UFMG Open - Delivering and Impacting with Tin Puljić

0:00 i'm just going to make my voice clearer that being said thank you for the invite so the talk i was invited to give in particular wasn't delivering and impacting arguments given this is generally a broad topic i have assembled a collection of various pieces of advice related to different stages of argument building and argument delivery how this is broadly going to look is i'm going to discuss prep time and argument generation and therefore also how to

0:28 impact those arguments while creating them i.e how to come up with good impacts secondly i'm going to discuss what to do in prep time even if you find yourself in a situation where you don't know much about the motion or you might be panicking because there's not much info or not my generation going on thirdly i'm going to talk about how to deliver your arguments in a stronger more argumentatively sound nuanced way and lastly i'm going to talk about

0:50 delivering a more rhetorical sense how to make it more persuasive i'm also going to try to give some advice as to how to practice all of these things i will aim for this to last no longer than hour and a half in terms of questions and we'll leave time for q a at the end but also i will have chat open during this entire time so if you have questions during the lecture you can just type them immediately into the chat

1:15 and i can integrate them into the talk i think this is probably the best way to do it because q and a's at the end happen when people already have you know attention stands lower and stuff like this i think it's probably best if you come up with questions during the lecture just put them in the chat immediately i'm going to try to answer them as soon as i see them that being said we can start with the talk so the first

1:34 thing i want to talk about is prep time i eat the different stages of prep time how to go about it and what are the important questions that need to be answered during prep time so the first step that necessarily needs to happen in prep is characterizing the debate before going into arguments before jumping into okay have this idea or this argument headline the first question is what is this debate about and i think this branches into a couple

1:59 of things first of all just a generic question you can always ask yourself is why do we think the ca teams said this motion what makes them think there's a debate behind this this is very often related to some kind of either general trend in a particular field or trends within let's say the feminist movement or the lgbtq movement or it's related to recent events for example a recent international relations intervention or diplomatic congress or something it just

2:23 prompted them to set the motion so the first question is what is this debate about in real life the second question is how do we imagine a motion to unfold in real life without making arguments how do we imagine the implementation of emotion to look a good example of this are narrative debates so when you have motions like this house opposes the narrative that glorifies parenthood okay first question how does this narrative look right where is it present is it television radio is

2:52 it you know statements made by famous people when these statements are made what do they actually say how does idealization look are they saying parenthood is the best thing in the world are they saying you know parents could create suffering sometimes but it's so good but it's so important it's so nice it's worth it what is the messaging exactly because all of the arguments that you're going to make are going to be based on a particular premise as to how the

3:16 implementation of emotion is going to unfold in the real world and therefore if the premise i.e how you imagine the implementation of the motion to look is incorrect then the argument in and of itself is not going to have an impact because it's based on a wrong premise so the first step of practice to determine how do you think that the implementation of emotion is going to look part of this is also if it's a this house would emotion

3:40 coming up with a model if this house believes that motion then the question is how is the implementation of the motion likely to look what are the incentives of the actors how do you think this is going to unfold so the first question is therefore imagine the battleground so debating can be conceptualized as a social experiment you take a human being or you take a group of human beings you're taking country and you conduct a social

4:03 experiment on them you take a motion and you do the motion to the people and then you imagine how they behave under a world which is changed by the motion and this is the first step of imagination you need to have in order to imagine what is the alternative world in which you're going to make the arguments having done that the second step is to determine clashes and burdens because it's important to know what you have to prove before moving on to

4:29 actually proving it there are a number of ways in which i think you can improve the way in which you determine classes and burden and therefore also the impacts that your arguments are going to deliver so for me the first and most important question and this is also probably the most important question for impacting insofar as it directly relates to whether you're able to come up with persuasive impacts it's the question of what do you imagine can realistically be

4:54 changed by virtue of the motion because the problem is that debaters very often go for super big world-saving impacts like we're going to stop this conflict or we're going to significantly decrease poverty or we're going to significantly improve the status of minority groups in most cases these impacts are not realistic because in any debate there are 99.9999 factors outside of the debate that exist on both sides of the house that affect the same issue emotion is going to target poverty to

5:23 some extent or is going to target the resolution of a conflict to some extent but on both sides of the house there's still a number of external variables which exist anyway and continue to perpetuate the same problem so it's incredibly unlikely that you're going to resolve or meaningfully change in a you know global scale a large amount of huge issues or pressing issues the question is then what do you think the motion can realistically do what is the scope what

5:51 is the range of change of delta of comparative that you think in real life the motion could produce and i think the connection to real life is very important here so for me the rule of thumb is do not say anything that you would not shamelessly and in good faith say to your friend over a pint if what you are saying is something that a body that you're drinking a beer with will tell you this is stupid or this is

6:14 unrealistic or you have a naive perception of the world it's not something you want to say in a debate so the perception you want to have is what you would realistically imagine if discussing this in university or discussing this over a beer what you can realistically imagine with change of emotion were to be implemented is also what what what you want to run in a debate because teams that win debates are not the teams that have the largest impacts

6:38 but the teams that have the most persuasive impacts the larger your impact the larger the burden of proof you need to achieve behind this impact and particularly in good debates especially if your impact is huge and not intuitive good teams are going to very easily shed out in this so you want to focus very clearly on a smaller more realistic scope of impacts but one that you can realistically mechanize and you want to use it to call other teams out

7:03 you can explicitly frame this by saying we know our impacts are smaller in range but they are the only impacts which can realistically be achieved within this debate therefore the only ones that are going to be proven therefore the only ones standing at the end of the round and that's the perceptions you need to go with to give two examples here for example in the motion that this house believes that the feminist movement should advocate for the

7:27 abolition of marriage so things that most propositions and oppositions would run would largely go as follows proposition would say we can have huge societal change because the feminist movement is going to go for this change of narrative it's going to create a large societal awareness of the problems with marriage it's going to get a strong you know political push if not for the abolition of marriage and for the reform of marriage opposition is going to say look this is going to lead

7:53 to huge backlash because people are going to perceive that the feminist movement is attacking marriage marriages attacking traditional catholic institutions and all of these things genuinely i think neither is particularly comparative i don't think that the feminist movement is able through criticizing marriage or saying they want to abolish it get huge amounts of political pressure to reform marital institutions i think the amount of political capital they have is relatively small here i think also in opposition

8:20 backlash is largely uncomparative because the people who dislike the feminist movement and think that they are you know an assault on marriage think so already they do not pay attention to nuance in phrasing because the feminist movement already criticizes marriage they maybe don't say we want to abolish it but he already criticized already say it's a traditional institution it's imbued with religious ideas which are oppressive to women and these people already dislike it like they're not going to sit down and read

8:46 feminist theory and underline the words they're saying like this is not going to happen i think the realistic change within that debate would be to say look there's probably a principle insofar as the motion is phrased normatively i.e the feminist movement should do something we can prove that they have an obligation to oppose this even if they cannot lead to practical change secondly i think there's probably a limited argument to be made in a sense of there's a particular group of young

9:10 progressive people who are currently being socialized by the feminist movement through social media through famous individuals who co-op this and those are individuals we can maybe socialize to have a different viewpoint on marriage but there are limited group within society i think running that case would probably be the strongest case in the round because it's a case that hinges on the realistic premises of what the feminist movement can do or cannot do even if it would be good for it to

9:36 abolish marriage i don't think any government can prove that they can so the team in closing government or opening government for that matter should first ask themselves the question okay what do we think the feminist movement realistically can do what do we think this narrative is going to achieve and then build from there a second example is this house believe this also prefers a world where people believe in determinism as opposed to free will again i listened to a debate on this and

10:02 most of the clashes here were people saying okay but when you have determinism people find it a lot easier to go through life because they do not have to ponder you know the moral implications of their decisions they do not have to consistently think about whether they are guilty or not it makes it easier for people to deal with suffering but then opposition said oh but if you if you don't have free will then there's less morality because

10:23 people don't take responsibility for their actions they're not going to create moral systems i think both of this is not a good argument because realistically even if people believe or do not believe in either of these things most of the time they don't interact with these beliefs like everyone in this zone call has a belief on determinism versus free will but you don't think about it 99 of the time you still go about your lives because you have more

10:47 proximate desires you want to have fun you want to earn money you want to have food on the table you want to have friends and love and all these things humans don't interact with metaphysical beliefs all the time like even if we have a debate on this and it's a very heated good debate after the round we're going to go for a beer we're not going to lie on the floor and look at the ceiling and ponder our lives this means

