I appreciate your thoughts on my choices! Personally, I think your strongest pick was your third choice in R3. Light Raider always produces strong AMVs, but this is among the best I’ve seen, period. I’m also a fan of all of your R2 choices, particularly your first pick. I like both of the first choices for R1 and R4 as well, and the third pick in R1 was strong as well.
Somehow I missed both of these most recent comments.
Yeah, I’ll wait to post waiving this round. Just let me know when you’d like me to do so.
And yeah, I usually only push framework when it’s clear that solely pushing impacts on a Net Benefits framework would be tough. In this case, I feel it’s valid to pursue the relatively normal angle. There’ll be a lot on criminal activity to come, for sure, and I’ve already got thoughts on that that I can share with you if you’re interested. I think the main thing that you’ll have to do is really focus hard on how this affects the preconceptions that make it so difficult for police and certain minorities to establish mutual trust.
Having seen a bit more of this playing out in a different debate, I can understand how it's being used to split up a single round between three speakers, though I still might extend speaking times to 2 minutes or more. 6-8 minute rounds aren't particularly odd for single speakers, and I think it would give your students more time to flesh out their ideas.
That's an intriguing structure for a debate. I'm sure you have your own standards for doing this, and you are almost certainly running the class, so I don't mean to impose any of my ideas on you, though I have some experience coaching debate myself and have run similar rounds before with my own students.
Might I suggest increasing the amount of time available to the debaters? Approx. 1 minute is already rather short for providing arguments, and 30 seconds might only be enough time to get out a single paragraph at most. I think giving times like this encourage debaters to rush through their arguments and abstain from fleshing out important points.
Honestly, you'd be the one at a disadvantage if I did vote because your points would be the ones I'd scrutinize the most. It's harder for me with solid biological science topics like this where I come in knowing a great deal about the topic (though my PhD is in microbiology and not evolutionary biology... actually, very little evolution involved in my research), but I'll consider it.
Ugh... this one's going to be difficult for me to vote on without personal bias getting in the way. I might be able to manage it, but I can make no promises that I can fully step away from what I already know. Might want to look elsewhere.
I would agree with you on the relationship with the law, though especially in my rebuttals, be prepared to address a lot of correlation v. causation issues. Some of my rebuttals to these points may become obvious from my arguments, though there are a few that I haven't written out yet. I think you're right to focus your attention there.
I can also see why you'd expect that kind of argument from me. There will definitely be a contention along those lines, though the link story will be a little different, since I'm anticipating the "but that's just racism" response.
Hey, figured we could start discussion of this debate before I post my round (it's practically done, but I've got 3 more days and we should do something with it).
I'll give you my view of your argument in a bit, but first, I'd like to get your impressions.
What do you think are your arguments' strongest points?
What do you think I'm going to go after in my rebuttals (that'll be next round)?
Not trying to cast aspersions, but it's generally a bad idea to treat any argument you have as irrefutable. If you don't know the holes in your arguments, someone out there is likely to find them for you.
All this being said, while this seems like an intriguing topic, I think I'd have a hard time playing devil's advocate here given my family's history with the Holocaust. Probably one of the few debates I shouldn't vote on.
Undefeatable's summary of my vote is pretty much on target. I agree with him on this resolution, but I tried my best to divorce myself of my personal opinion.
What I read from your impacts were the various explanations for why racism has impacts and broad-scale racism, in particular, is damaging. The impacts I'm seeing aren't tied to the existence of systemic racism, they're tied to the existence of racism that affects many people, which is what Con preyed upon. I think examining why we need to define it as systemic racism in order to address it (e.g. we can't just punish bad actors and hope to fix the problem) would have done a lot to further your point. You have a lot of the link story to get there, but you spend most of your time focused on those links rather than examining why it matters to uphold your particular view of systemic racism and why the semantic argument is actually damaging to the wellbeing of so many in society. Essentially, while you certainly talked about why it was frustrating to face a semantic argument, I think you could have done more to explain what it does to perceptions of racism as a result, and how it hinders our capacity to both recognize and address causes of persistent racist tendencies in society.
