THW Abolish Daylight Savings Time
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After 1 vote and with 3 points ahead, the winner is...
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- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 4
- Time for argument
- Three days
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- One month
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
This House Would Abolish Daylight Savings Time
Daylight saving time (DST), also daylight savings time or daylight time (the United States and Canada) and summer time (United Kingdom, European Union, and others), is the practice of advancing clocks during warmer months so that darkness falls at a later clock time. The typical implementation of DST is to set clocks forward by one hour in the spring ("spring forward") and set clocks back by one hour in autumn ("fall back", from the North American English word "fall" for autumn) to return to standard time. As a result, there is one 23-hour day in late winter or early spring and one 25-hour day in the autumn.
Burden of proof is shared
Con will argue we should keep DST
No religious arguments, no quantum physics arguments, no trolling.
- Shorter sleep duration and worse performance [Better sleep leads to better health, common sense anyone?]
- Worse health overall that can't be adapted to
- Countless traffic incidents
- Causes shortened life expectancy
- Causes mental and cognitive problems
- The long term effects will pile up as you are going to work one hour earlier
1. There’s more light to enjoy in the evening.
What’s better: Only a fleeting moment of daylight before work (and driving home in the dark) or being able to enjoy the daylight well into the evening hours? That’s what we thought. More light = more time to do what you want or need to do = a happier you.
2. The crime rate drops during daylight saving time.
Research has shown that robbery rates after daylight saving time fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during those light-filled evening hours that didn’t exist before the time change. Mind. Blown.
3. It minimizes energy consumption (and lowers your costs).
When you enjoy more natural daylight, you use less artificial light — and that makes a real impact on the overall cost of energy consumption.
4. It lowers the incidence of traffic accidents.
Like driving home in the daylight versus the darkness, driving is easier when you can see your surroundings and where you’re going, right? Duh! Studies actually show that we could save hundreds of lives per year if we implemented daylight saving time year-round.
Critics of DST often focus their criticisms around those two days per year, citing confusion, schedule disruption, and even health problems. A 2012 study indicated that in the few days around the springtime clock change (the beginning of DST, in other words), incidents of heart attack rose by 10 percent. Never mind that heart attacks were found to decrease around the time of the autumn clock change … also by 10 percent. Never mind that heart attacks are much more likely to come in the winter and early spring than any other time of year, period. Statistics like that are pretty easy to twist to your liking.In reality, DST is an eight-month experiment designed to make life, well, more pleasurable for humans. The basic idea: In the Western world, we typically spend more awake time in the evenings than in the mornings. We also enjoy many benefits from being awake in the sunshine. This National Institutes of Health overview is a good place to read about vitamin D, increased exercise, increased socializing, and overall improvements to mental health that come with sunlight.ABSENT DST, FOR EIGHT MONTHS PER YEAR, OUR DAYS WOULD NOT BE STRUCTURED TO ENJOY THE MOST SUNLIGHT POSSIBLEAbsent DST, for eight months per year our days would not be structured to enjoy the most sunlight possible. Our mornings would be bright and cheerful, but the sun would tend to be set before we leave work each day. This stinks! This gives the average 9-5 adult very little time to enjoy sunlight. So during the spring, summer, and early autumn, we tweak it, just a bit, so that there's more sunlight in the evening. In the winter, we abandon DST, because there just isn't enough sunlight to make a difference. Winter is pretty much a dark hellworld no matter how it's scheduled. Winter DST would give us a very very late sunrise and not enough light in the evening to provide the effects we want.
In a new paper forthcoming in The Review of Economics and Statistics, we find that shifting daylight from the morning to the early evening has pretty hefty returns for public safety. When DST begins in the spring, robbery rates for the entire day fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during the evening hour that gained some extra sunlight.
Why might this time shift matter? The timing of sunset is pretty close to the time many of us leave work, and walking to our cars or homes in the dark makes us easier targets for street criminals. We feel safer when we’re walking in the daylight, and it’s easy to imagine why light might have a deterrent effect on crime: offenders know they’re more likely to be recognized and get caught if they’re fully visible. The timing of sunset matters because our daily schedules can’t easily adapt to follow the daylight. Most people can’t leave work before 5pm, even if it would be safer to do so.
1. There’s more light to enjoy in the evening.2. The crime rate drops during daylight saving time.3. It minimizes energy consumption (and lowers your costs).4. It lowers the incidence of traffic accidents.
It seems simply absurd that the more light would directly be able to counter the lack of sleep and disruption of circadian rhythm.
Definition of absurd
(Entry 1 of 2)1: ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous
I think it's irrelevant to the debate. I can easily drop ot because admitting workplaces should do it is admitting all businesses should so... What time os the rest of the nation going to run on???? I can easily drop that point, it supports DST being good.
Pro has been the one dropping ALL of my points, I addressed Pro's points in Round 2.
