Holiday Disclosure Post #5 – Reply and Round-Up (Bob Overing)
Though some of the staunchest opponents of disclosure refused to debate me publicly, I thank Salim Damerdji, Rahul Gosain, and Dave McGinnis for their replies to my arguments. This post makes a few points about what I’ve seen across these disclosure debates.
(1) Ad hominem attacks
At least Dave McGinnis and Rahul Gosain have called the arguments and discussion by the pro-disclosure crowd “bullying.” It’s strange to me that these theorists believe that (a) disclosure arguments are bullying while other theory arguments are not, and (b) disclosure arguments are bullying while non-disclosure arguments are not. (b) is especially strong. Non-disclosers are taking advantage of disclosers to gain a tactical edge. That seems much more like bullying to me.
(2) Defense upon defense
None of the arguments I’ve read from opponents give strong proactive reasons why allowing disclosure theory is bad. If the argument is so bad, then respondents should beat it in-round. this is not a reason to bar it as a coherent (possible, valid, viable, etc.) theory argument. There’s no detriment to a model of theory that allows debaters to claim non-disclosure as a type of unfairness. And even if all my arguments fall flat, we should err on the side of over-inclusion (see “In Defense of Inclusion”).
One might say that if disclosure is bad, then allowing disclosure theory is bad. This is unpersuasive. A multiple a prioris strategy is likely bad, but that doesn’t mean “interpretation – debaters must read multiple a prioris” should be barred as a possible theory argument.
(3) Misattributing blame
It’s possible that disclosure is getting a lot of the blame for other trends that people don’t like in LD, such as (a) problems with evidence (too much of it, too much deference to it, too much reliance on it, etc.) or (b) the decline in the prevalence of moral philosophy arguments. I don’t think either is attributable to disclosure, but as I discussed in “Disclosure Norms in LD,” it may be that disclosure’s detractors see it as part of a larger movement or trend they don’t like.
(4) Views from nowhere
My opponents have yet to explain what they think the average non-disclosed debate looks like. In a world of hyper-specific plans, non-topical Ks, and dense moral frameworks, disclosure is the primary route to meaningful, substantive engagement. I challenged Dave McGinnis on facebook to craft a strategy or explain how he would help his team prepare against (his own team’s) disclosure of the Gauthier Book “Morals by Agreement.” His response — that he would guess it some sort of contractarian argument — was quite unsatisfactory.
(5) Conceptual confusions
Both Salim Damerdji and Rahul Gosain have misunderstood various parts of my view. I said that when we’re determining whether a tactic is unfair, we’re asking if it grants advantages that do not reflect superior intrinsic debate skills. This does not mean that an unfair tactic must only grant advantages that do not reflect superior intrinsic debate skills; in other words, an unfair tactic can also grant skill-based advantages.
For example, I said “stealing opponents’ dropbox passwords and prepping out all their arguments” is unfair, even though prepping out all the arguments would grant an advantage reflecting superior intrinsic skills. (With tongue-in-cheek, Rahul commented in a parenthetical that “Bob helpfully condemns password-stealing,” but the joke’s on him now. Had he thought more about that example, it would be obvious why his strawperson is not my view.)
Responding to Rahul, Jacob Nails (and John Scoggin too) got this essentially right when he noted that if non-disclosure tests creativity, this is merely a disadvantage to the disclosure theory argument. Sure, non-disclosure may test intrinsic skills, but that doesn’t mean it’s not unfair in other ways.
Finally, Salim Damerdji’s reductio makes the point clear. He said that every instance of alleged unfairness probably reflects or tests some strategic skill. Thus, on their strawperson version of my view, there is no unfairness at all. On my actual view, an unfair tactic can be unfair in some ways while rectifying unfairness or promoting education in other ways.
I believe this clarification answers nearly all of Rahul’s contributions and much of Salim’s.
(6) Balancing
John Scoggin argued on facebook that the anti-disclosure view “gets rid of a lot of potential research…in exchange for a bit of creativity.” And even then, it’s a bit of creativity required of the “other debater…not so much on the part of the non-discloser.”
Curiously, he got no response.
I am a big fan of this balancing approach to theory debates generally, and I think most theorists would agree. E.g. fairness and education reasons are both relevant to theory debates. There is no one impact or standard that subsumes the rest, and if there is, proving it would be an uphill battle against the strength of our base intuitions about debate theory.
I have argued in some depth that disclosure enhances creativity, but even if I’m wrong, John’s point is largely correct that the trade-offs come out in favor of disclosure. The advantages of disclosure are many; the disadvantages are few. Unless creativity in thinking on one’s feet is the be-all-end-all of debate theory, I don’t know how we lose the argument.
End Notes
[1] Hyperlinks to the last four disclosure posts: #1, #2,#3, #4.
