The New York Sophist

I am slowly figuring out how to get a pretty good sound quality out of these recordings. This one might be the best one yet. This debate was also pretty good, here are some thoughts about it in general. 

At the start of the debate I spoke for a little bit about the idea of how to approach coming up with things to say. The Ancients called this inventio or “invention” – the creative act of coming up with arguments. It’s a great place to start in debate instruction as it reminds us that for thousands of years people thought of debating and arguing as a creative act, as opposed to a truth-seeking act, an act of transmission of fact, an act that distinguishes lies from reality, or any other such metaphor we have given to it in the Enlightenment hangover. 

This debate started strong with a dynamic speaker who chose to deliver his remarks extemporaneously. He spent a few key moments on framing, a very important move to make in any debate, where you establish the limits of the debate. Framing is often phrased toward the audience as their charge or their role – what is it that they are meant to decide? 

The short speech times mean that debaters cannot spend a lot of time on things other than developing their major arguments. This is not a disadvantage to the form at all; in fact, debates are always extremely time-constrained. Speakers must learn surgical precision in any persuasive situation as time is considered to be of ultimate value. 

The debate focused a lot around the economics and pay off of a college degree. I wondered about this approach – of course, it’s the easiest way to make sense to the audience, but there are a number of other approaches that the debaters could have taken on the question of the opposite “how can you not afford it?” – as well as university as the driving force for research, innovation, and things like that. Centering the debate here would also be pretty interesting as there’s a lot to consider. 

The first two speakers spoke about economics more than the second two, but I would suggest that perhaps the second speakers should dismiss the economic concerns (“That has been covered, let’s dive deeper”) and engage a lot more with their arguments about the nature of learning, the type of learning that is valuable, and the price we pay when we misconstrue a sticker price for a personal value. Both speakers had a lot of great things to say, and a very attractive and personal style. 

What I really liked about this debate was the extensive use of narrative, or storytelling, to frame and advance arguments. This is very difficult to do. It requires a lot of confidence, but more importantly, familiarity with your information to a point where you can weave it into a story. 

There’s a big difference between telling an audience “34% of graduates never use their degree skills” and “What happens when you attend a university? First, you pay a massive amount of money, then you interact only with people who are not innovators or they just don’t know much, you delay your working life, and at the end of it you decide to do something else with your life.” This is much tougher than it appears, and I’m sort of inspired after the debate last night to write up some lessons that might help students reach this level of speaking. People at the start of a persuasive speaking practice seem to want to make lists and read off data as if the audience was a machine meant to process it. I call this “jukebox” or “vending machine” audience theory after Ralph Ellison’s brilliant essay on how to interact with American audiences. No chance of that in last night’s debate. Everyone was quite good at framing and narrating their arguments.

It was also a pretty relaxed performance as well, which communicated to the audience that the stakes were important, but there was no fever-pitch, “all or nothing” rhetoric from either side. Firm positions were established, and questioned. And that’s a pretty good debate. Of course, like any debate, the clash – those points of disagreement that the audience needs as a guide for a decision – were not as well formed as the debaters could have done – but in the end it didn’t matter much. Audience questions were good – the one audience member asking about the stakeholder of the American society comes to mind. I think the audience was eager to hear more than arguments about cost and return in one’s career. 

If the debate were approached with the assumption that career is a 20th century conception and that most people learn job skills while working with and among other professionals, what is university then? The debate could take the turn of imagining another university, one that puts its obligation toward thought and social interaction with those you wouldn’t choose to socialize with first and provides you some job help but doesn’t make it the centerpiece of your time there. 

The debate was quite good – have a listen. Every speaker did well in making the point they were trying to advance. Great distinction in style as well – things like word choice and sentence construction were effective and engaging. 

Clash is a difficult thing to master in debate. I think it has to be the hardest thing and the thing that makes debating unique when compared with other modes of communicative decision-making such as discussion, argument, or persuasive monologue. The importance of clash is the importance of a GPS in a strange city: Where do you want to go? Turn here, exit here. You’ve arrived at your destination. But perhaps it’s more than this – perhaps it’s like a concierge service along with a GPS: Ready for dinner? You simply must eat here. It’s the best in town. Now, turn here, exit here. Bon Appetit! 