11:07 that most of the arguments on how it influences day-to-day lives and moral systems are not particularly comparative what is comparative what i would probably run from government is to say situations where people do interact with moral systems and actively ponder morality are situations where people are faced with a large amount of stress so when they're faced with hard decisions when they're faced with crossroads in their lives when they're faced with crisis of faith or emotional crisis that's when

11:32 people defer to metaphysical systems of belief and in these particular situations which are the only ones relevant for the realm we think determinism for example is going to be useful i think that this is just an example of how teams will very often run the obvious case i don't think that the obvious case is necessarily the realistic case which is why the first question in prep needs to be what do we think is the realistic scope of change that is going to happen

11:58 if this motion were to be implemented or if one side of this motion were to be implemented this however in order for it to be a strong impact in the end needs to be followed and accompanied by framing what does this mean if you are trying to frame something as being uncomparative or unrealistic for example the feminist movement is not going to abolish marriage before moving on to your case you need to explicitly explain what isn't comparative and why it isn't

12:27 comparative so this is the first step if you want to out frame something out of the round if you want to claim that something is unrealistic you first have to explain what you think isn't in the debate and only then move on to what you think is in the debate and this is something that you're both going to be doing as closing if you're reframing the round but also as opening like even as open in government you can

12:48 preemptively out frame things from the round and say we don't think that impacts regarding this this and this or impacts of this huge size are within the debate for these particular reasons but you need to give the reasons explicitly so not just define what is comparative but also what isn't comparative and why and you want to take the first mover advantage so even if you're opening government you want to do this framing preemptively because then you

13:12 are forcing a double burden on the opposition because if the opposition wants to run an impact that is that you want that you have out framed as being outside of the round in order for them to be able to run this in the first place they first need to respond to your framing and take down your framing for them to be able to run this at all so taking the first mover advantage and explicitly out framing

13:34 things before framing your own case in forces the other side to do a double job in terms of responses because for them to run their case in the first place they first need to take down your framing and show why your framing is not standing in the round which does double damage and puts a double burning on that the second question that is very important in terms of getting the good impacts once you have framed what the debate is about so you

13:59 have determined what is within the range of the comparative and what isn't within the range of the comparative and you've given reasons for both within the range of the comparative the next question is where is your case the strongest within the boundaries of the debate that you have established the next step is finding the strongest arguments and then having found them you want the debate to primarily revolve around those arguments which means in other words you want to

14:30 find the strongest arguments and you want to come up with preemption to whatever obstacles the other side could set for those strongest arguments to give a couple of examples if the motion is this house would not allow media to report on personal details and information about deceased individuals without explicit consent of the family so the family has to consent for the media to be able to publish information someone who is deceased where is op the strongest

14:59 op is the strongest in claiming the value of this information we do not want to have the families consent to this because we fear that if we lose this information we're going to lose valuable info that the public has a right to know or we're going to lose information that you know social movements can maybe utilize for their own goals so then in order for proposition to win you want to exclude the strongest op argument from the round i think a good preemption

15:25 for this would be to say we think families are probably going to consent in most cases anywhere there's a number of reasons for this the first is like they know that they're not going to be able to escape media attention anyway so they might as well consent the second is especially if it's identity motivated like you know crisis or crime or event they probably want to share the story of their of their loved ones so you know

15:46 that they raise awareness for other people who may be faced with things like you know race crimes or hate crimes but they also probably want to have this feeling that the entire country is joining them in their grief and the entire country is remembering remembering their loved ones they probably also want to take control over how their loved ones are presented in the media they also probably know that if they do not give the media stories

16:07 then the media is going to focus on the perpetrator and it's going to be traumatic there's a bunch of reasons why families consent anyway so most of opposition's arguments happen anyway the comparative is for the very small amount of families who do not consent and why we think they have a principal right to not consent and why this helps them deal with their trauma which i think is both an example of the first thing i talked

16:26 about which is okay what realistically happens do we think that most families are realistically consent probably yes so most of the opposition arguments are probably uncomparative the second is okay where is the proposition case the strongest the proposition case is strongest in claiming that people have a right to not consent we want the debate to revolve around that particular argument because it's our strongest argument so for the debate to revolve around that argument we need to find a way to exclude other parallel

16:55 arguments coming from the opposition and that is how we think about preemptives which arguments do we need to exclude for the debate to revolve around what is our strongest content another example of this is this house regrets the narrative that romantic love is the primary source of fulfillment in life again thinking about what is the strongest government material the strongest government material is probably going to be about people who cannot find love right because people who can't find love and who are in a

17:24 relationship are probably happy regardless of whether this narrative exists or not because they have access this already i mean if anything it's probably com it's probably comparative to the opposite because like people who are in a relationship and this narrative exists and says this is the primary source of fulfillment they may be you know more scared to lose it and enjoy it less but generally people who have love for uncomparative we want therefore the debate to revolve

17:49 around individuals who cannot find romantic love and for whom this narrative is going to make their mental state worse because they're going to feel not just the deprivation of not being able to access romance but they're also going to feel that by not accessing romans they will never actually be happy in order to do this we need to exclude opposition arguments that would frame the debate away from this so we want to explicitly say at the beginning at the

18:13 top of the open government prime minister's speech here is why this debate is mostly or exclusively about individuals who are locked out of romance this means explicitly providing reasons why it's not about the others and this is what i said before providing reasons why something is not comparative and that's what they said because if you are in a relationship you already have love and you've accessed this primary source of fulfillment anyway so the logical preemption is

18:39 to find the opposition arguments that could potentially hurt our frame or divert the frame of the debate away from our arguments and exclude them and this is how you strengthen your impacts because your impact becomes stronger if you can prove that they are the most relevant ones in the debate but others are less comparative than the opposition would have you believe and yours are the most comparative and this is where an impact is most persuasive because if you

19:07 just have parallel impacts that are not weighed against each other it's incredibly hard to weigh which impact is more important than the other but if you do weighing of explaining why other impacts are less comparative and your is more comparative basically create a persuasive impact and this brings me to the summary of the goal and the role of preemption so the role of preemption is not to respond to every fathomable op claim like everything opposition can possibly run

19:34 it's also not to respond to what the opposition is probably going to run it's to respond to what the opposition could run which would be the most unfavorable to your case so the best question for preemption is not what will opposition say the best question for preemption is which potential claims the opposition could make which would be the most dangerous to our case so the question for preemption is which parts of our case we need to protect the most where

20:03 do we think opposition could be strongest and where do we need to shore up our defenses preemptively so it's not predicting what the average opposition probably will say but what the best possible opposition could say that is most harmful to your case and this is where you target your preemption and this is how you utilize preemption to build up your impacts i think a good example of this or a good analogy for this i've heard this being used as an analogy for web

20:30 speeches but i think it's just a good analogy for arguments and cases in general i think you can conceive of cases or in this case you can conceive of your impacts through the analogy of obstacles i.e imagine that your case or your impact is a nice cottage up the hill and there is a road leading to this cottage and you want to get to the cottage the problem is there are obstacles on the road to the cottage

20:54 however some obstacles are relatively irrelevant like if there's a puddle of mud on the road you can just walk around it and this is the analogy to all you know the opposition makes an irrelevant mitigation that doesn't really harm your case however if there is a huge roadblock or there's barricades on the road or there's a paramilitary group you know roaming the road this is probably going to be a lot bigger obstacle to your case so the question is identify which

21:17 obstacles could exist to you reaching the final goal and which of these obstacles are likely to be dangerous because you don't need to focus on any obstacles some of them can just be sidestep some of them however if they remain on the road if you don't remove them are going to stop you from reaching the cottage in other words some things if left standing from the opposition are going to disprove your case so the question when trying to

21:41 protect your impacts or we're trying to preemptively defend your impacts is which things if proven from the other side would disprove our case and this is where you need to focus your preemption that's how you defend your impact so the summary of this the ldrs one define what the debate is about two think about what is realistic in real life to change by virtue of emotion and then explain explicitly in the debate why you think this is realistic

22:11 and importantly also explicitly why other alternative frameworks and impacts are not realistic and thirdly focus preemption such that it allows the debate to revolve around your strongest arguments i.e identify obstacles to your strongest arguments and remove them preemptively or at least have the same perception the same goal when you are doing rebuttal of course this preemption needs to be explicitly flagged in speeches so say presuming that the other side says this or in their strongest