This debate is really frustrating because it's not really about whether this is a significant problem. It's the aim of so much of Pro's arguments, which focus on impacts, to establish its significance, yet much of that argumentation is either outright conceded or ignored because it's not pertinent to Con's argument. In fact, the only words that are pertinent are "systemic racism," and I get two very different views of what is required to meet the standard for systemic. I'm going to go ahead and quote the definition in the description:
"Systemic racism includes the complex array of antiblack practices, the unjustly gained political-economic power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power. Systemic here means that the core racist realities are manifested in each of society’s major parts [...] each major part of U.S. society—the economy, politics, education, religion, the family—reflects the fundamental reality of systemic racism."
What's missing from this definition, and where Con puts the vast majority of his energies, is a clear comparison between what is systemic and what is individual racism. Part of the problem here is that there is a complex array of policies, and that it's not simple to disentangle what is the result of choices on a local level and what is systemic. When do we cross that line? Does a single city doing this become systemic? A single district? A handful? A state? I can understand that we must eventually reach that point of being systemic, but I don't know what it takes to reach it. Moreover, I'm kind of unclear about what makes a policy racist, which shouldn't really be this unclear by the end. If it causes harm to a given group of people without directly stating them in the policy, is it racist? Moreover, if a government decides to ignore the effects of a policy that was not intended to be racist, but clearly has an undue and excessive effect on certain races, is that society engaging in systemic racism?
I feel like both sides try to engage with these questions, but I never get a clear answer as to why systemic racism must represent a given view. From Pro, I keep wondering what the cost is of failing to recognize these issues as systemic. I could buy a lot of Con's arguments about semantics and still find a plausible reason to support you if you explained what makes systemic racism so much more insidious or more important to address. Instead of trying to work against Con's game, play it: he keeps telling you that all the obvious examples are in the past, so explain why and how things have changed and why it matters. If you can't separate the concept of systemic from individual by definition alone, then you need to give me a reason that engages with why your experts see systemic and individual racism as a necessary distinction. Con keeps wielding that against you, but you could have used it to your advantage if you had forced him to engage with an argument that isn't semantic.
As for Con, I feel like you could be doing more to address this issue of a lack of action as a form of racism. That's a point Pro makes quite a bit, and while it is harder to define in that same light (as it's more the actions of individuals with the government effectively just allowing it to occur), I don't see you doing much to counter this point except to say that these policies don't specifically target race, which I think treads a thin line. It could easily have been argued that that is the new vogue for systemic racism since the days of Jim Crow: providing implicit consent to further a policy that chiefly doesn't solely target a race or set of races, but does clearly cause outsized harms to people in those groups. Simply being more complex and undirected doesn't automatically means it fails to meet the standard of being racist, yet I see much of your argument as very much to the letter. I can see ways in which that perspective could be problematic, some of which I mentioned in my feedback to Pro, to which I think your argument is vulnerable.
All this being said, while I'm not particularly fond of semantic arguments, in a debate where the entire focus is semantics (it would have been on the word "significant" in most instances), the words play a pivotal role. As I see it, Con did a lot more work here, examining the discrepancies between the positions of Pro's experts and their own definitions of both individual and systemic racism. I may not be fond of it, but he does an incredibly thorough job of it. However, it's not so much the subject of the debate that has me making this decision, but rather the framing of the debate around experts. Pro makes a big point of stating up front how essential experts are to this debate, but is largely losing the debate on his experts and how they demarcate between individual and systemic racism. That reliance works against Pro, since any case he could have made for why it's important to establish that distinction and to recognize examples that fall into the systemic category are lost in the effort to just show that racism happens on a large scale. That ends up being reason enough for Con to carry the day.
Considering what I'm being told about what was agreed by Pro and not adhered to in the debate, I do also award conduct to Con, as Pro apparently agreed to waive the final round and still posted.
