Planorama #2: Replies and Uniqueness Updates

Replies to Planorama 1

I appreciated all the responses we received on Planorama 1 whether positive or more critical. My goal is to spark conversation—one of the best things about LD is our theoretical innovation and openness to new ideas. Our norms are not so set in stone.

A lot of folks said something along the lines of ‘why can’t you just beat semantics arguments on their own merits,’ ‘is this plans good in disguise,’ ‘seems sketchy,’ etc. True, true, and true. The example focus argument is not some meta-breaking argument form—it’s probably too unnatural to really gain traction. It’s just meant to be one tool in the toolbox. For debaters and coaches who find it strange and unnecessary, you probably don’t view the semantics debate as much of a problem in the first place, which is fine by me. That post invites you to accept the pro-semantics premises and then asks what options are still available for deep, research-intensive, example-laden debate.

On the flip side, some find the pro-semantics view so convincing that it’s hard to imagine how the aff could ever win ‘example focus good.’ On Facebook, some intimated that arguments from single examples are worth exactly zero in determining the truth of the resolution. I don’t think that’s right from a logic or argumentation theory perspective, but even if so, the plans-as-examples model could still work. It just becomes slightly less plausible that the neg should concede an obviously false premise. I also suspect those who offer full-throated rejections of example focus don’t take seriously the theoretical arguments in support of plans. If you think it’s always more educational or fair to debate the truth of the whole resolution, then, of course, you won’t find debate about a single example very compelling.

Some other notes and shout-outs: Jacob Nails had a funny comment on the blog that the example form could be used as a topical version of the aff (TVA) for bare plurals T. That strategy is possible in theory but unlikely in practice. If the neg forwards pragmatic offense for its interpretation, example focus wouldn’t solve its offense, so the TVA would have to be conditional on the aff winning the pragmatics debate, which is somewhat unusual. Aside from its argumentative import, the availability of this strategy proves the absurdity of bare plurals T as a reason to drop the debater. In simple terms, the neg would be saying “you read a plan, but you should’ve just defended the whole res and forced me to debate the plan anyway. Debate would be identical, but like, your advocacy would be more consistent with the resolution, which is good because… jurisdiction.” Is that persuasive?

Peter Z. commented “tl;dr drop the arg on T.” If you lose the plans good/bad debate, that’s roughly right. If the aff defends the whole resolution but loses that the neg must debate its example, debate would be identical to an aff that reads one example without defending a plan. The main difference is that warrants for ‘drop the debater’ don’t apply here, which is an important observation. Suppose a debater is better at winning ‘plans good’ than ‘drop the argument’ or ‘re-evaluate my offense.’ Again, it’s another tool.

Beckett L. asked whether this would encourage shady aff practices that effectively sandbag their plans good arguments until the 1AR. Suppose there’s no burden or theoretical argument in the aff, so it’s just whole resolution with one example. The negative is in a bit of a bind. Answer the example and the aff could—in theory—say they garner offense from the rest of the resolution too. Proffer other examples and the aff could read example focus to de-link. I’m not super worried about either side of the dilemma. In the former case, the aff would need to read generic offense that could apply to other countries (or justify add-ons), which puts the neg on notice. In the latter case, the neg reads examples that don’t apply to the one the aff spent perhaps four minutes developing. They should be well aware that they’re on shaky theoretical ground and can secure their disads with preemptive theory arguments or pointed CX questions. But I generally don’t like protracted CX discussions about what teams actually defend; they dilute the utility of disclosure and enable sketchy practices. So point taken. It might be better for affs to clearly establish the burdens in the 1AC or at least put the neg on notice by using an ‘example text.’ This wouldn’t mean justifying everything upfront, just some clear statement that the debate should be about the aff’s example and no others.

Some were confused by my ‘example’ label and occasional use of the term ‘plan’. To be clear, the label isn’t doing the work. The structure is different, whether you call it a plan or example or parametrics or what have you.

Finally, Jake Nebel asked for my proposed alternative to his entailment model of topicality. I suggested several examples in a previous post. The best I can say right now is “forthcoming.”

