THW Abolish Daylight Savings Time

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.