22:41 variant there's best case scenario the other side might say this so this is something that needs to be explicitly flagged within speeches now of course the question is yeah this all seemingly presumes that you have good prep that that you are able to generate content in prep and that you know about the motion and then i think the obvious question is yeah sure but what if we don't know a lot about the motion but we cannot generate arguments

23:06 because we do not have you know specific knowledge i think there's a couple of things that can help you i think the first piece of advice although it sounds very generic is don't panic why because in most cases if there's a very specific emotion you know nothing about like if there's you know micro finance chances are that none of the other teams in the debate know about this player like maybe have the bad luck that one of

23:30 the teams in the round are going to be finance majors not all three of them are going to be finance majors and everyone who is not a finance major is just as lost and just as scared as you are in those situations teams that win the round are things that one are most able to keep their cool and remain focused on what people are saying and coming up with logical rebuttal as opposed to panicking and secondly the things that

23:52 are able to make the most out of their prep time that they're at least able to create generic arguments generic content and to do this to the largest possible extent which means that you cannot afford to lose time on panic you want other teams to lose time on panic while you are actually doing the leg work to generate at least a generic case i'm going to give you advice as to how to generate a generic case this is something that

24:14 psychologically needs to be kept in mind because also during the debate if you are panicking you will not hear what the other side says and even if they make all these mistakes you will not notice them because you're focused on panic and i think and like i think most debates can be debated even if you have no specific knowledge i'll give you an example when we were debating quarter finals of euros in 2018 the motion was that the international

24:37 monetary fund should take sovereign control over fiscal policies of countries that cannot that are unstable or cannot control their debts or cannot pay back their debts rather and the argument coming from opening government is the reason why this is good is because wherever the imf intervenes the imf lowers interest rates lowering interest rates is good for investment you don't need to know what any of these words mean to rebut that argument so i don't need to know what the imf is i

25:08 don't need to know what interest rates are and i don't even know what fiscal policy is the only thing i need to know is this team has suggested that where the imf so in 100 plus diverse scenarios it always does the same thing it seems intuitively done that in countries that differ from one another in terms of economy in terms of geography in terms of demographics just basic things we would always do the same policy because if we do the same thing

25:35 in different scenarios it seems it's bound to fail at least half of them in other words if i tell a joke some of you are going to think it's funny some of you are not some of you may slap me because it's inappropriate because if i tell the same joke to different people they'll react differently i don't need to know the meaning of all of these words i need to know that the base assumption is they have one blanket

25:54 solution for different scenarios and this is a bad idea and i can just focus my rebuttal on saying why we need more diversity in solutions solutions that are better adapted to situation on the ground to particular economic factors and i can say countries on the ground know to do this better than the imf because they have diverse governments and they know situation on the ground this is good rebuttal to that argument without me even having to go into the

26:16 depths of understanding why the imf is our finances and in most debates you're going to be able to find and extrapolate such basic assumptions that other teams make they are high they're hidden behind jargon they're hidden behind examples and they're hidden behind statistics which is why you need to focus and listen to what they're saying in order to detect this if you're spending time panicking that you don't know specifics about the motion you will not notice

26:40 these things and this is what's going to make you lose not your lack of knowledge or not your lack of specifics however what are the specific types of advice we can use to generate content when we don't know a lot about the motion the first thing is you can use word by word analysis which means specific words within the motion have specific implications in terms of the burdens within rounds first of all the verb within the motion

27:07 the verb within the motion grants or bestows different versions of hunting so if this house regrets debate then the team that's regretting needs to propose a counterfactual they cannot just argue about whether x is bad or why x is bad if the motion this house prefers a world they need to compare to the current world in all these things if the emotions this house would they can implement a model if this house believes that they cannot implement a model they

27:31 have to prove the likelihood that emotion is going to be implemented in a particular way so the verb within the motion can implies specific burdens upon themes and you can always focus on these burdens and whether or not things have fulfilled them second thing there are very often quantifiers within motions so the debate is this house believes the state should strongly disincentivize women to have children which has emotional world the word strongly implies you need a

27:59 policy which is going to significantly harm women if they do have children because saying we're going to educate them in school about the risks of motherhood is not a strong disincentive right a strong disincentive would be to say we're going to cut child support we're going to remove tax breaks for for young parents we're going to remove paid parentally and then you can just argue from opposition why removing these particular things is incredibly harmful and unfair from the state by analyzing

28:27 the word within the round and what the words mean for burdens you can extrapolate what you and the other teams need to argue for or argue against you can craft cases from this and this can help you to imagine what the debate is actually going to be about okay so the question is what should we do when the motion seems somewhat ambiguous and you're faced with two possible interpretations that each give a different debate so there's two things that you can do

28:49 the first is you can debate both of the interpretations right you can say this motion can notably mean two things we think we win regardless of what the motion means the other is that you can choose a particular interpretation but you need to explicitly explain why you chose that one and compare to the alternative because other teams are going to try to raise the alternative against you so if you're aware of two interpretations and you've chosen one you need to preemptively give

29:16 reasons why you've chosen this one and not chosen the other one including if you're a prime minister from opening government so those are the two strategic pets you can take and i think which one you're going to take depends on what interpretations are so if one interpretation is more favorable than the other for you you probably want to find the reason why that's the real one if you have enough time to win on both and if you can win on both it's

29:38 probably better to do that because then you've won the debate into independent scenarios it's just a strategic question of what you think is more suitable what do we have time for but these are the two ways in which you can go about it okay next thing if you don't know a lot specifics about the motion you can always focus on what you do know what does this mean there are always general things that you can infer from the motion so if the motion

30:01 is and this was at euros 2016 this house believes that latin american states should significantly support a coup in venezuela and you don't know much about venezuela maybe you know nothing about venezuela but there are a couple of things you can generally infer okay first of all the cia team thought it would be a balanced debate to have a coup in a country this means that a situation within that country probably has to be bad otherwise this would not

30:27 be a balanced debate cool how does the bad situation look okay where is venezuela up it's it's in latin america it has a history of coups before you've learned about this in history class probably you know there's like hugo chavez and there's been a dictator you don't know much but you can infer generic things about dictatorships right so you can say okay it's probably pest corruption it probably you know oppresses people there's probably you know not much

30:53 media freedoms probably bad economic situation no distance okay what el what else do we know they're probably latin american countries need to be powerful enough for this to work otherwise it's not a balanced debate so what are generic reasons that they would be powerful they have a lot more economic power when they when they unite they have more economic power than the venezuelan government they're probably going to be supported by the us because the us doesn't like communist

31:20 regimes there are all these generic things you can come up with by just asking yourself basic questions about the debate okay why does the cia team think could be balanced to have a code it has to be a country in problems okay if it's a country problem it's a dictatorship how the dictatorships generally look and they just apply to venezuela the thing is you have nothing to lose so the worst thing that can happen is you're just wrong about

31:40 venezuela and someone knows more more than you and they're going to tell you that you're wrong and you will take a fourth but the comparative is that you don't have a case and again you take a fourth so yes you are risking that you're saying something wrong you are risking that somebody knows more than you but there is also a large chance that they won't know more than you and your generic case is going to go through

32:02 comparatively if you don't try to come up with a characterization even if it may be wrong and if you're just like i don't know much about this i'm not going to say anything you're definitely going to be forth so the risk of trying to assume general things pays off another example there was a motion at euros 2017 about whether feminist movement in india should utilize aggressive aggressive female goddesses in their advocates so there are a couple

32:29 of goddesses there is an infrastructure a couple of goddesses in the indian pantheon that are female and that are actively hostile towards male so they're they're depicted as sitting on male bodies or things like this i think most people don't have a particular grasp of knowledge from the indian feminist movement but there are some things you can infer okay so we know in general that india is a relatively conservative country so if you've learned about indian high school you've

32:53 heard of the caste system you know there's like rigid religious systems so already you can make the generic argument of in a conservative religious country it probably pays off to use religion to convince religious people to be less conservative second thing we know from the infoslide india's polytheist what are the general benefits of polytheism for social movements you can tailor your advocacy to particular regions so there's a particular region that worships a particular goddess you can use that

33:19 goddess you can use their traditional myths you can use different advocacies in different regions and all these things and it's again not tied to knowing about indian polytheism in particular but just polytheism in general and what kind of benefit it could bring to the advocacy of the movement and again the risk is yeah there may be someone from india in the room and they're going to tell you that you're wrong sure but if there's not someone from india in