There’s not a lot written on clash – which is strange to think about given its importance in helping audiences decide. But the history of debate education in the US really hasn’t been about helping audiences decide. It has been more about how to configure the audience into a perfect sounding board for the good arguments we make elsewhere. Interactivity as a source of good argumentation between speaker and audience has never been a focus. Look to the guidelines for the World Championship for a stunning example of how removed it is. Perhaps this growing debate education movement in New York could be about re-discovering audience via Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others, and making more than a picture frame from the crowd. How about a co-conspirator? That’s my goal. This requires trusting your audience, which everything in our society tells us is a bad idea. We have to distinguish doxa from episteme. Not to say one is better, but to say one is different. How we do that remains to be seen.

I am slowly figuring out how to get a pretty good sound quality out of these recordings. This one might be the best one yet. This debate was also pretty good, here are some thoughts about it in general. 

At the start of the debate I spoke for a little bit about the idea of how to approach coming up with things to say. The Ancients called this inventio or “invention” – the creative act of coming up with arguments. It’s a great place to start in debate instruction as it reminds us that for thousands of years people thought of debating and arguing as a creative act, as opposed to a truth-seeking act, an act of transmission of fact, an act that distinguishes lies from reality, or any other such metaphor we have given to it in the Enlightenment hangover. 

This debate started strong with a dynamic speaker who chose to deliver his remarks extemporaneously. He spent a few key moments on framing, a very important move to make in any debate, where you establish the limits of the debate. Framing is often phrased toward the audience as their charge or their role – what is it that they are meant to decide? 

The short speech times mean that debaters cannot spend a lot of time on things other than developing their major arguments. This is not a disadvantage to the form at all; in fact, debates are always extremely time-constrained. Speakers must learn surgical precision in any persuasive situation as time is considered to be of ultimate value. 

The debate focused a lot around the economics and pay off of a college degree. I wondered about this approach – of course, it’s the easiest way to make sense to the audience, but there are a number of other approaches that the debaters could have taken on the question of the opposite “how can you not afford it?” – as well as university as the driving force for research, innovation, and things like that. Centering the debate here would also be pretty interesting as there’s a lot to consider. 

The first two speakers spoke about economics more than the second two, but I would suggest that perhaps the second speakers should dismiss the economic concerns (“That has been covered, let’s dive deeper”) and engage a lot more with their arguments about the nature of learning, the type of learning that is valuable, and the price we pay when we misconstrue a sticker price for a personal value. Both speakers had a lot of great things to say, and a very attractive and personal style. 

What I really liked about this debate was the extensive use of narrative, or storytelling, to frame and advance arguments. This is very difficult to do. It requires a lot of confidence, but more importantly, familiarity with your information to a point where you can weave it into a story. 

There’s a big difference between telling an audience “34% of graduates never use their degree skills” and “What happens when you attend a university? First, you pay a massive amount of money, then you interact only with people who are not innovators or they just don’t know much, you delay your working life, and at the end of it you decide to do something else with your life.” This is much tougher than it appears, and I’m sort of inspired after the debate last night to write up some lessons that might help students reach this level of speaking. People at the start of a persuasive speaking practice seem to want to make lists and read off data as if the audience was a machine meant to process it. I call this “jukebox” or “vending machine” audience theory after Ralph Ellison’s brilliant essay on how to interact with American audiences. No chance of that in last night’s debate. Everyone was quite good at framing and narrating their arguments.

It was also a pretty relaxed performance as well, which communicated to the audience that the stakes were important, but there was no fever-pitch, “all or nothing” rhetoric from either side. Firm positions were established, and questioned. And that’s a pretty good debate. Of course, like any debate, the clash – those points of disagreement that the audience needs as a guide for a decision – were not as well formed as the debaters could have done – but in the end it didn’t matter much. Audience questions were good – the one audience member asking about the stakeholder of the American society comes to mind. I think the audience was eager to hear more than arguments about cost and return in one’s career. 

