowledge of the world, if you tell me the moon is made of green cheese so we couldn't have landed on it so the US Government can't be trusted, I shouldn't have to bring a citation or argument that it isn't or lose the fight, and so on.
It also seems to encourage people to go super-meta about debate rules and what is 'good for' debate, which seems to greatly favor social arguments and also act-utilitarian arguments in a rather foolish way? Isn't that how we are getting into this mess, that essentially people are holding debate scores hostage to outside-debate concerns, and it is working quite often?
I would also argue that obviously Tabula Rosa judging is not what we are talking about here from many of these judges. If you say that certain arguments result in an automatic loss, that is the opposite of tabula rosa. If you say you can't defend capitalism, not only is that not tabula rosa, that is being unopen to debate at all and also is going to give everyone an incentive to K everything as capitalist.
More than that, if you can't be anti-K conceptually because there such talk is 'not good for debate' or generally ungood, and you believe the world is about such struggles, then these arguments are trump and nothing else matters and also every debate is the same. You can't 'give me the arguments' tabula rosa in a world in which there is an underlying accepted worldview that judges will auto-loss you for lifting fingers against. Instead what it is saying is some sort of 'local' tabula rosa which means facts locally don't matter but general ideologies do, so everything is about ideology.
The role of woke in this is that it invalidates the tabula rosa, and gives you judges with a 'good for debate' prior that has little to do with good for debate and everything to do with good for woke, which then massively shifts the playing field and incentives, from K being a 'you can try this if you see an opening' into something that breaks the format.
Yeah, sorry, some stuff gets contracted in writing, but to be explicit: There totally are (and were in 2010) judges that are exactly as they say and will not give a specific class of arguments any air under any circumstance, or will insta-lose a team for stepping over some line, or etc. Judges gonna judge, and so on. (As with many things, I believe the first cases of this came from the political right, can't disrespect the flag -type stuff, and is now exclusively a tactic of the political left.)
And yes, I waffled while writing my post on how much to qualify and hedge my tabula rasa claim. I can construct claims that I would allow Affs to win against with no citations and three clear sentences, and so of course I'm not a blank slate. I dunno, it's a thing we gesture at to distinguish ourselves (for the debaters' benefit) from differently-philosophized judges who will hand you an automatic loss if the wrong partner does the cross-ex, or they just think capitalism is good, or any of the pro-social-justice philosophies on display at the links.
I think two things are being unintentionally conflated here: 1. is it OK for a judge to write a judging paradigm that says, "many held-by-most-of-American-society arguments are out of bounds/auto loss"? 2. Is a kritik a _reasonable_ argument to run in a debate round, if it's treated on _roughly the same grounds_ as more old-school arguments?
(My answers are No to 1 and Yes to 2.)
On 1:
I 100% agree that there are some judges that do not have tabula rasa as their judging paradigm; I do firmly believe that tabula rasa is indeed the _default and predominant_ judging paradigm.
I did some spot-checking of the paradigms listed in the Slow Boring article, and as far as I can tell, none of them assert that they are tabula rasa or have tabula-rasa-ish vibes. ( At least two of them, when read in their entirety, however, are somewhat less favorable to a team running kritiks than when only the excerpted text is read; at least one of them, in the balance of their non-excerpeted comments on other more conventional strategies, is saying "kritiks aren't an auto-lose, I'm not a boomer," rather than that kritiks are an auto-win.
I think empirically overwhelmingly judges agree -- I'd note that, when doing spot checks of the two biggest national championship tournaments, (https://www.tabroom.com/index/tourn/postings/round.mhtml?tourn_id=26661&round_id=1028505 and https://www.tabroom.com/index/tourn/postings/round.mhtml?tourn_id=24340&round_id=881421), the final-round judge panels have _no one_ that can be characterized as in line with auto-loss Marxist philosophy. Few of them explicitly say they're tabula rasa (or words to the equivalent), but what rossry or I would characterize as them being tabula-rasa-ish is the predominant philosophy.
I'd also note that I judged in the late 2010s in the same Los Angeles circuit as one of those judges linked in Slow Boring (I don't think I know him or overlapped with him) and in that circuit I saw many, many judges that personally were the archetype of neon-haired leftists _give the loss_ to the team running a kritik or, for that matter, the loss to just normal arguments that appeal more to the left.
On 2:
A judge saying kritiks being _reasonable_ to run in rounds does not equal only Marxist judging. Lots of arguments are reasonable to run in a debate round, but are not auto-wins and have little VAR; I actually think that kritiks generally have negative VAR at high skill levels because they're hard to pilot well in a high-end debate round.