33:40 the room and you can make a persuasive enough characterization you can win that debate and also in most situations you will actually not be lying because in most situations you can actually infer basic characterizations of groups and countries from general knowledge without them being untrue you will lack specifics but you're still going to be generally correct so the risk is not that big it can pay off another thing you can do if you don't know a lot about the motion is it or in

34:07 a particular situation where you're let's say you're opening government and you think opposition is super strong like you can see an opposition case you would have an opposition case in the blink of an eye you don't know what government cases you can start building the government case from preemptives so you can start by thinking about what are the things you would say from opposition and then try responding to them because if you don't have a government

34:30 case but you have an opposition case you can try to rebut the opposition case that you have and then fashion the government case from that rebuttal so there are a number of ways in which you can act that can reduce the problem problematic situation of not knowing about db the last thing i want to share here and this is going to take like 15 minutes for me to explain but i think it's very important in terms of you

34:54 being able to generate actually persuasive impacts because remember that i said that in order to generate impacts you need to have strong nuanced mechanization behind these impacts i'm going to give you a couple of templates that will help you do this i see a person is raising their hand so if you have a question you can either say it out loud or type it in the chat whatever whatever suits you i think this is i'm sorry can i cheer now

35:23 sorry to make my question can i make my question now or would you rather did i wait for the end you can do it now okay thank you okay so what happens when the first person made a really good argument and you're just coming right after because sometimes i freak out thinking that i might not be good as them and when i see that someone is doing a very good job standing for

35:53 their points i feel like i might not be good enough to be them and when they just did what you already told us which is they introduced it the subject and then right after they said what i i wanted to say you know they just said what i wanted to say and answered it how would you feel and how would you try to to make a change or

36:24 you know to call attention or just to be better because sometimes i actually get very nervous about i've been in a debate club for two months so i'm still a little bit nervous and anxious about it but how do you do when you see your competitors are very very good okay so a lot of this is going to be answered towards the end in terms of at least practical things in terms of how you can you know work to improve but i

36:54 think in terms of psychological aspect there's a couple of things to say here i think first of all no one can deliver a perfect speech in seven minutes so because you are restricted to seven minutes everyone even if they are the best debaters in the world are going to under analyze something they're going to miss some mechanisms they're going to miss some logical limits nobody can deliver a perfect speech so what you should focus on is trying to

37:20 locate mistakes so when people hear somebody doing very well they start focusing on them doing very well and oh my god they have this mechanism and this mechanism but the mindset should be okay what do they not have you actively want to look for missing links this also relates to how people take notes i didn't very often when people get very nervous about speakers before them they tend to write too much they tend to write down every word that

37:45 they're saying because they're saying so many mechanisms so many examples this is not the right way to go of course you need to write their speech and write notes in such way that you know what they said but the focus needs to be on listening listening closely to what they're saying and listening to what the assumptions of their arguments are and this is the example i gave the imf the team that made this argument ended up being in the finals of euros

38:09 that year we went through with them in that quarter final so they're a very good thing they won incredibly important tournaments and they made a complex argument but the assumption behind that argument was simple and refutable however in order for us to notice that assumption we needed to remind ourselves that they are not going to run a perfect case because they only have seven minutes and we need to focus more on listening and less on writing

38:34 the second thing in terms of people being you know amazing amazing speakers and having more experience than you the thing to remember is when they are debating against you they have more to lose than you do because know that most debaters have self-confidence issues and like the best debaters in the world they look incredibly confident they look so cocky and you know they think they're going to win most debaters don't think that and from talking to a lot of debaters who've been

39:02 in the finals of worlds and euros most of them have self-confidence issues most of them have self-doubt most of them are afraid going into a debate but they're going to flunk it that they're going to it up it's going to go bad for them the thing is when you are the underdog debating against them you have nothing to lose like if you lose to oxford a day nobody is going to say oh my god you lost

39:22 oxford how could you lose dogs per day if you beat oxford they are going to be legends like new esl team in the block they beat oxford for oxford a the calculus is different because if they win against you it's a routine win everyone expected them to win no excitement here but if they lose to you oh they're going to have to justify to themselves how they lost to a novice team and they want to win euros they

39:43 want to win worlds but they lost to a team that nobody knows and they're going to be scared if this harms their reputation or if they're going to do badly in the next round so they're probably more afraid of losing to you than you are losing to them because you have no reason to be afraid of losing with them and then just comes down to a battle of wits right so it comes down to they have more specific

39:59 knowledge than you right sure but they're not smarter which means they're going to make mistakes you can notice these mistakes as long as you have you know the correct psychological mind but even in the worst case scenario where you do not have a direct rebuttal to what they're saying so they're saying very good arguments you don't have direct responses you can always weigh against your case so you can say okay even if they prove this perfectly and

40:21 even if we grant them this argument our case is more important than that because even if they have some impact on their side of the house and they prove this well our impact is bigger or our impact is more intense or our impact helps more vulnerable people or whichever metric you want to use it's for a weighing workshop not for an impacting workshop so no time to go into this here but you can say our case

40:44 outweighs theirs in importance even if there's work what's proven i think this is a good maneuver to generally have so when generally you are repotting somebody's case the first step is to say we think that they are wrong or we have mitigation to their case so we're going to flip their case but the second step is to say even if we say that they are correct or they're somewhat correct our case is just more important and you

41:05 should prioritize our impact over theirs even if their impact were proven at the end of the talk i'm going to also talk about you know strategies to improve strategies to train so i'm going to get to that as well but for now this is the advice at least in terms of the in terms of what you can do in debate and in terms of how you can you know deal with the psychological aspect so i hope that answers

41:26 your question okay another question is in the chat i found it very hard to draw the line between characterization impacting mechanization when i should stop drawing the line between incentives and mechanisms or impacting and knowing when i should go further so don't get framed after undervalued or when i should just move the next point what is the structure that you use for speeches or arguments so i don't have a specific structure i don't have a template what i

41:50 usually do is just i say we think this is going to happen and that's a statement of the impact then i then i say these are the reasons why i think it's going to happen those are the mechanisms and then i say here's why it's important in the round and that's the way i've proven this impact but why should the judge care about this impact in the end so that's like the general idea i have okay i have a statement i have

42:13 reasons why the statement is true and then when a statement is proven to be true why the statement is important in terms of knowing when to stop i think this is something that comes with experience i think however the most important thing to do is ensure that your most important mechanisms are set so you want your best mechanisms to be at the top so even if you have time management issues if you have to cut something on the go to get

42:41 your second argument you you want to ensure that the things that you cut are the things that are less important so you want to ensure that your strongest mechanisms are going to be said at the end of the day i'm going to talk more about this a little bit later but i think largely drawing the line of how much you need to mechanize and how much impact differs from motion to motion from debated debate and getting to understand that doesn't have

43:04 a template it's more of a question of doing a large amount of debates and realizing this instinctively i think also judging can help right because if you judge you get a different perspective you get the perspective of okay what do judges evaluate in terms of how much impacting is enough impacting or how much mechanizing is enough mechanizing and then you can use this knowledge when you're debating as well i think this is largely experienced so hopefully this answers

43:27 answering the question okay so moving back to what i was talking about i'm going to give you two templates that you can use to make your impacts more persuasive specifically i'm going to talk about power analysis and incentive analysis what does this mean in short this means that every actor in a debate has particular incentives and motivations there are things they want to do and things they want to achieve incentives that actors have are the primary predictors of their behavior

43:55 because actors are going to behave in a way that is more or less tied to what they want or what they desire therefore proving that an actor has a particular incentive and the disincentive is going to be utilized in a good way by the motion or targeted by the motion is a prerequisite to an argument about an actor behaving in a particular way being the persuasive argument the second thing here is to note that actors may want something they may not

44:22 be able to get something so they have incentives but they also have varying degrees of power to actually achieve and fulfill their incentives and this levels of power are also predictors of their actions not just the level of power that they have but also the awareness that they have of the level of power they possess so i'm going to give you a template of three points for incentive analysis and three points for power analysis which is going to allow you

44:47 to strongly characterize actors and therefore create persuasive mechanisms as to why your impacts are going to happen in incentive analysis we have three questions the first question i mean very obviously is what does the actor want and there are different things that they may want and similar to what i said earlier even if you don't know a lot about the motion you can always infer general things so every country wants to be independent they want to be safe they want to have