If the debate were approached with the assumption that career is a 20th century conception and that most people learn job skills while working with and among other professionals, what is university then? The debate could take the turn of imagining another university, one that puts its obligation toward thought and social interaction with those you wouldn’t choose to socialize with first and provides you some job help but doesn’t make it the centerpiece of your time there. 

The debate was quite good – have a listen. Every speaker did well in making the point they were trying to advance. Great distinction in style as well – things like word choice and sentence construction were effective and engaging. 

Clash is a difficult thing to master in debate. I think it has to be the hardest thing and the thing that makes debating unique when compared with other modes of communicative decision-making such as discussion, argument, or persuasive monologue. The importance of clash is the importance of a GPS in a strange city: Where do you want to go? Turn here, exit here. You’ve arrived at your destination. But perhaps it’s more than this – perhaps it’s like a concierge service along with a GPS: Ready for dinner? You simply must eat here. It’s the best in town. Now, turn here, exit here. Bon Appetit! 

There’s not a lot written on clash – which is strange to think about given its importance in helping audiences decide. But the history of debate education in the US really hasn’t been about helping audiences decide. It has been more about how to configure the audience into a perfect sounding board for the good arguments we make elsewhere. Interactivity as a source of good argumentation between speaker and audience has never been a focus. Look to the guidelines for the World Championship for a stunning example of how removed it is. Perhaps this growing debate education movement in New York could be about re-discovering audience via Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others, and making more than a picture frame from the crowd. How about a co-conspirator? That’s my goal. This requires trusting your audience, which everything in our society tells us is a bad idea. We have to distinguish doxa from episteme. Not to say one is better, but to say one is different. How we do that remains to be seen.

In lieu of a long, wordy narrative, here’s my Thursday – which was super busy- through my Snapchat Spectacles.

I have a long notebook page full of good posts so don’t worry, this isn’t turning into some sort of vlog depository. There will still be a ton of writing here. 

It was just one of those days where I went full speed through the whole thing, accomplished everything I needed to do, and somehow have too much energy from the long day to really crash out in bed right away. That’s why there’s this post. 

See you in the (later) morning!

St. John’s University Debaters and the 2017 British Tour Debaters pose after the first debate of the 2017 tour.

For all of my criticism of BP the event we had on Monday night in Manhattan had me double checking the old inventory of what BP has that gives it advantage in reaching public audiences. 

First, BP encourages speakers to return to their own arguments above responding to the arguments of their opponents. This seems like a more “natural” way to argue, or at least more mimetic to Natural Language Argumentation than other formats of debate.

The involvement of so many speakers is also an advantage as you get a more nuanced and more spectrum-like approach to a topic as speakers want to differentiate themselves from every other speaker in some way. You can’t do that by simple response and you can’t do that by backing someone’s arguments up with more support. You have to offer a perspective that is different – which seems to be more mimetic of the way debates proceed in everyday life.

A silly, sportified element of debating is of course overcommitted certainty, but in BP this performance of certainty allows for a comfortable dance with uncertainty (our ally in debate education) for the audience. It might be that most audiences find it a bit easier to patch a position together between the speeches that suits their point of view. Or it makes them see how easy it is to move around between positions as they hear pretty compelling speeches from a number of presenters. 

This is of course, all very positive and is pretty dismissive of the real threat of sportification on the abilities of debate to improve people – in the post-debate discussion the tactic of “making up African ruler names” was mentioned – something only a very cynical and unreflexive debater would do (list the thousand or so you know here). I’m pretty sure I know what slimeball fake debate teacher was being discussed and was just very happy that my chances of interacting with that person are now next to nothing. But on a larger note, the threat cannot be underplayed. Competitive, tournament-victory oriented debate programs are a very real threat to the power of well-thought out debate programs in the service of students. Our colleges and universities are so job-centric these days that debate might be the only intellectual practice that students get. We can’t let it be absorbed by the neoliberal consequentialism of “job skills” nor by the frivolous fun trickery of an athletic team model.

We cannot forget that debate is a university activity supported by universities involving university students. Anything that hits below this mark needs to be opposed. 