The reason is perhaps unsurprising on reflection -- they're by definition articulating a separate philosophical world, so it's hard for a Negative team to make kritik arguments about Capitalism bad and also say things like, "the Affirmative's policy is bad because it will cause a budget deficit." It's absolutely doable as rossry noted, but very hard to do well or in a way that has as much clash of arguments as ideal. (This is the actual reason I think kritiks are bad; at its worst, it's the Krark-Clan Ironworks deck of debate rounds)
But I do believe that there is something good and right about giving kids the chance in high school and college to argue about big ideas. I think a Marxist 17-year-old seeing, and feeling _viscerally_, the total failure of a critical theory argument in a debate round is a good thing. Especially in -- as I don't think rossry or I have articulated yet -- in policy debate, where a judge usually delivers their decision verbally to the competitors after reviewing their notes, and explains why. The aformentioned neon-haired leftist explaining politely, but in exquisite detail, why the kritik _didn't convince them_ is an important teaching moment. After all, debate judges are usually former debaters, and debaters usually like to tear arguments apart more than putting them together.
4) This is a misinterpretation:
> it requires arguing obvious nonsense, with failure to accept such nonsense as the baseline of discussion, or insisting that it is irrelevant to the topic, treated as a de facto automatic loss.
On the contrary, an argument that [insert K here] is irrelevant to the topic, this is bad for debate, and the _Neg_ should suffer an instant loss (we'd call this "framework") is bog-standard in the Aff reply. Only rookies get caught without their framework file.
On one hand, this is mostly the sort of nonsense flak that the Neg's topicality argument was -- spend 30sec setting up the skeleton of an argument that you can put real meat on if the other side really flubs their reply. But in a very real sense, if the Neg spends 13 minutes dumping critical Marxist theory on you, it is entirely valid to spend 4.5 minutes of your 5-minute reply on some flavor of "this is off-topic and bad for debate, this judge-is-a-revolutionary-historian bit is a fiction, we are high school students and you are a debate coach and I wanted to debate military policy because debate in high school is important for shaping a future generation of political leaders who can solve real problems so can you please give this Neg team the loss to avoid this whole activity going off the rails?" I have done exactly that, multiple times. Won on it about as often as we won on any other off-case stuff.
The biggest thing that makes policy different, as a format, is that it's expected that it's valid to debate the rules of debate. The majority of TOC judges in 2010 would vote for a K -- if the Neg won the debate-about-what-debate-is-for to put the K in-bounds -- or vote against a K, if the Aff won that it should be out-of-bounds. I'd bet at 1:1 odds that that's still true today.
4) Some judges gonna judge judge judge judge judge, but that's why teams get (or at least got -- I'm not current) a fixed number of "no, not that judge" vetoes at most tournaments. We called these "strikes", and yes they were used by K-disliking teams to avoid being judged by the most K-friendly judges, and by K-liking teams to avoid being judged by judges that wouldn't ever vote for the K even if their opponent was a dead fish.
That is good to hear and also highlights the problem. You can choose to pull out a K or not pull out a K. If you do, then you win if you win the meta-argument on whether the K is a valid tactic (since under their own frameworks Ks invalidate literal everything) or you lose if it is rejected. Which means you'll pull it out if it gives you a better chance than not doing so (or if you inherently value using it). Including using Ks to flat out challenge the entire rules of debate to say that Ks matter more than debate so whoever raises the bigger K should win automatically.
Which is fine in your time, or mostly fine, because if you made such arguments against a prepared opponent you would lose, and the question now is whether such arguments actually work - it's fine to say 'you have to win the debate over in-bound-ness' but you have to do that with a bunch of people who think nothing else is in bounds and that anyone who disagrees is a horrible person and a bunch of similar land mines, so in practice that doesn't obviously matter.
Basically agree.
I suspect there _is_ a problem in the state of debate, which was not present in my time to nearly this extent, but which has not been clearly characterized by the first/second rounds of criticism I read.
And I agree with your instinct that it's the shift in the judges that is the real action, rather than the tech or the (meta-)format.
5) More fundamentally, what is debate _for_? Should it be practicing good, persuasive, honest argumentation by doing exactly that? Is it practice thinking about the _structure_ of arguments, or their _form_, or their _truth_? Other?.
My $0.02 is that it's perfectly reasonable that policy debate bears the same relationship to persuasion that fencing bears to martial prowess. I think that training for _this_ sport with _these_ rules is good even though none of the constituent skills make any sense for self-defense.
In this view, CX isn't useful because debaters practice the whole of good persuasive speaking (seriously, watch any twenty seconds of any policy debate video from the last 10 years); but it's more narrowly good for practicing _thinking critically about how arguments fit together into conclusions_. I have -- exactly once -- made the mistake of arguing that their plan makes X worse and also (three arguments later) that X is good actually; that loss stung so much that I think I never did that again. I still think about the difference between "impact defense" (if I'm right, you get none of your claimed Y) and "impact offense" (if I'm right, you get bad Z) -- which are diametrically different in their implications if they're 95% to be true. The debate-the-rules-of-the-game stuff isn't useful for its _content_, but is mostly just fine for its _structure_.