45:14 money every person wants to be happy they want to be alive and not dead they want to find love and friendship every company wants to get profit wants to avoid lawsuits so even if it's a very specific actor this actor is still part of a larger broader group of actors a human or a group of people or a country or a company and you can always infer the things that they that they may want you also want to

45:39 explain why they want it so what are the characteristics of the actor that make them want it they have to be reasons why a particular actor x wants a particular thing y so the sub question here is why does the actor want what you're claiming the actor wants because you need to give reasons as to why you think people are going to behave in a particular way the second question and this is where it gets more important

46:03 is how far are they willing to go to get it because the thing is actors have different incentives and these incentives are arranged in a hierarchy we can want different things and we want some things more than we want others this means that we are prepared to sacrifice some things for others and as a corollary we are not prepared to sacrifice some things for others so some things are lower priority and we're willing to let them go for higher

46:28 priorities some things are a red line beyond this we will not go something we will never sacrifice something we're never willing to do to give a hypothetical example like this is of course never going to happen it's a stupid example but they just illustrate what i mean so if you are let's say a ma'am or if you're talking if you're talking about the member of this this privileged minority who is being oppressed by the state and the

46:50 majority society and one day there's like you know prophet or you know some kind of magician and he comes to and he says look i have the power to stop discrimination against your group immediately like from tomorrow you're going to be treated just like everyone else but for this i need you to sacrifice your entire family depending on who you are as a person a lot of people would say no way because i have an incentive to not be

47:15 discriminated but my love towards my family is a red line i'm not going to cross i'm not going to sacrifice them some people who have less connection to their family might say yeah sure like that's a fair sacrifice i care about them i care about myself more but in both of these situations you have people having two very strong incentives but one being more powerful than the other a real life example is to say and i

47:38 think it's probably very relevant if you look at you know the situation afghanistan or the taliban and all of this if you have religious extremists these are individuals who are even prepared to sacrifice their lives for the cause like suicide bombers and all these things rationally sacrificing your life is a very dumb thing to do but for them the priority of achieving the metaphysical good which is the rule of god on earth or however they perceive it as religious extremists is

48:04 something they prioritize this is also a reason why very often there is no negotiation with terrorist groups because they do not necessarily strive for material gain if they're religious groups try for metaphysical things but the thing is in order to strongly and persuasively characterize an actress incentives you also want to keep in mind the hierarchy of incentives that they have to explain what are they willing to do and what are they not willing to do what line they're

48:32 willing to cross what are they not willing to cross so for example in a debate about israel and palestine and let's say a two-state solution in israel and palestine an argument you can make against to state solution is to say both of these sites regard the same land to be holy if it's holy it was given to them by god therefore it's not a piece of land to be traded it is a gift of god which if traded is literally sacrilege

48:55 and giving the land of god to the sworn enemy and they are not willing to do this because this is the red line for them even if a two-state solution would be materially better they do not want to cross the metaphysical line and this is for example a good rebuttal to a team claiming that yeah two-state solution be very rational maybe but the way the actors perceive this is a different way this is why it's important to have in

49:17 mind the hierarchy of incentives and the last question is what irrationalities is the actor influenced by and this is also my problem with rational choice theory because people are not rational maximizers of utility like there are things which would objectively be more utilized for people not all people do the best things for themselves why because they're under the influence of subjective perceptions and emotions people can be angry people can be afraid people can be deeply convinced of

49:46 certain beliefs or ideologies people can be in love people can hate each other all of these things make people behave in different ways and i think an example i already gave is conducive here as well it is most irrational in terms of utility to die because if you're dead you cannot experience any utility anymore but people are very often willing to sacrifice themselves for things for beliefs for ideologies for their loved ones all of this happens because they do

50:12 not just rationally consider consequences they also consider or subconsciously this happens like their emotions and things like this so you need to keep in mind not necessarily what is going to be objectively the best for the actor but how is the actor likely to act based on their complete state of mind or their system of beliefs this is also incredibly important when debating actor emotions because things are very often going to make impacts based on oh this is the best possible

50:38 impact for the actor sure but we are still debating from the perspective of the actor if the actor doesn't perceive this to be the best possible impact for them then that's irrelevant from the perspective of an actor motion and is therefore not a strong impact within that particular so these are the ways in which you can answer questions about what actors want and to what extent they want it and these are the prerequisites for having a

51:01 strong impact because they make the impact persuasive so you can convince the judge that actors are going to act in a particular way and therefore produce your impact this is where the impact gets proven within the debate the second step however is to prove that the actors are actually able to achieve their interests in other words they have the power or the capacity necessary to achieve their interests and therefore going to give you a template of three different types of

51:31 power that actors can have and that you can use to identify what power actors have and what extent of power they have i extrapolated this from a concept known as three phases of power which is a concept in political sociology which i adapted to using in-debate analysis so in terms of types of power that people can have the first one and most basic most obvious one is coercive power coercive power in short is the ability of actor a to force actor

52:01 b to do something even though actor b would not do that of their own volition this therefore implies sanction the reason why actor b will do something even though they would not otherwise want it is because there are negative consequences if actor b doesn't do that a good example of this and the most obvious is the state the state has coercive power to force us to do its bidding because if we don't the state has the law the

52:28 courts and the police it can use this to prosecute us and to put us in jail in worst cases they can use the military against us as a form of force which we cannot resist so the reason why we abide the state is not because we would want to but because we are forced to the second thing to keep in mind here is that fear of sanction is very often motivation enough for people to act in a particular way

52:53 so the reason why we follow the law is because we know that if we do not follow the law sanctions will ensue so we are acting out of fear of sanction not out of the sanction being imposed in and of itself so coercion very often doesn't have to be exercised for you to do something you just need to know there is a threat of something happening terrorism is a good example of this so so a terrorist group let's say the ira

53:17 can say we're going to blow up a car in the center of derry if you do not give us these concessions they don't need to blow up the car they just need to frighten the government into thinking that they'll blow up the car and this is going to have you know huge repercussions people are going to die then the government is going to give into notably coercive power exists on a far lower level as well so i would say a

53:39 school bully has coercive power over you because they can force you to to give them your lunch your lunch box because if you don't they're going to wedge you or stuff you in a locker or you know put your head in the toilet or something something horrible like this and they can also scare you into saying i will put your head in the toilet if you don't give me your lunch so you better do this of course the school bully has a far

54:00 lower amount of power than the state so all of these types of power can exist at different extents but the type of power is is the idea of being able to sanction someone or to scare someone with sanctions doing something that you want so the question is is it max waiver so max weber's definition of the state uses coercive power so max weber defines the state as a an institution or a collection of institutions that holds a legitimate

54:31 monopoly on coercive power however the definition of coercive power itself was not given by max weber i cannot remember the guy who defined it max weber uses however this this term of coercive power to define the state so to that extent it is mass favorite the second type of power that can be exercised is agenda setting power agenda setting power trivially is the ability to determine what is going to be talked about and what is not going to be

55:00 done i.e the ability to push a issue a discussion to the forefront of this course or to shut down discussion or awareness about an issue in the most literal sense agenda setting an example of general setting power is the ruling party in parliament that controls the docket so the ruling party largely controls the day-to-day agenda of the parliament and what is going to be discussed and therefore they can shut down opposition proposals even if the opposition wants to have a discussion on

55:30 something important or they want to have you know propose a bill that is going to deal with some kind of issue they don't have enough votes to do this they don't have control over the over the docket because because they don't preside over the parliament so the ruling party can you know shut down issues or push issues based on what they want to do but i think on a broader scale a very good example of this would be

55:51 famous individuals and their ability to reach out to people so let's say i want to you know i want to save stray animals in croatia and i go to the main square in zagreb and i you know i climbed the main statue and i started yelling save the cat save the dogs like bring the safety stray animals nobody's going to listen to me so people are going to say i'm crazy and the police is going to come and take me away

56:16 and people are just going to say hello crazy guy who shouted about cats in the main square if however let's say beyonce comes to zagreb to the main square and talks about how we need to save stray cats in croatia not only is everyone going to you know turn around and listen because it's beyonce but it's also like the media is going to report on this like everyone in the world like guardian bbc is going to write articles about how

56:39 beyonce is campaigning for the rights of stray animals in croatia and people who would not have otherwise heard about stray animals in croatia will now know about straight animals and croatia three animals in croatia but also because some people are fans of beyonce and they you know they they want to support the issues that she supports they're actually going to look into donating they're going to look up links they're going to look up shelters they're going