Appreciate the vote! Just FYI, the Dorohedoro characters often look like that (though she is rather masculine), and the main character is actually the guy with the mask who is walking through the scene as multiples of himself before his head turns into gyoza. It's an odd one, for sure.
Well, maybe it's just my experience with live debates at similar speeds, but I don't find either of them to be exceptionally fast.
That being said, for a general audience, I'd agree with you that it would be better to slow down. Two reasons why I would still encourage sticking with these times:
First, I think it's an important skill to develop to fit your speech to a specific length of time. You can argue that that would be true of any length, but if you can extend and contract that length of time as suits your argument, I'd say that takes away from the value of it. Being more concise and, yes, speeding up where necessary can help to accomplish that, and I don't see either of them as necessarily problematic, though they can both be taken to problematic extremes.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, this debate isn't just meant to be something voted on by lay voters on the site. It's also meant to be practice. We're doing these kinds of debate because we either are doing or would like to be doing live debates. This is a common format for live debates, including the specific times. It might be best to advocate for changes to how these times are structured, but they've been this way for a long time, and I suspect jockeying for changes would be a long and grueling process that likely wouldn't end in success. So, we prepare for the style of debate, and yes, sometimes that means using common tactics like speeding up. Again, there are limits, but that's neither an uncommon nor a frowned upon tactic in LD.
Being outdated isn't really the problem, nor is the evidence, per say. I tend to start every debate with a little bit of burdens analysis to frame the discussion, and I think that could go a long way in your case. Even better here would have been to include just a little bit of what the actual policy would be, e.g. "Google will make a public acknowledgement that its privacy policies have been bad, and will take x, y and z steps to address them." Apart from that, it's difficult to establish precisely why privacy matters without getting too slippery, but you could always talk about why it's good for their bottom line and how it is likely to shape the industry. The notion that personalized ad experiences have generally been good, a point that RM made, is contrary to what most people in the US probably think about it. Beyond that, you could just talk about how it reshapes the industry to address differences in perspective on privacy worldwide. You mentioned the EU, but it never really factored as an impact. Why does it matter that the EU has a different perspective on their practices, and how would they perceive a proactive effort on the part of Google to change how it acts to better suit that market? Not everything has to be sourced, but you can give persuasive reasons why these changes would have meaningful impacts for the company as well as just enhancing trust in a system that many of us rely on daily.
I'm not saying that his vote seems legit. I'm saying that his vote is legit. If I had decided to let Con's framing of the resolution stand because Pro never meaningfully addressed it (something I absolutely considered) and chose to award conduct to Pro for Con's new arguments in the final round (I actually wrote that I was very close to doing this), then I would have posted the exact same point allocation. If MisterChris does the same thing because costs matter more to him than vague educational boosts, then that's his decision. You didn't make the same one. Neither did I. Doesn't make his any less valid.
What you seem most upset by is the fact that he's selective in choosing which points to award and that he split the points. I honestly think that happens too little. If the goal was to heap points on one side, as so many debaters do, then he would have done that. I don't know why you think he'd get something out of tying this debate (which appears as though it won't happen anyway, based on Bringerofrain), but your attempts to push a narrative of why MisterChris would do this are just absurd.
Nice ideal, but I somewhat doubt that you can behave like a super computer, and even if you could, a super computer itself would come with biases. A person would have to program said super computer to favor certain points, otherwise the computer would simply state what was said happened and not award points.
I mean... fine, I guess? Like I said, it's not really possible to set aside all your personal views, largely because there will always be points you prefer and points you don't, no matter how much personal knowledge you throw out. In the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts, anyone who tells you different is selling something.
There are very different understandings of what tabula rasa is depending on the style of debate. Ideally, we would all be able to set aside every bias and piece of information we have, but in practice, that’s impossible. In general, I’m not fond of pushing such an ideal among voters, nor am I supportive of everyone bringing everything they know to bear on a debate. Not sure where the line should be drawn, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people should throw out any knowledge they have to determine the outcome.
