Argument Culture (like bacteria?)

There was an interesting piece by Roger Ebert today in the Sun-Times comparing Bill O`Reilly to Charles Coughlin, and using some scholarly research as support. Ebert, I didn’t think, had much of a mind at all since all he usually does is say rather obvious things about rather obviously bad films. But this piece changed my mind about him.

It was reminicent of Deborah Tannen’s book The Argument Culture where she dismisses switch-side argumentation as fairly worthless for real problem solving or for access to truths about issues or problems we face in society. Her research is seriously lacking, as she does not cite any contemporary argumentation work from scholars who research this issue all over the globe.

Ebert, on the other hand, felt that to prove O’Reilly was a propagandist he had to cite some formal research study on propaganda. Not bad, although unfortunately, he falls into the same trap as Tannen, the trap of thinking of argument and debate as something that has a right and wrong way of doing it – that once a fallacy is identified, the use of it will be exposed and the bad results of propaganda will cease.

Arguing is like smoking in this way – people who smoke are not just unaware of the health risks. It’s not like you can go up to a smoker, tell them it’s unhealthy, and expect them to be surprised, thanking you while putting out their cigarette and promising to quit right away. They are fully aware that it is bad, they are doing it because they are addicted, or perhaps they feel like the enjoyment is worth more than the health risk.

And in argument it is the same way – I don’t think identifying a bunch of fallacies or propaganda techniques are going to get much argument improvement. I think instead you will get the smoker’s response – yea, yea, yea, I know, I just don’t care. This is a pleasurable act. And when smoking bans appear, the rights discourse rises along side it. Smoking (like free speech) is a right that cannot be infringed, it is a personal liberty – just like Bill O’Reilly does according to Ebert. However, just telling us that these propaganda techniques are there won’t do much against the pleasure of the act. This is the weak point of argument theory built on rationality. Perhaps we can try an experiment: Argument theory built on romanticism, myth, or aesthetics. Can it be done? I think perhaps there are clues that it has – the vast collections of aphoristic writing of the 18th and 19th centuries, koans from Buddhism, and mixed media art perhaps. Maybe television? Propaganda and fallacies are only bad if you accept rationalism and Reason as the starting point.

If we want to stop the public health problem of bad argumentation we need a better model than simple conciousness raising. “That is a fallacy!” says the argument student. “yea, yea I know,” says the layperson, “I know they are bad for me, but I really just don’t want to quit.”

BSDT 2008 Final Round

Here’s the final from that same tournament I thought I lost. I hope it came through okay. The video is allright except in the middle of it I try to open a window and cause some havoc.  If you were there on that day you probably remember how nasty that room was temperature wise.  Now it’s recorded for posterity.

Slowly Posting the Videos from Cornell

Here’s the first one, quarterfinals from Cornell judged by me, Chris from Cornell and Irene from Cornell.


Quarterfinal BP round @ Cornell Invitational Debate 2009 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

Interesting round, might be worth writing something about since there was some serious disagreement about the rankings during the adjudication process.

This is from Vimeo, which seems to be better quality in my opinion than Google Video, and since they are shutting down their uploading program, might as well start using vimeo. Tuna in his blog already uses it quite a bit and I think it looks very nice. I hope to get some fancier video software and actually start uploading in Hi-Def soon. For now though, these videos don’t look so bad at all.