Bob Overing | Co-Director
Bob is a co-director of Premier, coach for Walt Whitman HS, and current Yale Law School student. As a senior in high school, he was ranked #1, earned 11 bids and took 2nd at TOC. In college, he cleared at CEDA and qualified to the NDT. His students have earned 80 career bids, reached TOC finals, and won many championships.
3 Comments
Interesting. Couple thoughts:
1) Bullying. This isn’t about the content of disclosure theory as an argument read in round. I’m worried about the way debaters treat one another *before* rounds. In my experience, pre-round disclosure demands can too often include intimidating tactics, implied threats, and mind games that can be deeply distressing to debaters. This is what I mean by bullying: acts of interpersonal hostility that make students feel uncomfortable – not gaining an edge by not putting your arguments on the wiki. In my experience, these unfortunate incidents do in fact happen substantially more with disclosure than other arguments.
I’d encourage debaters reading disclosure theory to think about ways to stay respectful when they meet resistance to their preferred norms – especially when race, gender, skill gaps and program size (among other important factors) complicate these interactions.
2) Agreed that “an unfair tactic can also grant skill-based advantages,” but that leaves me with a new concern about this standard for theory arguments: every practice seems to reward some non-skill-based advantages in addition to skill-based ones. For example, reading several disads and a clever counterplan, for example, rewards research, explanation, prep, etc. It would *also* reward having access to their Dropbox to ensure prep parity or having more coaches to anticipate the objection and prewrite your explanation – those are not intrinsic. When does the fact that some extrinsic advantages would solve the problem become relevant?
My guess would be “when it’s sufficiently hard to win without extrinsic advantages,” which doesn’t seem great – among other concerns, I’m worried about what this threshold is, how having a threshold limits competing interpretations or existing reasonability paradigms and why “your arguments are too good” couldn’t meet this threshold (by requiring very deep literature knowledge or camp experience to adequately answer, for example). I’d be curious to know if you think there’s another way to answer this question.
3) Agreed that disclosing a set of books is definitely useless. What possible offense could it solve?
1) Given that I think disclosure is almost always better than non-disclosure and that theory is a good way of enforcing it, I’m unlikely to agree with you that the “threat” of disclosure theory is tantamount to bullying. The same interactions you’re talking about go both ways — non-disclosers play pre-round mind-games to try to cleverly get out of violations, e.g. by disclosing the aff 15 minutes before the round instead of 30, by suggesting we wait until we’re in the room to flip for sides, or putting abnormal conditions on disclosure of affs. I don’t see these shenanigans as much different than the threat of theory from a pro-disclosure team, and in fact, they can be more distressing. A senior refusing to disclose against a sophomore in a doubles debate can be just as discomforting because it forecloses effective prep, something the younger or more inexperienced debater can do to level the playing field. I also don’t see a threat of theory in this context as much different than CX threats, e.g. ‘I want you to drop this spike or I’ll run theory.’
2) So, I like the dropbox password stealing + disad case, but I’m going to modify it a little bit. Suppose it’s a politics disad, which is fair alone, but unfair when read with a states counterplan. If the interp says “debaters may not read politics disads,” we could say (a) the interp/violation does not isolate structural abuse, so the theory argument is invalid, or we could say (b) the standards do not *prove* the violation is structurally abusive, so the theory argument is invalid. In both cases, even if the theory arguments say that politics disads are unfair, they really indict the structural abuse of the combined states+politics strategy.
You want to say that my view begs some sufficiency threshold or reasonability argument, which will boil down to the standards debate and look like (b). I think that’s a fine reading of the substantive/structural divide, and it’s probably what John Scoggin (and maybe Marshall Thompson) has in mind when he uses the term.
But I think the intuition that “debaters may not read politics disads” does not isolate structural abuse is somewhat more powerful and renders the theory argument incoherent from the start. How would we do this without resorting to reasonability / threshold arguments that invoke standards? We would need some robust definition of Lincoln-Douglas debate and our background debate norms that includes disad debating as a normal and acceptable component of the activity to be infringed upon only in certain exceptions. Those exceptions would need to be defined into the interp, so “debaters may not read states counterplans with politics disads” is fine, but “debaters may not read politics disads” is not.
I like (a) but realize the virtues of (b). If (b) is correct, this does not significantly undermine my view, which is broadly that a coherent/valid theory argument is one that suggests the violation rewards non-skill-based advantages. If my broad view is not particularly enlightening, that’s great because it speaks to how far theory debate has come in the past five years.
Going on the offensive now: do you have an alternative view of theory/fairness that we might similarly pick apart? Whether we adopt my view or some alternative, there is unlikely to be a condition that excludes disclosure theory and outweighs the huge pragmatic benefits of allowing it and its ilk. Maybe I should have made this more modest point clear in my initial post.
3) I dunno, ask Dave.
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