I am very reticent to award source points in instances like these. Always feels like double-dipping to me - I’m already treating his new arguments from that round as entirely forfeit. It’s my standard, regardless of the context of other votes on the debate.
Yeah, apparently I did mix it up in several places. This is what happens when I’m trying to type up my thoughts with a puppy in the room wanting my attention. Hope it makes some sense.
I can understand sources being an important factor in this debate, so I don't fault you there.
However, I will say (and this is just my opinion) that I often find it difficult to use something not discussed in the debate as a means to determine the outcome. Part of the problem is that in the absence of any discussion over the contents of those sources, Pro/Con doesn't have an opportunity to address any conflicting evidence therein. I appreciate holding them accountable for missing critical parts of their evidence, but I don't think that's part of the duty of a judge, partially because they don't get the chance to address a point you make. I can completely understand saying that it didn't convince you for that reason, but also penalizing them in source points seems excessive to me when they have no opportunity to address those issues.
As for the point about only having access to the abstract, I find that very understandable as well, though again, the issue there seems to be penalizing for a choice of sources. I've seen many on this site and elsewhere cite books that we clearly don't have easy access to, and while I'm not particularly fond of that, I also don't feel that it's my prerogative as a voter to penalize them for selecting such a source. Pro may have access to these papers that we do not, and while his opponent would have been perfectly justified in demanding that Pro provide quotes from the paper to support his claims about what they say, the absence of such an effort makes it difficult for me to hold it against Pro.
All this being said, I can understand where you're coming from, and I'm not saying that your vote should be removed or altered, just that I personally disagree with the bases for how you're awarding source points.
I mean, he certainly gives a lot of feedback on sources. It's unusual for someone to give sources to one side on the basis of accessibility, and the mods may see that as problematic, though I'm not certain myself. As for having contradictory claims, I guess if they're demonstrated within the debate, I could see that as a valid reason to have problems with them. I do generally have a problem with voters pointing out problems with sources that aren't presented in the debate.
I'm still reading through the final round (been busy this week...), but I'll give some feedback for both of you on this one. It definitely took a different turn from Undefeatable's previous debate on this topic. Not sure how I feel about it just yet.
Hey, I'll go ahead and accept this a little later today. Only change I'd like is to reduce the character count down to 20,000. Not that I suspect either of us would go up to 30,000, even with that option, but I'd rather it was just off the table.
Well, one way is to challenge him on the basic premise of his arguments. I don't think they're so airtight that you can't hit at them.
On the other hand, I think you could have gone with the points you gave if you spent time linking them to the words in the resolution. Why is it logical to oppose flat earth theories? Because it reinforces existing science, bringing evidence of the structure of the world to a wider audience and ensuring that people understand what supports it. The logic is in creating an opposing force by understanding the arguments that flat earthers believe supports their case and providing a systematic set of experiments that show that they are wrong. Opposition pushes us to examine why something is wrong. There's not just value to that - there's logic and practicality.
Having the same value, though, doesn't really change anything about whether they're logical or practical to oppose. That's part of the problem here: you had a goal in mind, and while that goal could have been related to the resolution, you had to do the work to get it there. I will also say that I didn't really buy the waste of time point, but that's not the only argument that fauxlaw gave, nor is it the most important of his points, yet that's the only one you kind of challenged (though I will point out that the argument he made there wasn't totally based on utility in general, but rather utility towards the non-existent entity being debated, a point you didn't fully address).
I appreciate your thoughts on my choices! Personally, I think your strongest pick was your third choice in R3. Light Raider always produces strong AMVs, but this is among the best I’ve seen, period. I’m also a fan of all of your R2 choices, particularly your first pick. I like both of the first choices for R1 and R4 as well, and the third pick in R1 was strong as well.
Somehow I missed both of these most recent comments.
Yeah, I’ll wait to post waiving this round. Just let me know when you’d like me to do so.