Day after Cornell

Relaxing at home today since the Uni is closed and thinking about doing some work but probably won’t get around to it. Today’s Kelly’s birthday so that’s the focus of the day.
I liked the tournament at Cornell – really well run and I feel like it was the most competitive tournament we’ve had in the east in BP format (so far). I think it’s going to get tougher as we go on. 
The tournament didn’t give me my usual great feelings mostly because I was doing some stuff with the tournament that I haven’t done before like helping to pick the topics, set up judging panels and stuff like that. It just reconfirmed by dislike for the running of a tournament, and how appreciative I am that there are people who like to do that sort of thing. I reconfirmed my belief that I am not one of them.  I’m happy to help out the running of a tournament, but I think where I’m best at that is in the low rooms judging, helping people get a bit better at argumenting. Yes, new word, jot it down.
I spent some of the bus ride home re-connecting wtih my students who I didn’t really have much of a chance to talk to during the weekend, which is, as everyone knows, the best part of a tournament.
Here’s a list format of the things about the Cornell tournament that were great. Marked with positives for your ease-of reading:
+ I came up with some new teaching ideas though after talking to a few friends about BP teaching methods. 
+Saw some freinds from California who came out for the tournament. I hope this means that more Cali BP teams will travel east more frequently. There’s a lot to learn from eachother.
+ Connecting with old friends and catching up as well as sharing some great stories.
+ Watching some really amazing students make arguments that I would never think of in years, much less 20 minutes.
+ Ate 3 blueberry bagels. So rare.  To get anything other than onion or Pumpernickle is super rare for me, so to get three over 2 days is out of this world.
Negatives:
– Having real responsibilities connected to the running of a tournament.
– Feeling disconnected from my students for most of the weekend.
– Having to vote against three of my most favorite teams, sometimes more than once
– Being away on Valentine’s weekend
– My new video camera doesn’t have the stamina of my older video camera.
I think the positives outweigh, kind of. They are of a different quality.
I’ll post what videos of the tournament I have later on.  Some of them crapped out I think. It’s too bad.

Cork Worlds Reflections 1 – Consensus Judging

The judges assemble as the pairing scrolls by.
So today I just uploaded to facebook all my pictures from Cork. And I caught up on some email and other things. A pretty throw away day, except I picked up lunch for my wife and dropped it off on campus for her, which gave me a chance to go by the library and get a book I need for syllabus crafting, which should start tonight/tomorrow.

My AC adapter for my rechargeable battery station is fried so that sucks. Time for a trip to radio shack.

So here’s my first reflection on Worlds now that I’ve had a day or so to think about it – Consensus judging is really no consensus at all. It’s judge training/indoctrination worked in as a part of the system.

The attitude I got from many judges here and there through the tournament was that chairs are the decision makers, and they are there to gently show the wing judges how the round should be judged. They are the ones empowered to demonstrate to the wing judges how a round should properly be judged.

Now of course, wings can outvote a chair if there are enough of them to overrule the chair’s decision. The slang for this is “rolling” the chair. And discussions I had with people who rolled or were rolled indicated that it is at the least an insult to the chair, and most likely seen as some sort of punishable move. In the end, the wings are supposed to agree with the chair.

I find this pretty fascinating because on the one hand I absolutely love the idea of a built-in judge training system that uses real tournament experience to improve the abilities of the judge. On the other hand, it’s easy for it to fall into politics or into bad indoctrination – as one chair said to me after a debate when I was asking about this sort of stuff, “I’m a chair: I know how these things should be judged, wings don’t.” The danger here is a move to an expertise based judge system – like policy debate – where the judges are blamed for the failure of a team to win because they can’t take a good flow or don’t understand the arguments.

I like BP/WUDC style because the onus is more on the teams as of now to adapt and be “persuasive” – a key word for judges that I spoke to in Cork. The consensus judging system can certainly help keep it this way, as long as some element of diversity is left in the judging system and not squeezed out by persuasive Chairs who could possibly end up pushing a univocal, technical view of debate judging worldwide. The cultural/regional differences in how debate is viewed are incredibly important for the pedagogy of debate, throughout the entire history of rhetoric.

I like the educational potential of consensus judging, but not the indoctrination/persuader model of the Chair. Instead, I like the model of the Chair as “Socrates” – questioning each and every decision from the wings to make sure they have fairly accounted for each and every argument in the debate, and really have given each team their due in the course of the debate. When I serve as Chair here and there, I notice that a lot of the top half of the debate is oversimplified often times (even by me because, hey, that was a long time ago once you are finishing up the Opp Whip speech). I usually use the discussion period to make sure that we are fairly representing the arguments of the first tables. Under a Socratic paradigm, the chair makes sure that the wings are listening carefully, and learning how to evaluate arguments in the round with as little personal bias as possible.

So I wonder – what is the role of the chair in a consensus system? Is it to convince the other judges that he or she is right? Is it to hear the views of the wings and construct a decision that satisfies all adjudicators? Or is it to serve as a Socratic gadfly to the wing judges, questioning and probing their assumptions about the debate, making sure that the decision is defensible from all skeptical sides?