The Dangers of Dogmatic Thinking

Before my senior year of high school I attended camp at UKY where by instructor was Michael Gotlieb, two time top speaker and NDT champion. I was pretty excited to learn from one of the best ever.

Then I got to the camp and I started thinking something odd... this Gotlieb fellow was kind of an idiot. He showed us a tape of one of his NDT final rounds (where he defeated a team from Emory who twice made it to the finals of the NDT, on a unanimous decision) and as I was watching this I noticed some things, I'll just give the most egrigious example for sake of time- they didn't read offense on politics. In the final round of the NDT. These guys were total jokers. College debate would be a cake walk.

This is what I was actually thinking. Some of you may read that and think its funny, but I can see those same thoughts going through countless kids heads when hearing decisions from judges, listening to their coaches, and in particular when they describe a debate where they got "screwed".

So what is going on here? People are thinking dogmatically. I will use two examples to explain what I mean, poker and golf.

Let's start with golf. One of the smartest guys I have ever talked to was a golf "hustler" professionaly. His basic schtick was he would get rich country club types to bet him money ( I am trying to keep this as simple as possible for those of you with no background in golf/betting or hustling so those of you who do have such a background forgive my crude explanation) so that each hole of golf was an individual bet. So you could win 10 holes and come out ahead money no matter how many strokes you lost by on the other 8. When he explained this to me I thought it was pretty simple, lose the 8 holes badly and then cream the other 10, collect cash, rinse repeat. I did not understand the subtely of hussling. In reality, what the hustler does is barely lose the 8 holes, and barely win the 10. Why?

Because this (combined with the style of play of the huslter) convinces his opponent that he just GOT LUCKY. That the opponent is truly the better golfer but that the gods of fate conspired against him to give the hustler the win. This means that you can re-hustle the same person- repeat business as it were- which is they key to making a living at hustling as opposed to just earning some extra scratch.

What is the hustler's style of play? Well I first thought he would handily win the 10 holes he needed to turn a profi by banging out 300 yard drives and birdie every hole. However, this would quickly alert the mark that he was being taken. A golf hustler plays a very differant game- he plays a bad long ball game and a good short game. Rarely will anyone get lucky and hit a 300 yard drive instead of their average 170 yard drive. However, even the worst golfer can get lucky and since a long put, hit a lucky chip shot etc. So by playing a great short game, the hustler tricks his opponent into thinking it is all luck.


Second, poker. When I first started playing poker I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily, I was playing with people who had even less idea than I did, so I would lose money to the better players and win money from the worse players. I had no idea what made certain players better than others , so I started asking. Good players, I was told, play tight- they don't play a lot of hands, they only play thier good hands. Casual observation showed that people who won usually did have a good hand... this rule seemed to work. So I resolved to play tighter than anyone. After a while I realized I was losing more money than before. Why could this be? I asked around and it turned out people had noticed I was playing tight, and so they didn't play hands with me. I was unable to recoup my losses from the blinds when I did have a hand. Well what do I do about that? Mix it up- somtimes play tight, sometimes not. The key was that I had to employ differant strategies at differant times.

Lets take a step back- what does this have to do with debate?

1. The golf hustler- this is how bad debaters view good debaters- they look at it from the mark's perspective. They didn't get out debated, their opponents got lucky0 they can't see what it is the other team is doing that is beating them because they aren't carefully examining the situation in an objective manner. So they complain about rep, luck and how the other team just has better coaches.

2. Poker- rules are made to be broken. Rules need to be learned not so that you can blindly follow them but so that you can learn the underlying premise behind the rule, understand it, and then CHOSE when to implement it. In poker you can memorize a list of starting hands and play "by the book" but you will never rise above the 5-10 limit playing this strategy, you need to adapt, evolve, darwin, i-ching...

When I got to UKY I had a certain set of beliefs in my head that I had learned from camp, but more from observing other teams/my own debates. These were things like
-if you control u on politics you win
-offense/defense is how you should decide everything
-its better to go for a generic CP than a DA and case because affirmatives will be less ready for it

And when faced with advice to the contrary from someone who clearly knew more than I did rather than listen to them and either change what I was doing or at least think critically about WHY I was doing it, I just thought it was stupid and ignored it.