And yeah, I usually only push framework when it’s clear that solely pushing impacts on a Net Benefits framework would be tough. In this case, I feel it’s valid to pursue the relatively normal angle. There’ll be a lot on criminal activity to come, for sure, and I’ve already got thoughts on that that I can share with you if you’re interested. I think the main thing that you’ll have to do is really focus hard on how this affects the preconceptions that make it so difficult for police and certain minorities to establish mutual trust.
Having seen a bit more of this playing out in a different debate, I can understand how it's being used to split up a single round between three speakers, though I still might extend speaking times to 2 minutes or more. 6-8 minute rounds aren't particularly odd for single speakers, and I think it would give your students more time to flesh out their ideas.
That's an intriguing structure for a debate. I'm sure you have your own standards for doing this, and you are almost certainly running the class, so I don't mean to impose any of my ideas on you, though I have some experience coaching debate myself and have run similar rounds before with my own students.
Might I suggest increasing the amount of time available to the debaters? Approx. 1 minute is already rather short for providing arguments, and 30 seconds might only be enough time to get out a single paragraph at most. I think giving times like this encourage debaters to rush through their arguments and abstain from fleshing out important points.
Shouldn’t be a problem.
I'll get to this this weekend.
Not really the type of topic that at least one of you wants me voting on. I've got a pretty hard bias on this one.
I'll try to get to it.
Honestly, you'd be the one at a disadvantage if I did vote because your points would be the ones I'd scrutinize the most. It's harder for me with solid biological science topics like this where I come in knowing a great deal about the topic (though my PhD is in microbiology and not evolutionary biology... actually, very little evolution involved in my research), but I'll consider it.
Ugh... this one's going to be difficult for me to vote on without personal bias getting in the way. I might be able to manage it, but I can make no promises that I can fully step away from what I already know. Might want to look elsewhere.
I'll try to get to this this weekend.
Be interested to see what you come up with.
To a large extent, I agree, though this also involves how people respond to perceptions of certain arguments being taboo.
I would agree with you on the relationship with the law, though especially in my rebuttals, be prepared to address a lot of correlation v. causation issues. Some of my rebuttals to these points may become obvious from my arguments, though there are a few that I haven't written out yet. I think you're right to focus your attention there.
I can also see why you'd expect that kind of argument from me. There will definitely be a contention along those lines, though the link story will be a little different, since I'm anticipating the "but that's just racism" response.
Hey, figured we could start discussion of this debate before I post my round (it's practically done, but I've got 3 more days and we should do something with it).
I'll give you my view of your argument in a bit, but first, I'd like to get your impressions.
What do you think are your arguments' strongest points?
What do you think I'm going to go after in my rebuttals (that'll be next round)?
Not trying to cast aspersions, but it's generally a bad idea to treat any argument you have as irrefutable. If you don't know the holes in your arguments, someone out there is likely to find them for you.
All this being said, while this seems like an intriguing topic, I think I'd have a hard time playing devil's advocate here given my family's history with the Holocaust. Probably one of the few debates I shouldn't vote on.
Undefeatable's summary of my vote is pretty much on target. I agree with him on this resolution, but I tried my best to divorce myself of my personal opinion.
What I read from your impacts were the various explanations for why racism has impacts and broad-scale racism, in particular, is damaging. The impacts I'm seeing aren't tied to the existence of systemic racism, they're tied to the existence of racism that affects many people, which is what Con preyed upon. I think examining why we need to define it as systemic racism in order to address it (e.g. we can't just punish bad actors and hope to fix the problem) would have done a lot to further your point. You have a lot of the link story to get there, but you spend most of your time focused on those links rather than examining why it matters to uphold your particular view of systemic racism and why the semantic argument is actually damaging to the wellbeing of so many in society. Essentially, while you certainly talked about why it was frustrating to face a semantic argument, I think you could have done more to explain what it does to perceptions of racism as a result, and how it hinders our capacity to both recognize and address causes of persistent racist tendencies in society.
