Purpose of Debate Camp- Part 2

The best debaters are those who have good critical thinking skills. By this I mean, those who are able to hear an argument and start to logically deconstruct it in their heads. To develop this kind of skill is like the tag line on the Othello box- a minute to learn, a life time to master. Unfortunately for all the lazy kids out there, to get into a top 10 percent of critical thinkers in the country is going to take some work. First, however, lets look at how critical thinking skills work in debate to your advantage.

1. Any argument – obviously anything the other team says can be more easily answered with some critical thinking. However, most debaters are more likely to just flip to the aff answer section of a file and pull some cards out than think about constructing a strategy to respond to a particular argument. This is one of the major things that contributes to aff critique losses in my mind. In response to a k the aff pulls the same stock args out and reads them. The neg, who may be very very lazy, has at least taken the step of preparing for this small list of arguments (or their coaches/friends have given them the answers) and they read answers. Then the aff sort of falls apart and loses. The aff needs to go through the process of thinking critically about the negs args in the 2AC, and then again in the 1AR. Under critical scrutiny arguments like no value to life, capitalism is the root cause of your case, and ASPEC make a lot less sense.

2. New arguments- particularly when you debate new arguments you need to think critically to come up with witty analytics and to figure out how the existing evidence you have can be used to generate an answer. The best example of this I can think of is teams who read realism good to answer every K in the world. Realism good is probably not on face an answer to say, Heidegger. However, its not difficult to see how with a little explanation it could certainly answer many parts of the k, or any K for that matter (particularly realist arguments related to the inevitability of certain IR practices or human nature). Many K debaters are very good at critical thinking because they have to be- they use the same generic link evidence but come up with fantastic explanations about how it applies to very different affirmatives.

3. Cross x- the ability to defend your ideas and pick apart those of your opponent will make you devastating in cross-x. You will find you no longer “waste time” asking for evidence or clarifying flow points, you will be shredding disad internal links and making K alternatives seem foolish if you can master logical reasoning and apply it effectively.

So how do you learn this? Research. This is true for a few reasons. When you do a lot of research you will come across a lot of response articles- by this I mean articles someone wrote in response to another article. In these you will see logic and critical thinking put to use to take apart other arguments. This not only helps you in that if you debate that issue someone has already gone to the work of deconstructing it, but also the more you read articles like that the better you yourself will become at breaking things down. There is a bit of a myth in debate culture that the best debaters are the best “arguers” or are smarter than worse debaters. Generally any time I debated an issue I would find (much to my chagrin) that there were already several people far smarter than I who had written on the subject. So instead of coming up with arguments myself, I could rely on them to do a good part of the footwork. Now unfortunately rarely is a response article a complete “debate argument” (i.e. impacted in nuke war). The research process requires you to take the arguments in that article as a basis of your argument, and to then go and research more links/impacts etc.

To close, I want to discuss talent. Most people in debate think of someone as being talented if they are a really good speaker or appear to sound smart. Oftentimes talent is almost viewed as a bad thing, such as “he is very talented but does no work”. In other words, the perception is that talent relates only to the speaking part of debate, and is usually used to talk about people who are thought to do little research but still achieve good results.

In From the Board to the Boardroom: How Life Imitates Chess, Gary Kasparov notices a similar dichotomy in the chess world. Players who don’t do a lot of studying but have huge results are said to be talented, people who work really hard are said to be dedicated. Kasparov says we need to expand our understanding of talent and realize there are different kinds. The person who speaks well but doesn’t do work is talented in that they are a good speaker, but not talented in that they don’t have the self control/willpower to force themselves to put in the hours.

I bring this up to make the following point- some people are naturally better speakers than others, some people are naturally better researchers than others. Both areas can be improved on through hard work. Most people seem only concerned with working on the speaking aspect. This means that if you are a very hard worker through talent or practice you will have a huge asymmetrical edge going into your debate career.

Bringing this all together: critical thinking skills are learned through research and argument construction. If you are not a naturally talented researcher, lab leaders are a great resource for learning to become a better one. If you are not a talented speaker, the work it requires to become one is generally work that you can do on your own. Most people ignore research/critical thinking in order to focus on speaking.