57:01 to give money because you know somebody who they have an emotional connection to has urged them urged them to do this so by using her global popularity her access to the media for access defense beyonce can legitimately make stray cats in croatia a global issue an issue that people know about the same is when argentina boycotted a friendly football match with israel over the issue of palestine has billions of fans worldwide when lionel messi says as argentina

57:31 captain we will boycott because of the issues with palestine then people who are lionel messi fans will actually be interested in this because my this is my idol my captain why is my captain boycotting i want to know what each in palestine is when lionel messi brings it up due to the influence he has he can make this a global issue and he can make people aware of this or even act upon this but would not have

57:53 otherwise done it and the same is true for shutting things down so let's say for example i think religion is a good example of this so in the catholic church have the pope so pope francis can say look as the church we need to have a discussion about how we treat atheists about how we treat sexual and gender minorities because they are all children of god and we should give them a respect and they have the right to access heaven

58:20 pope francis can also say as the pope as the legitimate representative of god on earth i'm going to shut down this discussion because i believe it's a sinful discussion the pope has agenda setting power because he is the proverbial 13th apostle he is a successor to saint peter he is the closest to god on earth so the pope has the ability to reach out to christians and say with the authority of the pope i implore you to consider changing your

58:46 perspective but you can also say with the authority of the pope i declare that certain aspects of thought are sinful and his authority as the pope grants him a gender setting power to make this a matter of discussion or to shut it down as a matter of discussion so this is a level of power which goes beyond coercion it affects whether something is discussed or not discussed in the first place and then the third level of power the

59:10 most insidious one is preference shaping power preference shaping power trivially is the ability to convince an actor that they want they genuinely want something and to make them do something not out of a fear of sanction but out of a genuine belief that they desire this and the best example here i think is advertisement right so the goal of every good beer advertisement for like heineken is for you to see oh my god this looks so fresh

59:40 this looks so cold it looks so tasty i want a beer now if after seeing the advertisement your thought is i want a beer now the advertisement has exercised preference shaping power over you because it has made you desire a beer through its influence on you i think this is particularly true in you know today's world in the world of so social media algorithms and advertisement on the internet where they collect you know meta data on you they

60:05 know you know patterns of how much time you spend on content where you have clicked where you haven't clicked things that you don't know about yourself or don't consciously know and they're able to target advertisement you in such a way that they make you want things that you're not even aware of but i think people have this kind of power also overlap with agenda setting power right because i think the same is true the same is true for the pope right

60:28 because the pope given he is the prime representative of god on earth and he is a religious you know leader and a guide he can say i think that for the salvation of your souls you should pursue this type of action and given that people trust the pope and they also want their souls to be saved they will genuinely want to follow the words of the pope he doesn't have to sanction them he just has to say

60:53 this is good for you and given he has the authority to do that people's preferences are legitimately going to be shaped by this so in short it's the ability to convince people that something is good for them and if you do this successfully they're going to execute this action regardless of any future action you take this is also the most efficient type of power because it doesn't require constant supervision it doesn't require the exercise of coercion

61:16 or the spending of resources if exercise successfully people continue to do things you want them to do even without you enforcing this so these are the three types of power you can use in debates in prep time to analyze what you need to keep in mind is as i've already said first of all there are different levels which actors have this power so two actors can have the same type of power but have it two different levels but also actors can

61:41 have different types of power simultaneously so the state has all three types of power right the state has coercive power it has a gender setting power and it has preference shaping power some actors will have two out of the three some actors will have one some will have zero but it's possible to have different different types of powers simultaneously to keep in mind this concludes the first and longer part about how to prep a debate how to come up with

62:13 a good argument how to make the impact strong and what templates or advice to use what i'm going to do now i'm going to move on to general advice which for delivery persuasiveness and for delivery strength i've divided this into three parts the first is how to deliver an argument for it to be stronger the second one is how to deliver an argument in order for it to be more persuasive the third one is how to practice to get veterans

62:42 in terms of general advice for strong delivery in terms of analytical strength analytical rigor the first thing is if you are new to debating you may want to have an argument template this is not something that you're going to use universally this is not something you're going to use forever but when building arguments it could make sense to write them down in a structured form that has different parts which are visible on your paper or on your excel sheet so you can make a

63:12 table in your excel sheet or you can draw lines on your paper to delineate and this you might have heard this this is called the the sexy structure why is it called the sexy structure i'm going to write this down in the chat that's the easiest it's called a sexy structure because s stands for statement e stands for explanation stands for example i stands for importance which means that for every argument or

63:42 for every impact there is first of all a statement this is going to happen then the explanation here is why we think it's going to happen here is the mechanisms for this here's the characterization behind this then the example which doesn't have to be a real life example or statistics can be an analogy it can be a made up example for example let's say that in my life i encountered this situation it serves to illustrate that your mechanisms are

64:09 actually realistic you give a mechanism and you say look this example shows it's actually realistic it happens in your life and i is important in the sense of and i'm going to talk about this in a moment why is the argument important for iran if you prove this argument why should the judge care i think it's useful to have this kind of template if you're new to debating in order to have your arguments clearly structured for

64:31 yourself when you deliver them but also to make flagging easier just for judges to be able to track your arguments you need to clearly flag what part of your argument you are explaining so if you have this divided into the sexy structure you can use this for flagging i.e you can flag when you are moving from one letter to the other okay so what we claim is going to happen in this argument and give the statement

64:53 here are the reasons why we think this is going to happen let's move on to the explanation here's an example which proves this is realistic as an example and here is why we think it matters if you have it clearly visually delineated it also helps you clearly flat transitions within the argument in terms of what part of the argument you're proving therefore making the argument easier for the judge to track the second important thing and i want to

65:17 emphasis emphasizes the i part the final part of the sexy structure is what does the argument do to the round because you can prove an argument it doesn't mean the argument is important it doesn't mean it's the most important in the right so notably if there's a debate about i don't know post-conflict reconciliation or ethnic cleansing and somebody uses an example of world war two and they say world war two ended in 1947 and you stand up and you say no no we're

65:46 twenty nineteen forty five notably you've won that clash you have won the clash of historical accuracy it's probably going to be incredibly irrelevant as to who wins the round because their example and what they want to illustrate and their mechanisms are probably still true regardless of what year world war i ended in so proving something is not enough you need to prove why it matters you've proven something so you want to explicitly say how you proving an impact changes the

66:13 balance of the round so for example by proving this impact we show that on the metric of whatever in this debate we have achieved the largest change on this mutual metric or this argument directly disproves the claim from the other side because they claim this but our argument through its mechanisms shows that the opposite is going to happen but it's also an example of using your content as as rebuttal or given that we've proven this argument given is the largest

66:44 impact in the round even if other teams have proven their impacts as well ours is still more important these conclusions are going to vary the thing is you want to tell the judge how you proving the argument tilts the balance of power in the round in other words how is it going to impact the final adjudication us proving this argument means xyz for us winning the round and this is the template way in which you frame the importance part

67:13 why does us proving this matter for us winning how does it help us win and how does it shift the balance in the debate the last thing and this is tied to the importance part you want to end all larger pieces of content with weighing not just weighing against your bench if you're closing but also against the other teams what does this mean in good debates everyone is going to prove something so if either in your room have oxford

67:41 cambridge and llc all of them are going to prove their arguments how you win a good debate is not by showing that the other side is wrong it's by mitigating them as much as you can and then showing that you are more important so between four well proven cases our case weighs as the most important which means that you need to establish metrics for your impacts i.e metrics are reasons why your impact is more important than another impact and

68:11 there can be different metrics and this is a question for a different session there can be a metric of does the impact which impact you know influences more people which impact influences the most vulnerable people which impact is more principally legitimate doesn't matter but there needs to be a way for you to explain why this impact is better than another impact which is going to be posited by another team in the round of course you want to rebut

68:37 their impacts of course you want to mitigate their impacts but in most cases you're not going to be able to do this 100 you're going to be able to weaken the other side not take them down completely so you need to be that shows why you win over the weekend version of their case or the weekend version of their argument what does this mean this means that it's incredibly important to keep in mind that you need to end

69:03 larger pieces of content with explicit weighing this argument is more important than the other ones raised in the debate even if they are proven because of this particular metric the second thing to keep in mind is that metrics need to be weighed against each other because teams are going to use different metrics to prove that their impacts are important you are going to say we help the most vulnerable group in the round an opposition is going to say yeah