RFD, Pt. 1
This debate is really frustrating because it's not really about whether this is a significant problem. It's the aim of so much of Pro's arguments, which focus on impacts, to establish its significance, yet much of that argumentation is either outright conceded or ignored because it's not pertinent to Con's argument. In fact, the only words that are pertinent are "systemic racism," and I get two very different views of what is required to meet the standard for systemic. I'm going to go ahead and quote the definition in the description:
"Systemic racism includes the complex array of antiblack practices, the unjustly gained political-economic power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power. Systemic here means that the core racist realities are manifested in each of society’s major parts [...] each major part of U.S. society—the economy, politics, education, religion, the family—reflects the fundamental reality of systemic racism."
RFD, Pt. 2
What's missing from this definition, and where Con puts the vast majority of his energies, is a clear comparison between what is systemic and what is individual racism. Part of the problem here is that there is a complex array of policies, and that it's not simple to disentangle what is the result of choices on a local level and what is systemic. When do we cross that line? Does a single city doing this become systemic? A single district? A handful? A state? I can understand that we must eventually reach that point of being systemic, but I don't know what it takes to reach it. Moreover, I'm kind of unclear about what makes a policy racist, which shouldn't really be this unclear by the end. If it causes harm to a given group of people without directly stating them in the policy, is it racist? Moreover, if a government decides to ignore the effects of a policy that was not intended to be racist, but clearly has an undue and excessive effect on certain races, is that society engaging in systemic racism?
RFD, Pt. 3
I feel like both sides try to engage with these questions, but I never get a clear answer as to why systemic racism must represent a given view. From Pro, I keep wondering what the cost is of failing to recognize these issues as systemic. I could buy a lot of Con's arguments about semantics and still find a plausible reason to support you if you explained what makes systemic racism so much more insidious or more important to address. Instead of trying to work against Con's game, play it: he keeps telling you that all the obvious examples are in the past, so explain why and how things have changed and why it matters. If you can't separate the concept of systemic from individual by definition alone, then you need to give me a reason that engages with why your experts see systemic and individual racism as a necessary distinction. Con keeps wielding that against you, but you could have used it to your advantage if you had forced him to engage with an argument that isn't semantic.
As for Con, I feel like you could be doing more to address this issue of a lack of action as a form of racism. That's a point Pro makes quite a bit, and while it is harder to define in that same light (as it's more the actions of individuals with the government effectively just allowing it to occur), I don't see you doing much to counter this point except to say that these policies don't specifically target race, which I think treads a thin line. It could easily have been argued that that is the new vogue for systemic racism since the days of Jim Crow: providing implicit consent to further a policy that chiefly doesn't solely target a race or set of races, but does clearly cause outsized harms to people in those groups. Simply being more complex and undirected doesn't automatically means it fails to meet the standard of being racist, yet I see much of your argument as very much to the letter. I can see ways in which that perspective could be problematic, some of which I mentioned in my feedback to Pro, to which I think your argument is vulnerable.
RFD, Pt. 4
All this being said, while I'm not particularly fond of semantic arguments, in a debate where the entire focus is semantics (it would have been on the word "significant" in most instances), the words play a pivotal role. As I see it, Con did a lot more work here, examining the discrepancies between the positions of Pro's experts and their own definitions of both individual and systemic racism. I may not be fond of it, but he does an incredibly thorough job of it. However, it's not so much the subject of the debate that has me making this decision, but rather the framing of the debate around experts. Pro makes a big point of stating up front how essential experts are to this debate, but is largely losing the debate on his experts and how they demarcate between individual and systemic racism. That reliance works against Pro, since any case he could have made for why it's important to establish that distinction and to recognize examples that fall into the systemic category are lost in the effort to just show that racism happens on a large scale. That ends up being reason enough for Con to carry the day.
Considering what I'm being told about what was agreed by Pro and not adhered to in the debate, I do also award conduct to Con, as Pro apparently agreed to waive the final round and still posted.
I give it 50-50 odds that I get through it. Read through over half of it yesterday.
Appreciate the vote! Just FYI, the Dorohedoro characters often look like that (though she is rather masculine), and the main character is actually the guy with the mask who is walking through the scene as multiples of himself before his head turns into gyoza. It's an odd one, for sure.