I would affirm that training almost any skills at all, or any rhetorical skills or competitive skills, has some inherent value, and that thinking through logic is useful even if it is logic that follows highly impractical rules. If these were rather arbitrary rules sets, similar to fencing bears, then I would say that it would be better if we instead put far more weight on truth and good, persuasive, honest arguments presented in good faith and how to ensure that those dominated, with a focus on where we can be guided by the beauty of our weapons. But that it would be fine, and far better than the median use of time. If debate was about what you want it to be about.
The problem is that this structure is, it seems, no longer neutral. Instead, we are teaching students (if the allegations are correct) argumentation within a CRT/Marxist/Far-Left framework, where many important things are unthinkable and grounds for automatic loss, and saying the right Shibboleths gets consistently rewarded, and normalizes and teaches that system and way of being and talking. This then gets carried through to the outside. And that's terrible.
I'll acknowledge and even nod along to the claim that "what epistemic-discursive rules are we demonstrating / proving / reinforcing, and are they what we want the world to have?" is the right question. I think we agree about at least the broad strokes of an answer as well.
That said, it's not the discussion that I particularly want to have right now, so I want to politely back away from it.
6) I haven't judged a CX round in ten(?) years, but if I did tomorrow, I'd give a pre-round disclosure that I'm not going to put down my pen or throw anyone out of the round for what they say or how they say it, and if you have a legitimate problem with what the other side is doing -- and you're right that it's bad for debate -- you should have an easy time winning on that and convincing me to hand them a loss.
7) Look, I dunno, all of this is years out of date. Maybe the game really done changed. But nothing that I've read from the concerned side makes me think that they've got a clear picture of what's on the ground (and in this way, I am not acting like a tabula rasa judge).
Yep, it's always all huge if true. As I said, the first attempt left me highly unpersuaded, because I did spot checks, and you've definitely thrown a bunch of shade on the second set of claims. The thing is that when I think through the logical implications of your account, it does lead to an equilibrium where debate ceases to be the thing you experienced - the debate lacks defenses against this kind of attack, in the context of a youth that is highly left-wing especially among those most likely to do debate.
Yes, a bit that I elided somewhat is how much it was unclear to me in 2010 that the K (any K, really) was just overpowered and should eat everything if teams prepped it right and judges were at least tab-rasa to it. Which is why, good game-player that I was (and with the coach that I had), I picked up exactly those weapons and rolled over teams unprepared for them as main-deck tech (on Aff and Neg -- military drawdown, I think you meant decolonization...). Present-me would not be sure whether to roll eyes, tip hat, or both.
*shrug*
First off, +1 to this format of reply, and to the engagement here, and also you should write this up on your blog so I can link to it, even if it's literally copy/pasting what is below. There was a ton of stuff here that I completely did not know.
Second, yeah, that is... not at all what I thought debate was, or even something I considered that a debate might actually be, and I have no idea what to think about it at first glance, seems much closer to Monty Python argument sketch than I would have expected for both better and worse. And I can totally see why this makes the evidence presented not strong evidence of much of anything.
Further responses will be in-line.
"Nabeel S. Quershi on puzzles" links to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30237320/
Should be either https://nabeelqu.co/puzzles or https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/notes-on-puzzles
I would expect to see links to Notes in a Substack Post. With Twitter, the tweet is the main thing (most of the time). It's where you want people to engage you. On Substack, it seems to me that the Post is clearly the main thing. Notes are primarily to enable more people to find your blog, so the links would be from Notes to Post and rarely the other way around. Sorry, I don't have any numbers on usage. It's quite new so probably the numbers are still developing. It's silly of Musk to see Notes as a threat to X. They serve quite different purposes. Perhaps Notes will develop in a direction that makes it more of a threat but I suspect that would raise objections from bloggers who don't want another Twitter/X.
This is not the kind of mistake I'd expect to see you make so it's surprising to see two instances of it here: $40 million on tax prep lobbying and ~1% recovered from AML are equilibrium quantities not indicators of fundamentals. Intuit et al would spend more if they felt more threatened and $40m is likely nowhere close to the actual max they're willing to spend. Budgetary return on AML was never the point, complete success would look like 0% return and if returns are anywhere near 100% you're trivially spending too little; AML is semi-deliberately burning money to deter hard-to-measure negative-sum activity elsewhere (ie crime). $300b / year is certainly excessive (FBI only spends $10b / year?!) but it's not obvious that scaling it back would net the economy 90% let alone 99% of the difference.
In short: solve for the equilibrium! Surely >90% of good-faith policy mistakes come from holding quantities constant that are likely to change under intervention...
On tax prep yes we should consider that they'd ramp up, but it's not clear to me they could ramp up all that much in an effective way. Could have said more here.
On AML, I do realize the equilibrium issue, once again I could have said more, and... I really don't think this is that big a deal, radically scaling back the laws would have very little effect even in equilibrium. It's true that I didn't mention that claim, but I definitely do believe it.