69:28 but we help a larger amount of people in the round how do we know as a judge which metric is more important so if there are different metrics there is also the second meta level of a metric versus metric so then as the government you want to say sure you help more people but even these people are comparatively more privileged there is not a large comparative we have the most vulnerable group and therefore have the bigger comparative which is why our

69:52 metric is more important so when building impacts the first thing is already in prayer you want to include already include choose a metric which suits you include a metric how you're going to measure this impact the second is you need to come up with reasons why this metric specifically is the most important metric because you're going to have to weigh against other metrics in the debate because metrics are what makes impact important or unimportant otherwise an

70:20 impact is just an impact what makes it more or less important than other impacts is the metric used to weight this is important lastly just in terms of how you can generate content better as a team but before that the question is is it more strategic to make effort spending a lot of time on robusto or prime minister weighing impacts so i think if this question refers to prep time it really depends from motion to motion

70:49 like so if you have a motion where you're a government and you think it's operated you probably want to spend a lot on on you know thinking of how you can respond to the strongest upgrades if you think the motion is very narrow and you think it's probably about just one argument you want to spend a lot of time excluding the other arguments because to narrow the debate down you need to have proof by narrowing it down if there is a

71:08 very broad emotion with a lot of arguments and you og rolo you probably want to spend the most time in prep just generating content and running the largest amount of arguments and burning closing like this is something just going to be a strategic consideration based on the debate so the motion at hand based on the position you have based on the teams in the room because if you know the teams in the room you also can know their their

71:31 strengths and weaknesses and based on your own you know decision how you want to win the debate so i don't think this is something has a template answer and i think it would be harmful to try to find a template dancer answering this it's a question of what suits the particular situation you find yourself laughing just in terms of generating good content the first thing is as a deputy speaker and as an extension speaker there is a

71:57 particular mindset i think is very useful for you to be able to generate strong impactful auditions for debates deputies towards their first speakers as well as extensions towards their top half should assume a critical adjudication position what does this mean if you are a deputy speaker listening to your prime minister or to your hello who are your partner you want to focus on finding the things they did wrong not listen to the things they did well

72:26 why is a deputy speaker you need to expand on what they said if you just repeat their speech you're not going to be able to rebut the opposition well you're not going to expand your case so the way you want to look at this you want to look at it as if you were an adjudicator judging them so if you were judging this speaker and you would have to give them feedback what feedback would you give

72:47 what would they have done better what could they have had more examples for is there an argument they could have run what rebuttal were they vulnerable to and how would you have resolved that vulnerability the same was for extensions because like extension speakers very often the way they perceive extensions is i have a list of five argument headlines and then i just if when opening government or opening opposition mentions this headline they just cross it out this is

73:11 this is not how extensions work the point of the extension is not to bring a new argument the point of the extension is to bring the most persuasive contribution as to why a particular site wins and the way we should do this particularly in good rounds is most of an analysis extension which is there is a case brought by the opening government you want to find what's lacking in the case where are the missing mechanistic links where are the missing

73:35 characterizations where are the missing impacts and you want to insert yourself within that so the logic is not do i have a completely new argument the logic is if i'm listening to my top half as if i were judging them where would they give them feedback what could they improve on and then these areas where they can improve this is also where you fit your extension or where you fit your expansion of the case as a deputy speaker so always assume a

74:00 critical adjudication position when listening to speakers on your bench before you because when you notice mistakes this is also the guideline as to where you want to focus most of your analysis after that the last thing that's important to keep in mind here just good communication with your partner because delegation of duties is incredibly important for a team to be able to deliver strong impacts over the course of an entire debate what does this mean this means that if you are a

74:24 whip and you need to refute the closing government impacts but you also need to refute open environment and you don't have time to deal with og because you're listening to cg you can tell your partner please write me down rebuttals to open in government because i don't have time to deal with this also you can ask for you can ask your partner whether they need something so when your partner is listening to a speech you need to rebut you can ask

74:52 them what do you need new mechanisms do you need new responses and i can help you with this you can use your partner to listen so if you want your extension to be the most impactful in the round but as a member of government you're also writing your extension during dpm already because you need to have time to write your extension you can tell your partner please listen to the dpm and tell me if they say something relevant

75:15 which steals our impacts so communicating with your partner delegating duties telling them to help you with something and being open to them asking you the same thing is an incredibly important prerequisite for you being actually able to perform well in debates and generate good impacts second part in terms of persuasive delivery and how to make your argument just stick better i think there are a couple of things you can use here the first is i think the way in which

75:44 people frame their phrase their first minute is incredibly important i think a lot of esl speakers waste their first minute on useless stuff so it's either a stylistic introduction that doesn't make sense in the debate or it's long flagging i'm first going to give my first argument which says this then i'm going to give my second argument which says this this is a waste of time particularly because native speakers can always speak faster than you right

76:13 they don't have to translate while they speak which means that they're always going to have a larger rate of words per second this means you need to make up for the time lost how do you make up for the time lost you want every word you say to be a word that the judge is going to write down flagging or stylistic introductions are therefore useless nobody has ever lost a bp debate because they did not flag their arguments at the

76:36 top if you want to flag you can do this in five seconds but first on this second on this third on this you're gonna flag on the go i'm now going to my first argument and i'll finish my first argument and so on and so forth what you want to do with your first minute you want to use introductory sentences that allow you to jump into content immediately so you want to say things like the primary mistake of the opposition side

77:00 is and then immediately move into rebuttal or before explaining what is comparative in the round i'll explain what isn't comparative and immediately move to the framing or deer panel no time for fantasy intros a lot of things to say first and immediately move into content all of these still sound stylistically persuasive but they allow you to literally start spewing content from the fourth or fifth second instead of the 45th which grants you 40 more seconds to flesh out your

77:30 infants and to flesh out your mechanisms which you think is very important in terms of leveling the playing field against native speakers okay there is a question in the chat when forced to enter deeper levels of meta debate i generally have a difficult time finding explanations for things we usually take for granted as a universal truth or find obvious on a day-to-day basis eg why freedom is so important or why quantity in some cases feels more

77:52 relevant than vulnerability do you have any tips on that well this is again an argument to argument question because depending on the value you're arguing for depending on the metric you're using there's going to be very specific analysis you're going to use so there's no template but i can advise you and i'm going to talk more about this later first of all you can just watching a lot of debates helps as you can see how top level speakers have

78:16 done these kinds of ways in different situations you can steal their wings from them secondly in terms of philosophical ways in particular a very good web page to start with is the stanford encyclopedia philosophy so that's an internet page they have explanations discussions and thought experiments on pretty much any concept that ever existed in philosophy pretty much any principle or any moral metric and they also have in-depth ex in-depth explanations of the importance of these concepts so i think if you want a more

78:45 academic approach to this then just google stanford encyclopedia philosophy you're going to find a lot of material there if you want a more debating approach try to find emotions where you are most confused about this you've probably debated some emotions in your life and you know which in which emotions you face this is a problem and try to find recorded debates on these emotions or on similar emotions and there's a bunch of these from euros from

79:07 worlds from hws from macau like there's a bunch of these and look at how top speakers did this and then you can use their weighing and build on it add to it remove from it i think this is the best way to see how it's done in a variety of cases because i cannot give you a simple template because it really depends on the particular value arguing for a particular metric in argument cool moving back to the persuasiveness

79:32 of delivery the second thing that makes a persuasive delivery is calling out biases and recording has stopped nikolas i think internet has fallen so recording from from now just a minute so i can see we'll be back yeah sure i mean you are host now so you can i think just restart the recording

80:16 i will start recording now and if he gets back he okay cool so what do i mean by calling out biases so judges at least the vast majority of them are not consciously biased they're not like oh my god look this esl team i want to them over most biases are subconscious which means that you want to preemptively bring biases to the alertness of the judges it means you want to say things like if you are

80:47 debating against an epl team and you're afraid that they're they they're you know they sound more persuasive because of their absence and of their words and preemptively say i know that they sound more fancy but please listen to our content because we actually have the content in this round or do not be deceived by their vocabulary there is not much behind it here is why we think this is wrong just calling out people on the fact that they could be biased

81:12 preemptively is something that makes them more alert to this first of all because people feel ashamed to be biased they don't want to feel that they made a biased decision and when you remind them that they could be biased and that actually you think that you suspect that they could be biased this creates a reaction of wariness in people and they're going to look twice over their notes to see whether they screwed over the esl team and secondly