Thanks for voting! Appreciate your taking the time to go through these.
I'll try to get through it, no promises for this one, though.
Cute.
Well, maybe it's just my experience with live debates at similar speeds, but I don't find either of them to be exceptionally fast.
That being said, for a general audience, I'd agree with you that it would be better to slow down. Two reasons why I would still encourage sticking with these times:
First, I think it's an important skill to develop to fit your speech to a specific length of time. You can argue that that would be true of any length, but if you can extend and contract that length of time as suits your argument, I'd say that takes away from the value of it. Being more concise and, yes, speeding up where necessary can help to accomplish that, and I don't see either of them as necessarily problematic, though they can both be taken to problematic extremes.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, this debate isn't just meant to be something voted on by lay voters on the site. It's also meant to be practice. We're doing these kinds of debate because we either are doing or would like to be doing live debates. This is a common format for live debates, including the specific times. It might be best to advocate for changes to how these times are structured, but they've been this way for a long time, and I suspect jockeying for changes would be a long and grueling process that likely wouldn't end in success. So, we prepare for the style of debate, and yes, sometimes that means using common tactics like speeding up. Again, there are limits, but that's neither an uncommon nor a frowned upon tactic in LD.
Hey, still hoping to get a vote or two on this if you get a chance.
No problem. Got to keep this one short for once.
Being outdated isn't really the problem, nor is the evidence, per say. I tend to start every debate with a little bit of burdens analysis to frame the discussion, and I think that could go a long way in your case. Even better here would have been to include just a little bit of what the actual policy would be, e.g. "Google will make a public acknowledgement that its privacy policies have been bad, and will take x, y and z steps to address them." Apart from that, it's difficult to establish precisely why privacy matters without getting too slippery, but you could always talk about why it's good for their bottom line and how it is likely to shape the industry. The notion that personalized ad experiences have generally been good, a point that RM made, is contrary to what most people in the US probably think about it. Beyond that, you could just talk about how it reshapes the industry to address differences in perspective on privacy worldwide. You mentioned the EU, but it never really factored as an impact. Why does it matter that the EU has a different perspective on their practices, and how would they perceive a proactive effort on the part of Google to change how it acts to better suit that market? Not everything has to be sourced, but you can give persuasive reasons why these changes would have meaningful impacts for the company as well as just enhancing trust in a system that many of us rely on daily.
I'll try to get something going. It's been a hectic week, but if I do get one up, it'll be closer to the deadline. Please remind me.
I'll definitely keep the opening short, so no need to worry about a huge start. Plan is under 10k.
I'm not saying that his vote seems legit. I'm saying that his vote is legit. If I had decided to let Con's framing of the resolution stand because Pro never meaningfully addressed it (something I absolutely considered) and chose to award conduct to Pro for Con's new arguments in the final round (I actually wrote that I was very close to doing this), then I would have posted the exact same point allocation. If MisterChris does the same thing because costs matter more to him than vague educational boosts, then that's his decision. You didn't make the same one. Neither did I. Doesn't make his any less valid.
What you seem most upset by is the fact that he's selective in choosing which points to award and that he split the points. I honestly think that happens too little. If the goal was to heap points on one side, as so many debaters do, then he would have done that. I don't know why you think he'd get something out of tying this debate (which appears as though it won't happen anyway, based on Bringerofrain), but your attempts to push a narrative of why MisterChris would do this are just absurd.
Nice ideal, but I somewhat doubt that you can behave like a super computer, and even if you could, a super computer itself would come with biases. A person would have to program said super computer to favor certain points, otherwise the computer would simply state what was said happened and not award points.
I mean... fine, I guess? Like I said, it's not really possible to set aside all your personal views, largely because there will always be points you prefer and points you don't, no matter how much personal knowledge you throw out. In the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts, anyone who tells you different is selling something.