If anyone tries this strategy in round, let me know! I’d love to hear how it went down!

Update: ‘Plans Good’ is Getting Better

There is a strange tension in the metagame right now. On the one hand, plans are as popular as ever. In my metagame breakdown for our winter program, I found that 55% of affs among bid round participants at Blake and CPS were plans (weighted by # of affs read by each). At the highest rungs of circuit success, I suspect Ks are overrepresented, so you’d find even more plans at lower levels. On the other hand, plans bad theory and its variants also seem quite popular. What gives?

Plans good/bad could be intractable. Like conditionality or PICs, the debate might just be too close to resolve definitively. Or the strategic equilibrium could be such that it’s generally profitable to read plans but also generally profitable to read ‘plans bad’. These explanations might work for condo, but they seem inadequate for plans good/bad. Debaters find ‘plans bad’ strategic not just to read but also to go for in the 2NR. It’s not treated—at least in debates I’ve watched over the past few seasons—as a throwaway or frivolous topicality objection. Should it be?

‘Plans bad’ and its ilk share many features with other shells in disrepute: it’s available in most rounds, it’s bidirectional (i.e. its opposite is also argued offensively), and the arguments hardly change topic to topic. Consider the following examples:

The point is not that ‘plans bad’ is a frivolous theory argument, but it’s worth asking why it has enduring relevance, given that it looks a lot like frivolous theory. In bare plurals T, we have new window dressing for plans bad, but that can’t be the whole story. There must be something that folks find persuasive about the anti-plan view, something that militates against classifying these as purely frivolous shells. I suspect that ‘plans bad’ is taught to be a timeless, necessary theory debate. The primary lines of argument are passed down in lectures and backfiles with little updating and critical reflection. I’m guilty of this too, so let’s reflect.

‘Plans Bad’ Standards

Unfortunately for plan opponents, whatever virtues ‘plans bad’ might have had many years ago have rapidly diminished. I don’t think debaters and coaches have fully taken stock of how poorly the standard anti-plan arguments fare in the current metagame, and how those changes might affect strategic decision-making. Perhaps some of these changes are accounted for in the shift to semantics-based offense, but other than that, the offense for ‘plans bad’ is essentially the same as it was when I started debating in 2008.

The primary argument for ‘plans bad’ has always been predictability. The basic idea is that plans narrow the topic, giving the aff more choices, so the negative can’t adequately predict the aff’s advocacy. A related argument is limits, which claims that plans underlimit the topic—giving the aff too many options, forcing the neg to prepare too many affs. Does this argument hold up?

Any version of this argument must be contextualized. When I was debating, we had topics like these:

• Resolved: It is morally permissible for victims to use deadly force as a deliberate response to repeated domestic violence.
• Resolved: Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need.
• Resolved: Public high school students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized exit exams to graduate.
• Resolved: In a democratic society, felons ought to retain the right to vote.

Specifying a victim, individual, public high school student, or felon would be extremely unpredictable. After all, there are literally millions (or in the case of “individuals”, billions) of options. ‘Plans bad’ against those affs would be much better justified than it is against the Saudi Arabia aff on JF19. Recognizing the strength of ‘plans bad’ against those affs, we (mostly) read plans that specified a location or an actor rather than individuals.

But today debaters trot out the same predictability and limits arguments they’ve read for over a decade. For the aff to find a viable plan—and I noted this in my way-too-early 10 things post as well—the list is not just any country as it was on some other topics. Count the limits: the aff must concern (1) an authoritarian regime, (2) receiving or about to receive U.S. aid, (3) where withdrawal or blocking aid would solve a harm, (4) that has actual impacts and can beat fill-in, the reform CP and/or the politics disad. How many affs is that, realistically? Six? Maybe ten? I don’t think there are ten legit plans being read by multiple teams in the metagame right now. If the argument is that the neg can’t predict ten affs on which there is copious foreign policy analysis, news, and empirical research, often spanning decades, I struggle to see how that’s anything but frivolous.