This is a huge problem with the advancement of many debaters careers (my own probably more so than most). In most other activities, participants do what their coaches tell them to do (football, basketball etc. granted there are always exceptions but for the most part). But in debate we encourage critical thinking and student autonomy. I am not saying that is a bad thing and that you should blindly do whatever your coaches say. But the balance is oftentimes out of wack in debate. And I woul dlike to offer my explanation for why.

Why do debaters double breath or use weird annunciation patterns or hop up and down or any of hte other "bad habits" people develop when they speak? Because they learned these things from watching other debaters when they were young and they become habit. When you are in debate for a long time you can see these trends emerge- a particularly successful debater will have a certain style of speech and 3 years later you will see kids who have a massively exagerrated imitation of that debater as their basic speech pattern. Its a bit like the game of telephone that way. So if bad speaking patterns can get handed down that way, why not bad patterns of thought?

When a coach tells a debater something that seems counter intuitive, it is that 1 instance of the coach saying it vs hundreds of debates observed/conversations had with other students to the contrary that go on in the debaters head. It's hard to overcome those odds. But more importantly, when a coach tells you advice that contradicts a long held belief you have, few of us are willing to accept it because to do so would be to admit that we had been acting foolishly, and no one wants to do that.

One of the things I am learning (slowly) as a coach is that my usual blunt and to the point style of talking does not work well when trying to teach someone that there is a better way of doing something than the one they currently use. People do not like hearing that they are wrong.

So, let me now highlight some debate rules that are followed dogmatically often to the teams detriment

1. Impact overviews- debaters have it drilled into their head from day 1 that an impact overview contains timeframe, probability, magnitude (sometimes turns the case) so they spit that out regardless of how silly some of it may be (like arguing the TF to your elections social security reform impact is faster than the case)

2. Offense - teams are obsessed with having offense to the point where most debaters today do not know how to even debate defense- they haven't been taught and they have never even seen it done.

3. Theory- there are debates where 2 counterplans and a critique with an alternative are read and the affirmative doesn't even say conditionality bad. Or where the neg reads an agent or process CP and the affirmative doesn't say pics bad because "judges don't vote on that".

4. Who is the agent of the atlernative- a totally useless question that is now so trendy. It doesn't matter who the agent is, it doesn't solve. Ever. So instead of spending 2 minutes of CX beating this irrelevant horse to death, spend that time coming up with a coherent explanation of why.

5. War turns the case cause after a nuclear war there would be more racism and pollution which turns environmental justice.... Really? Thats gonna be the tie breaker when the judge decides? How many decisions have you ever heard that went " I voted aff, I thought that the neg won the politics disad and the plan causes nuclear war but... I'm just not convinced that nuclear war would cause pollution".

6. "Permute do the plan and all parts of the alternative that aren't mutually exclusive" when the alternative is "vote neg" or "reject the plan". Bravo.

7. Counter interpretation- only our case is topical. This argument started around the time I was in highschool some 10 years ago and I don't know that its won a debate since. Please let it die.

8. Stupid theory counter interpretations like "pre round conditionality" solves your offense. What does that even mean? That when I discuss strategy with my coach I can use conditionality then? Or other gems like "we can only run word pics to words in the plan"... what else would you read them to?


I could go on. Point being- critically interrogate the things you do and when criticized about them, act on that criticism. You may have read some of the things on that list and thought "but you have to say disad turns case... you have to have a counter interpretation.." etc. No, no you don't. One of the great things about debate is you don't HAVE to do anything. And you shouldn't do something just because you are afraid of being percieved as doing nothing.

The Biased judges post ended up sort of incoherent, but the point I was trying to make is that biased judges usually boil things down to their essence pretty fast. If I don't like K's, I can easily tell you what I find unconvincing about your alternative. Your job is to use that information to make it more convincing and change my mind. If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball, and likewise if you can get an anti - k judge to vote on a K its usually because you have risen above the mediocre level of analysis/explanation they are used to and have performed at a higher level.