There are very different understandings of what tabula rasa is depending on the style of debate. Ideally, we would all be able to set aside every bias and piece of information we have, but in practice, that’s impossible. In general, I’m not fond of pushing such an ideal among voters, nor am I supportive of everyone bringing everything they know to bear on a debate. Not sure where the line should be drawn, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people should throw out any knowledge they have to determine the outcome.
I am very reticent to award source points in instances like these. Always feels like double-dipping to me - I’m already treating his new arguments from that round as entirely forfeit. It’s my standard, regardless of the context of other votes on the debate.
Made some changes to it, though I might still be missing some.
I’ll fix it up when I get a chance. Currently out and about.
Yeah, apparently I did mix it up in several places. This is what happens when I’m trying to type up my thoughts with a puppy in the room wanting my attention. Hope it makes some sense.
Finished the debate, giving it some thought. Goal is to get up an RFD by the end of the day.
I can understand sources being an important factor in this debate, so I don't fault you there.
However, I will say (and this is just my opinion) that I often find it difficult to use something not discussed in the debate as a means to determine the outcome. Part of the problem is that in the absence of any discussion over the contents of those sources, Pro/Con doesn't have an opportunity to address any conflicting evidence therein. I appreciate holding them accountable for missing critical parts of their evidence, but I don't think that's part of the duty of a judge, partially because they don't get the chance to address a point you make. I can completely understand saying that it didn't convince you for that reason, but also penalizing them in source points seems excessive to me when they have no opportunity to address those issues.
As for the point about only having access to the abstract, I find that very understandable as well, though again, the issue there seems to be penalizing for a choice of sources. I've seen many on this site and elsewhere cite books that we clearly don't have easy access to, and while I'm not particularly fond of that, I also don't feel that it's my prerogative as a voter to penalize them for selecting such a source. Pro may have access to these papers that we do not, and while his opponent would have been perfectly justified in demanding that Pro provide quotes from the paper to support his claims about what they say, the absence of such an effort makes it difficult for me to hold it against Pro.
All this being said, I can understand where you're coming from, and I'm not saying that your vote should be removed or altered, just that I personally disagree with the bases for how you're awarding source points.
I mean, he certainly gives a lot of feedback on sources. It's unusual for someone to give sources to one side on the basis of accessibility, and the mods may see that as problematic, though I'm not certain myself. As for having contradictory claims, I guess if they're demonstrated within the debate, I could see that as a valid reason to have problems with them. I do generally have a problem with voters pointing out problems with sources that aren't presented in the debate.
I'm still reading through the final round (been busy this week...), but I'll give some feedback for both of you on this one. It definitely took a different turn from Undefeatable's previous debate on this topic. Not sure how I feel about it just yet.
Nevermind. I'll be keeping my rounds well under 20k, trying to use this as an opportunity to improve my word economy.
Hey, I'll go ahead and accept this a little later today. Only change I'd like is to reduce the character count down to 20,000. Not that I suspect either of us would go up to 30,000, even with that option, but I'd rather it was just off the table.
Should be able to do it.
Well, one way is to challenge him on the basic premise of his arguments. I don't think they're so airtight that you can't hit at them.
On the other hand, I think you could have gone with the points you gave if you spent time linking them to the words in the resolution. Why is it logical to oppose flat earth theories? Because it reinforces existing science, bringing evidence of the structure of the world to a wider audience and ensuring that people understand what supports it. The logic is in creating an opposing force by understanding the arguments that flat earthers believe supports their case and providing a systematic set of experiments that show that they are wrong. Opposition pushes us to examine why something is wrong. There's not just value to that - there's logic and practicality.
Having the same value, though, doesn't really change anything about whether they're logical or practical to oppose. That's part of the problem here: you had a goal in mind, and while that goal could have been related to the resolution, you had to do the work to get it there. I will also say that I didn't really buy the waste of time point, but that's not the only argument that fauxlaw gave, nor is it the most important of his points, yet that's the only one you kind of challenged (though I will point out that the argument he made there wasn't totally based on utility in general, but rather utility towards the non-existent entity being debated, a point you didn't fully address).