And that’s true before we get to disclosure and the frequency of plans in the metagame. Maybe it was true in 2008 that plans were tough to predict when relying on burdensome ‘old school scouting’ methods—usually running around the cafeteria or campus to find somebody who debated your opponent beforehand so you could get the flow and use twenty minutes of prep more effectively. Then we started reading off laptops, flashing cases, electronically keeping flows, joining social media more ubiquitously, and disclosing citations. Today if the negative doesn’t know what the three or five most common plans will be at an upcoming tournament, that’s absolutely on them!

If plans are 55% of the metagame (and probably higher in a larger sample) and you can read your opponent’s entire case before the tournament, what possible argument is there from predictability or limits? Disclosure and metagame awareness are not just weak defense—they’re practically knockdown responses.

This isn’t just about JF19 either. On JF18, for instance, plans were far less common, and the most popular aff was a race-based, consequentialist whole res aff. The paucity of literature on the topic, given the word abolish decreased the likelihood of plans. But their relative rarity diminished predictability problems because there were just a few plans needing prep. That’s right: plans are predictable both on topics where they’re readily available and ones where they aren’t.

I’d be surprised if this weren’t obvious to most people. So here is some newer content. Functional limits are much better now than they were ten years ago because LD debaters are drastically better policy debaters than they used to be. At my senior year TOC, I would be shocked if half of the octas participants had read a plan or a disad more than once that year. I went to about twenty tournaments, had over 150 debates, and read consequentialist affs in the vast majority of rounds. How many times did the neg concede framework and engage the 1AC on its substantive merits for 7 minutes? Twice! Despite disclosure, a large team reading similar arguments, and my obvious intention to debate util in most rounds, teams did not prepare for those debates. They prepared for framework and to a lesser extent, tricks and theory. In a high-level bid round (against a debater who would go on to win an octas bid among other tournaments), I had to explain the definition of inherency! Many elite debaters could not craft a politics disad. They didn’t understand counterplan competition. I could go on. (It’s possible that there was a temporary drop in policy-style debating after 2010, but I’d still take most top circuit LDers today in a policy debate against most debaters from back then.)

The point is that negatives are way better prepared now than they were when ‘plans bad’ was popularized. Disclosure has improved evidence quality and policy strategy. (Most) camps teach policy concepts more consistently and rigorously. Negatives are prepared to argue politics, counterplans of all stripes, inherency, etc. All of these facts decrease the strength of predictability claims, which often amount to unpreparedness apologetics.

Another common anti-plan claim is ground loss. The idea here is that there’s some generic ground owed to the negative, and plans exclude it or diminish its quality. As debaters have become better researchers and disclosure nearly ubiquitous, generic ground has evaporated. I rarely see debates where the 1NC has pure generics. Of course, there is a causal issue if the neg would have read generics but for the plan. Sure, but the neg needs to show that the ground exists, that it’s desirable, and that it’s owed or predictable for the neg to have it. On JF19, for example, I don’t know what that ground is. The vast majority of NCs aren’t weakened by regime-specific plans. K links are better. Some disads are worse, but some are better. If the claim is that the neg can’t read an Israel disad against a Bahrain aff… I guess? But who wants to do that anyway?

‘Plans Good’ Standards

On the flip side, support for plans has improved. The common arguments like clash and stable ground are roughly the same, but topic lit standards are much better. Keep in mind that the majority of debaters will want to argue consequentialism on one or both sides of a given topic (whether utilitarianism, structural violence, or pure kritik debate). In recent years, the topic committee has created resolutions that are downright un-debateable in their entirety from a consequentialist perspective:

• Resolved: Wealthy nations have an obligation to provide development assistance to other nations.
• Resolved: A just government ought to prioritize civil liberties over national security.
• Resolved: Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power.