Here’s a video of the event, see if you think I’m right about the nature of the speeches. I hate giving a format credit for something, but it does seem to beg the question – if we did a NPDA or policy format, would the debate sound the same? Would it appeal to the audience in the same manner? 

I didn’t mean it to happen, but the debate features a wide range of experience levels, and I think it worked out well to show the different levels of debate approach. You can see beginner, intermediate, and advanced modes of debate engagement all here in the same video. It is accidentally a pretty good teach-the-teacher piece. 

Last weekend in Montana I opened myself up to all questions from the debaters. One asked, “How do you keep everything in your head so that you can recall it to be able to use it in debates?” This question struck me as being at the heart of debate and rhetorical education – the question of preparation and knowledge.

I tested one of my oldest debate metaphors as a response: “Being a good debater is more Bene Gesserit than Mentat. You don’t have to be a human computer rife with information, you have to be aware and listen and adapt to the context you find yourself in.”

“Did you just make a Dune reference?”

Yes, yes I did. I should do it more often. There are few books right now that speak as well to our world. Herbert was an autodidact’s autodidact. He absorbed everything and tried to include it in his story. He even tried to invent a new science, planetology, which he included in his story. He was someone who was trying to find a nexus point between different types of knowing in order to craft a believable universe with its own politics, it’s own history, and its own sciences and economy. I think he was pretty successful.

This weekend I was catching up on reading and caught the excellent essay  in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Dune and the historical sources Herbert borrowed from to make his epic book.

Quite possibly the coolest cover.

Typical debate instruction is very much like Frank Herbert’s Mentats. Trained from birth to account, gather data, analyze it and make policy recommendations, the connection to the ideal debating subject is pretty obvious. Mentats can take any amount of data and compare it against itself in order to devise a strategy. They are immersed in data and information, have near instant recall, and hardly ever make a mistake in judgement.

Being a mentat is near impossible. One has to be trained from birth almost to be able to work one’s mind in a way reserved for the most powerful computers. But in Herbert’s world they are more trusted than a sea of advisors, or even the best computers. The human brain, according to Herbert’s vision, is the best computer out there – if only it can be trained from an early age.

Most people assume that when a speaker appears knowledgeable it is because they have knowledge. They know things and that knowledge is part of them. But recognition of knowledge is a performance, it’s something communicated to an audience. Knowledge is performed, it is made recognizable so the audience says, “Oh, that guy knows his stuff.”

This is a lot more like Jessica than any Mentat in the books. The Bene Gesserit “weirding way” relies a lot on context, position, audience, and of course, words. While people fetishize the subject who commands a lot of facts, a lot of data, it is the Bene Gesserit order that has seeded nearly every planet with the origins of a messianic tale that can be activated by anyone who can read the scene and respond appropriately. Compare the actions of Jessica, her husband murdered and her house nearly destroyed, making a path for survival for herself and her son to Piter, the mentat who dies because he cannot foresee that the Duke would kill himself with a poison gas capsule concealed in a false tooth.

Information is one thing, context is something else. We tend to think of context, audience, position and location as a type of information, a type of knowledge, but we really undersell it. The ability to read a scene, to see the story that you are already interpolated within, and to act in a way to capture the key roles of that story and be influential, well, that’s debating. Debating is not a regurgitation of facts and information. It’s the ability to convince an audience what the limits of information look like. You can include and exclude whatever you wish.

Debate should be taught as if it were the Weirding way – no, the weirdest way – the way that calls everything, including facts, into question in order to be able to defend good limits for the state of information, knowledge, and fact when a decision is on the line. Mentats can help provide a lot of information and analysis, and we fetishize that sort of subject, the subject who has “mastered knowledge.” Meanwhile as we pine away for the Mentat, the Bene Gesserit is the one setting up the scene, the arguments, and the approach that will take advantage – like a magical enthymeme – of tales laid down in our minds and hearts years ago. We have to be trained from birth to be a Mentat, but we are all prepared from our first bedtime story to be the unwitting co-conspirator of a Bene Gesserit witch.