Barney is not a good debater

BARNEY is NOT a GOOD DEBATER

As always, any debater who sets a generic, subjective standard without defining that standard deserves to lose her debate outright. There are few move more amateurish then arguing that something is good without defining what good means in context.

PRO makes 3 argument, all quite weak

One: PRO argues falsely that "not good" is a neutral condition that ought to be presumed, shifting to burden of proof to CON. SInce PRO failed to define "good" in the context of this debate this argument must fail. If "good" is defined as, say, most likes in the FORUM section then PRO's argument is obviously false. Worse, PRO rather muddies the question of GOOD vs. BAD by invoking Socratic ethics. If PRO is applying some moral standard here, he fails to make the case. As instigator and maker of a claim that contradicts the debateart.com convention, the Burden of Proof here is 100% PRO's.

Two: PRO argues that Barney lacks the traits of a good debater but the only trait PRO mentions is analysis and instantly offers that he is incapable of making such an argument. PRO argues that win/lose record is an example of a debater's trait but this is obviously false. By definition, debaters have little influence over their win/lose and so that record can't be ascribed to debaters as a trait. We need only look at the top ten win/lose records on this site and note that there are 3 or 4 debaters found there that couldn't format a proper syllogism if their life depended on it to understand that win/lose records are political artifacts with no connection to qualities or traits or performance or conduct of individual debaters.

Three: PRO argues that nobody on this site is a good debater when compared to debaters outside of this site. Unfortunately, PRO has forgotten the one rule he set for this debate which was that "we only consider debateart .com" Having violated his own single rule, PRO invalidates this argument and makes an excellent case for losing this debate outright just on rules violation

CON starts with two arguments based on win/lose records which I have already stated are objectively non-persuasive. There is no relationship between the quality of debaters on this site and win/lose records.

CON's third argument finally begins to adress the quality of a "good" debate- public recognition, dodging traps, overcoming truisms, meme-worthiness. I think there plenty more important qualities but CON goes way ahead here by defining a standard.

In rebuttals, CON correctly calls out PRO on his subjective standard and gives one good example of the unreliability of win/lose records for analyzing debate quality. CON refutes PRO's lame 'analysis' argument by providing one example debate that definitely demonstrates some skill in analysis. CON correctly call out PRO for failing to abide by his own rule setting the scope of this debate.

In ROUND2, PRO deceptively pretends that he did not limit the scope of this debate to debateart.com, earning a lost point for conduct.

PRO explodes his already failed second argument by confirming that win/lose/leaderboard is no reflection of quality. PRO entirely undermines the majority of his ROUND 1 here.

PRO then undermines his undermining by further relying on win/lose to counter CON's examples of quality debating. PRO's failure to define GOOD up front effectively give him no ground against CON's very reasonable examples of quality. PRO can't make up his mind from one paragraph to the next whether win/lose records is an indication of quality.

CON quite rightly objects to PRO wild inconsistencies regarding scope and win/lose record. PRO correctly stands by his example of quality in his debate style as entirely unrefuted (mostly because PRO seems to feel no obligation to define some objective standard for quality.

From first to last, PRO fails to erect any rhetorical goalpost for his assertions,fails to set an objective standard for "good," and consistently contradicts and undermines the argument he devoted all of his energy to in ROUND1- comparative win/lose.

PRO never really built a substantial case on any particular and made CON's job pretty easy here. ARGUMENTS to CON

CONDUCT to CON because PRO violated his own single rule for this debate, limiting scope to debateart.com and then pretending that rule does not apply to his (entirely absent) defintion of a "good" debater.

RFD given here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UvsRs2_mNCWYsLy5ufZoAGvduqCEq9Je3Xc2rTU3bng/edit?usp=sharing

TL;DR: Con effectively utilized the absence of thresholds from Pro's arguments, as well as points that Pro either dropped entirely or punted to Con early, to establish that he at least meets some criteria for what Pro considers to be a good debater. Since Pro didn't include offense in his argument (e.g. why Barney is a bad debater), largely just undermining the question or arguing that he can't demonstrated that he is, winning on any of these points was sufficient to net Con the debate. Con wins on some of them, so I vote Con.

RFD in comments.

I just want to open by saying that I have absolutely nothing against either debates and that particularly for Barney, I have nothing but respect for the contributions you have made in this site. Of course, debates ought not be awarded to who we respect, but rather who articulated better arguments.

Burden:
From the get go Vici establishes the Chaos state as the proof for a burden shift towards his opposition. For Barney to accept this is an absolutely terrible decision . It means that I must enter the debate judging Barney as if he were a new user, and then assessing whether the proofs he provides are sufficient in elevating him to "good" status (they could have just cited Wikipedia and asserted that Vici was the claim maker and quite convincingly threw the burden back). Even though a lot of us see Barney as "good", it is actually very difficult to establish what qualities contribute to "good" in a quantitative manner in the given character limit.

Metrics:
Vici provides the combined record analyses as his means for judging whether a debater is good, whilst taking note to emphasise why it is superior to the traditional elo and leaderboard system - "more difficult to find 10 bad opponents who've won 100 times than to snipe 100 people". I find this system problematic, but nonetheless far more capable than the traditional system. Note that if this argument is successful, two of Barney's contentions are nullified. Barney has some scattered rebuttals - he says that Vici cites the later records of his opponents rather than what they were, but Vici's reply of the boxer seems sufficient to me.