Some topics aren’t ripe for policy debate—plan supporters can concede as much—but these ones are. There are solid policy-based, consequentialist arguments on both sides. But, they require specific examples. Development assistance from the UK to Venezuela might be good while assistance from China to Nigeria might be bad. Ditto for the second topic. Which governments? Which civil liberties or national security threats? What does “prioritize” even mean? And don’t get me started about a topic that begins with “Countries” or “States”…

This argument can be cached out in a number of ways. I call it a topic lit argument (as opposed to clash) because I think the most persuasive version is that there’s little to no research on these propositions taken generally or universally. There are mountains of research on nuclear power production in the U.S., but how many energy experts seriously treat the question of whether all or most countries ought to prohibit it?

From my research on JF19, there is a lot of scholarship on specific countries and not a lot of meta-analysis on military aid as a general principle. How do plan opponents expect non-plan debates to go down? Generic debate is poorly supported, repetitive, and frankly uninteresting from a policy perspective. But example debate—assuming a whole res advocacy—is absurd. The aff reads a Saudi Arabia advantage, and the neg reads a Cameroon disad in response. Think about the question the judge has to answer at the end of the round: Is withdrawing aid from Saudi Arabia better than maintaining aid to Cameroon? This is not a policy tradeoff the U.S. actually faces. It’s not contemplated by the topic literature. It’s a very confused way to debate that requires students devote time to answer questions no one asked.

The picture is even worse when you add induction objections to the mix, which plan opponents not only license but incentivize. The neg says Saudi Arabia is not a typical or representative example. The aff says the same about Cameroon. Now what? Does the judge multiply the strength of each side’s offense by the generalizability of its example? Does a really generalizable case with little offense beat a fringe case with a lot of offense? Or is typicality a threshold inquiry, so each side’s examples must meet it but aren’t weighed by it? No LD theorist has ever answered these questions in public writing, to my knowledge.

If anyone disputes this characterization of the topic and supporting literature, I challenge you to find three pieces of quality evidence on each of two questions: (a) whether a particular regime is representative enough to induce the resolution as a general principle and (b) whether withdrawing aid to one regime would be better than maintaining aid to another regime (where the two do not conflict). If that evidence does not exist, I don’t see how non-plan consequentialist debate could even get off the ground.

The Issue of Framework Debate

Some will say that all this is fine because moral/political philosophy debate is improved without plans. I’ve seen this asserted quite a bit, and I still don’t get it. Take JF19 for example. Would a Rawlsian endorse the resolution? She might want to know about the effects of military aid on the least well off. That depends on the countries included in the sample. Perhaps military aid to Saudi Arabia hurts the least well off but aid to Egypt helps. Would a virtue ethicist endorse the resolution? She might want to know whether virtue is exhibited by granting aid or inculcated by citizens of the recipient state. That too seems to depend a lot on the specifics. How about a Kantian? The intention underlying military aid or the maxim we might test for universalizability could be quite different whether we want to help innocent civilians survive attacks from a warmongering neighbor or just want the regime to keep oil supplies flowing. None of these questions are answerable without some degree of specificity.

Plans support moral/political philosophy debates, not to mention that the topic literature problems persist in these areas too. To use an example, you’ll need evidence of representatitiveness. And for many frameworks, you’d like to see some evidence comparing withdrawal from Regime X and maintaining aid to Regime Y. If neither type of evidence exists, framework debaters shouldn’t want whole res either.

Even if I’m wrong, the potential weakening of moral/political philosophy debate in a world with plans is vastly outweighed by the obliteration of policy-style debate without plans. The vast majority of common frameworks that apply to the whole resolution would apply in plan debates too, but policy-style debate without regime specification is nearly impossible. We can also make a quantitative weighing argument from metagame practices. Moral/political philosophy debate has been in decline for some time, and at this point in LD’s trajectory, the majority of debaters want to debate consequentialism. That matters. If the cost of plans is that one debater can’t read virtue ethics quite as effectively (sad, I know), it’s worth it if hundreds more want to do meaningful consequentialist debate.

Coming Up

In future I hope to write about different models of topicality, the inevitability of pragmatics, ‘typicality’ burdens in plan/example debate, how to think about resolutions, and more. Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like to see me cover!