This was a frustrating debate to read. There’s meat to this debate, but both sides undercut their own arguments. Just looking at the bigger picture, Pro’s first two rounds are rather weak with the first functioning as just an opportunity to list biological harms without examining the degree to which they impact individuals and a monetary harm, and the second giving only a bit more insight into both without substantively adding to either and providing tepid responses to some of Con’s points. This means that Pro sets up a rather weak case with strong support, and it doesn’t help that Pro waits until R3 to substantively counter Con’s points and to provide any weighing analysis (more on that later). Con’s first two rounds are pretty good by comparison, but he largely abdicates his final two rounds, spending much of his third being upset at Pro’s use of the word “absurd,” providing little more than weak weighing analysis (largely by way of extensions on his previous points), and entirely giving up the opportunity to say anything meaningful in his final round, as his only efforts are focused on a CP he’s already too late to respond to (it came up in R3). Missing opportunities to use these rounds just gives me the impression that you’re largely throwing away your own points. If they don’t matter to you enough to emphasize them, why should they matter to me?
But it’s not just the big picture. Much as all of Con’s responses to it are off the table, I don’t know what to do with Pro’s CP. It comes in R3, which is extremely late to be presenting a CP (you can argue that it’s not a CP, just an extant possibility for companies to use, though it’s unclear that any companies would do this, when they would, which companies would do it, etc.); it functions largely as a way to avoid some of the harms coming from Con’s arguments rather than achieving anything beneficial; and it invites questions as to whether Pro’s case really solves anything (if companies can just do this whenever, why should it matter whether a country abolishes it? At best, that just means you’re removing it from some industries and for the unemployed). If anything, I felt this undercut your case. By that same token, I don’t know what Con is trying to achieve with a “common sense” argument as a means to address Pro’s biological points. I get that your angle is just to show how ridiculous-sounding it is for anyone to attribute substantial health harms to an hour of lost sleep and the resulting shift in circadian rhythms, but there are actual studies on the table in this debate, including analysis of several studies in your R1. Why don’t I see you digging back into those points later, especially when they are the only place where I see some actual impact analysis (10% increase/decrease in heart attacks). When you’re straight up admitting in R2 that the degree of lost sleep required to achieve sleep deprivation is unclear, and you admit that an hour lost every night can have these effects (honestly, that just leaves me questioning how many nights before it becomes harmful) I’m honestly just unsure why Pro didn’t treat that as a tacit admission that no amount of “common sense” can adequately portray these effects.
But where both sides are lacking the most is in actual weighing analysis, though this hurts Pro the most. Without clear numbers to establish the degree to which people are affected, even by a day or two of reduced sleep, I’m not clear how much weight I can give your points. Sure, they’re well-supported, but they just sort of sit there every round, and I don’t know why or how they outweigh Con’s points. Maybe if I got some indication of the actual death toll from heart attacks and traffic incidents, I would be able to see a better case being made here. Lost productivity is about the weakest route you could have taken. Meanwhile, Con can just coast on having more points and some comparative analysis in his R1. Pro concedes the deterrent effects to robbery (surprised Con didn’t talk about other criminal activity, but it’s something), there are clearly at least weak positive health and happiness impacts to having longer daylight hours, there’s some non-zero reduction in energy costs (not sure how much, though), some plausibly positive effects to traffic incidents, and pretty decent reasons to believe that the costs of DST are actually countered by the benefits that occur when it ends. There is also a clear and conceded impact to companies losing out on that extra daylight, which is at least far less certain without DST than with it.
I might believe that certain parts of the biological effects favor Pro’s side, but I’m not given substantive reason to disregard other points and I don’t have a clear means to outweigh them. When I don’t get that information, I generally weigh the side with more arguments that cover a broader swath of impacts as superior because they all have relatively equal weight. That’s the case here: I vote Con.
Appreciate the feedback!
Your vote was a great analysis. I was planning to vote on this one, but became frustrated by arguments from both sides that seemed to wander on me. I appreciate you thoughtful and concise piercing of that frustration. Well done.
ah, damn. I focused too generally and forgot about the actual lives lost. You're right about that. Giving better numbers would've definitely helped, and I got lost in refuting Con's argument rather than going further in the first round.
I'll see what I can do.
But it got dat girth doe ;)
this one's pretty short.
bumperino
Pro brings some new points or quotes in Round 3, it would be inappropriate for me to bring new rebuttals he can't reply to so disregard the new quotes.
damn, you may have finally got me... let's see if I can negate any of these ideas...
Enjoy the opportunity to take on one of my weakest arguments yet.
Knowing about the topic is not always that important.
You already are aware of this, it's how you reply so rapidly to Rounds.
I predicted you would accept this. Let's see if you can win this one. Funnily enough, I know less about DST than I do about Google Privacy, so this will be trickier.