The "controversial" rule in the descriptions:
I was drawn to this debate quite frankly because of the abhorrent quality of the other votes (sorry), especially the ones which deducted arguments on the basis of the alleged "rule" in the description. This is entirely unconvincing. First, from a logical standpoint, Vici provides sound reason as to why we ought accept universal definitions with the example of the public speaker - that if someone asks "are you a good speaker, answer whilst only considering X website", it is clear that "consider" implies that we ought derive sources from only the website as opposed to any other source, not that we ought to define the term "'speaker". Obviously, all definitions are outside of this site (no such thing as a debateart owned definition) so it is entirely logical to derive definitions from a dictionary. Those who argue that "Vici must prove that Barney is a not good debater within the standards of this site" have terribly misunderstood the definition of "debater" and ought to bear the burden of conjuring any source which indicates that "good debater" refers explicitly to this narrow definition. Secondly, from just an emotional intelligence perspective, when Vici says "we only consider debateart because debate.org is gone and we don't know about it" it is clear that they mean that we ought derive sources, as debate.org was mentioned as a prohibited (clearly indicating that Barney's record from there cannot be utilised).

Overall arguments:
The argument comes down to Vici's metric, which acts as a preemptive rebuttal to Barney's entire case. Barney's refutations of it were not sufficient and amounted to poking holes at it instead of attacking it's essence. Furthermore, that Barney took up the entire burden meant that even if Vici's metric was disproved, he would be left at square one, for it is his burden to build bottom up a case why he is good (simply refuting the metric would have left him as the status quo 1500 debater). I mean this with absolutely zero disrespect, but in my opinion, this is a clear cut argument point allocation to Vici from me.

Source:
Equal. That Barney sites common sense claims (his profile, the leaderboard) does not constitute a point awarded.

Pro's case relied entirely upon one core tenet:

That defeating and competing with other good opponents (and, of course, winning often enough when doing so) defines a good (or better than good) debater.

Con truly rebuts this in Round 2 because he notes that whtieflame and bones themselves are good rating but I find this flawed.

Instead, using the same logic of Con's Round 2 Kritik, I notice that when Pro says whiteflame defeated good debaters and also says that Bones did, the debaters they defeated are called 'good' for no reason other than rating.

Another issue is scope of the debate. Pro says in the description, written by himself, that this is only about DART yet uses DDO to regard Tejretics as a good opponent for whiteflame to have defeated and starts an entire contention that cuts his case in half, slaughtering the first contention in its entirety.

If nobody on DART is a good debater relative to world debaters, then why the hell did Pro juxtapose Barney's noobsniping against the fact that whiteflame and Bones defeated good debaters?

The case of Pro actually was a flawed attenpt at a pincer BoP trap. I myself pioneered this idea but I do not care about that now. A pincer BoP is a phrase I coined to describe a strategy of having 1 or 2 contentions that actually directly cannot be true if another is true (from the same side).

This works well when the opponent has to clearly exert characters and energy to defeat them, since it blackmails the opponent to need to build and defend two independent coubtercases on top of their constructive. Conversely, this works terribly and backfires if it actually directly enables the opponent to reverse said pincer by dismissing one with the other in an immediate manner. It takes finesse to pull off and close attention to how direct vs indirect the contradiction is for a voter and opponent to grasp.

Barney's case is that his winrate is higher than other high-rated debaters at the tier he is and that Pro is completely subjectively drawing differentiation between good vs mediocre debaters that are ranked high based on if he deems the opponents of debaters good or not, making the entire thing subjective and thus not objective.

Debate description reads: "we only consider debateart because debate.org is gone and we don't know about it"
All of Con's arguments are based on statistics gathered on the DART site. They unambiguously demonstrate that Barney is well above the average user in terms of being able to win debates (which is if not definitionally, the most commonly accepted goal of a "good" debater.) Pro's only counter to this evidence is the argument that this metric means nothing because no one on this site is a "good" debater. Con rebuts this based on the debate description. Arguments to Con

Con provides the most valuable sources, as well as an impressive amount of BTS math on his own rankings, they cover the majority of his claims regarding different statistics on DART, as well as voting outcomes, he also provides definitions for the relevant topics of statistics and logical fallacies. Pro doesn't completely fail to provide sources, but a lot of the things he says are completely without a source, such as the first paragraph about Plato and Chaotic states, the list of other "good debaters" and who they have beaten. Sources to Con

S&G are equal. I had no difficulty reading/understanding either argument, nor did I notice any egregious errors. Tied.

I was tempted to take conduct points from Pro as I find the premise of the argument itself disrespectful, but I suspect that it violates the voting policy somehow, and anyway, he was civil during the debate itself.

As a critical note I wish someone had taken the time to define "good" in this debate. It was danced around very loosely and while I feel the arguments themselves were unambiguous, it was left to the voter to decide how they should evaluate the arguments in terms of the claim itself. RM or Intelligence (as well as myself) would almost definitely not have left this unaddressed, and I personally feel the debate suffers for it.

ARGUMENTS:

According to the debate description, we are considering DebateArt as the criteria. So for PRO to insist an outside definition should be used as a standard for a good debater is to go against the description. CON structured his argument based on the statistical average of the leaderboard and the existence of the Hall of Fame, which are two metrics that DebateArt explicitly uses to rank debaters and good debates. This means that CON better followed the debate's structure than PRO and therefore has won the debate. The question was never "is Barney and OBJECTIVELY good debater" (according to the description), but if Barney's performance on DebateArt is good, since the description blatantly states that DebateArt will be considered.

SOURCES:
CON and PRO both had reliable sources, but CON cited significantly more reliable sources than PRO over the course of the debate. The sheer volume of citations back to previous debates and profiles proving Barney's performance on DebateArt went unmatched by PRO, who relied on a cursory analysis that he/she did not reveal to the general public and only included a laundry list of people PRO considered "good" based on his/her unshared spreadsheet.

SPELLING AND GRAMMAR:
Both sides had typos and basic grammar errors. But none of these errors were able to sufficiently impede comprehension, so both are tied in regard to this score.

CONDUCT:
Both were equally respectful and the dialogue was open and barely hostile.