81:39 they know that when you bring this to the awareness of the panel their panel is going to be more aware of this and their panel can give bad feedback if they think that they were esl biased or you know sex is biased or anything like this so this is very important in terms of like just getting your impact system better third thing is just rhetorical tools it's incredibly important to use your voice to stress things so very often people

82:02 have a problem that they speak very monotonously for seven minutes or they speak very fast and they don't change their pace for seven minutes it's not a problem to speak fast and it's not the problem to speak slow but there need to be changes of pace to emphasize things so when you are you know doing a strong emotional impact you want to slow down you want to use a deeper voice you want to stress the most important words the

82:27 way i'm doing now if there is something that you want to show that something is very pervasive like an example which happens very often we've seen this happen here we've seen this happen here you want to accelerate you want to name these examples one after the other barrage of examples to make it seem like it's very very pervasive to make it seem like it's very common so you need to use your voice as a rhetorical tool

82:48 to emphasize your impact because if things sound more impactful then the attention of the people listening to you is also subconsciously going to be diverted to that so of course you can do the same impact on both sides but if you make it sound impactful this is the gateway to people paying more attention to what you're saying and therefore crediting your impact more and the last thing i want to say here is time management is incredibly important

83:14 which is the same and this relates to an earlier question of when to stop mechanizing start impacting all these things in order to ensure a larger chance of winning that your most important impacts get out there what you want to do in debating is you want your strongest arguments your strongest rebuttal your strongest mechanisms to come at the top so the strongest argument if you have three arguments in opening government the strongest one is the first one you

83:42 will deliver not the last one because people sometimes are like i'm going to go for weaker to stronger no the strongest has to be the first why because time management is incredibly unpredictable you never know what can happen right you can get the poi which throws you off you can you know your screen can freeze and then you're not sure if it's it's your internet or if the judge's internet you can go into a digression and realize you

84:03 don't have enough time and then you're going to have to cut things you're going to have to cut things on the spot to get to the end of your speech you want to ensure that if you find yourself in a situation you have to cut some mechanisms or cut some impacts those you are cutting are going to be the least important ones or at least the ones you can delegate to your partner so you want to ensure just in case you have problems

84:23 with time management but the things you deliver first are also the most important ones so your strongest argument is delivered by 3 30. what happens later is also important but less important instead of starting your strongest argument at 550 because you mismanaged your time i think this is just a general advice for how to stylistically make your impacts delivered better the last thing i want to finish with is just how i think you can improve in terms of

84:50 being able to craft better arguments or craft better impacts the first thing is and this also i think answers one of the first questions we had in terms of like other people being better than you and how you can match their skill and stuff the first thing is actively watching debates what do i mean by activity so not just sitting down and watching a debate but watching a debate and actually taking notes and when the prime

85:12 minister finishes what do you do you take a look over their case you analyze if there are things you would want to add there are things you would want to subtract if you would like to add something why would you be adding this if you want to subtract something you think they shouldn't have said something why would they not have said that if there are words like phrases or terms that they're using that you don't know

85:33 of or examples that they're referring to that you're familiar with google these words google these examples collect the knowledge on what they actually are and what they mean beyond the debate then think about and write down how you would rebut their speech what are the weaknesses what are the strong points when you listen to lo and then you can compare okay hello had this rebuttal i had this rebuttal how much of this coincides and why is this true then do

86:00 the same analysis for lo what you would add what you would subtract how you would maybe tailor their arguments or maybe you know switch them around a bit to make them better or stronger again familiarize yourself with things that you're not familiar with and take notes of all of this because what you're doing in doing so is first of all you're increasing your memory retention because when you actually work on a piece of content when you analyze it when you

86:24 think about it you remember it a lot more when you just watch the debate passively secondly this allows you to create your own arguments from other people's arguments you can take a good argument as a baseline as a foundation you can remove things from it you can add things to it you can switch the phrasing to make it more tailored to your particular situation or to your particular case in your particular knowledge and thirdly you're going to get just

86:50 more general knowledge from googling things from reading things and insofar as you take notes of all of this you're going to have these notes accessible for the future and the same is true of watching workshops so when you watch workshops you want to keep very detailed notes of what people are saying in those workshops so content workshops and let's say debating ir or debating econ you also probably want to keep a case file of your own cases when you run a

87:16 case especially when you run a case very well you want to keep those notes somewhere and when you ask the judge for feedback about this case you want to write the feedback below the case and keep it all of this should be kept in one place you either need to one you want to have a debating notebook or a couple of notebooks or you want to have a single word document or a single google docs why

87:37 because printed materials are allowed in debating if you have a single file or a single notebook where you keep notes from the debates you watched notes from the workshops you watched and notes from your own cases you can use this during prep to draw material from this to remind yourself of mechanism to remind yourself of the impact and if you if this is all in one place you're largely going to know where it's located so even if you

88:03 don't get the benefit of organically learning more arguments of organically having a larger repository of arguments because you will learn more things remember more things from working on this actively you will at least have a database of things that you can draw from during prep time which is very useful second thing i think is very helpful is judging because judging puts you in a different perspective it puts you in the perspective of having to evaluate other

88:29 people's impacts and evaluate them comparatively so in order to give a team the first and another team the second you need to evaluate why one team's impacts were more important one of his arguments in general if this session's about impacts then we're talking about impacts why one team's impacts are more important than another team's impact so it forces you to come up with a metric and the deliberation with other judges is in essence a debate on metrics

88:56 because unless you have the same initial call judges will disagree on what the intended or the most important metric is and you will have to explain why you disagree with the other judge and why you put the team above another team and this is an exercise in weighing and an exercising metrics i.e it forces you to prove the importance of impact and not just the impact itself but secondly it just gives you knowledge on how judge deliberations look

89:21 you actually get an insight of when judges have 15 minutes what do they spend the most time on where do they save time what do they cut out of the discussion you get an insight of what burdens of proof judges expect from teams and then with this knowledge you can tailor your arguments to this because you will know better what your judge expects so josh in tournament is a good way to get a different perspective into how to increase the efficiency of

89:44 your impacts and your arguments overall but insofar as the sessions about impacts that as well goes without saying the third thing is you want to regularly do prep time either alone or with your party so every now and then like twice a week take a motion on your own or with your partner try to come up with a case like prime minister speech in 15 minutes and then you can do a couple of things with this you can record this speech and

90:11 you can listen to it later you can try to find your own mistakes you can try to send it to a coach or judge you trust to give you feedback on this you can do exercises with this like for example if you can give a seven minute speech and then you listen to it and you try to shorten it to six minutes like do the same content in six minutes to try to see maybe where you are

90:29 wasting time what are you know things that are superfluous in your speech and stuff like this but also it's very useful to do this exercise for recorded for debates motions that have recorded debates so if you can find a motion that has a high quality recorded debate and you do prep time and you come up with a case and you deliver a speech and you listen to your speech and then you listen to an actual strong

90:55 top quality prime minister speech you can compare these things and then you can actually have a better insight of where you are lacking because you're going to have a reference point so doing regular prep by yourself with your partner and recording those speeches can be very useful in a number of ways a number of exercises and lastly this is just a mechanistic exercise i've heard used by good speakers and this is a three mechanisms exercise which is the same

91:22 if you want to practice proving impacts mechanizing them especially in you know a spar debate that do not have a large stake or do not have a stake at all because it's not a tournament force yourself to come up with three mechanisms for every argument even if they're done so even if you have two good mechanisms come up with a third even if it's valid force yourself to come up with some generic third mechanism because the

91:46 first thing that this does it force you to diversify it forces you to think out of the box you know search the depths of your brain for something else some other mechanism which we could run and then if it succeeds you have a larger repository of mechanisms for the future but also it allows you to ask for feedback in a more targeted way from judges because you can tell judges okay we got these three mechanisms can you give us specific feedback on

92:11 each of them how could we improve them or if we cannot improve them should we cut them all together the three mechanisms exercise means that in every situation you're going to have different individual mechanisms for which you can ask targeted feedback from judges and therefore improve your arguments into the future and i think this kind of approaching judges is always very important because people very often just ask for general feedback and this is good but this is the least useful thing

92:38 because if you ask for general feedback what most judges will give you is just a rephrasing of the oa and this is not useful you want to ask them for specific things you want improvement so in this case if you want improvement on impacting how could we improve on our impact and ask them how could we better weigh our impact or how could we better mechanize our impacts so specific feedback questions to judges improve the quality of feedback you're going to get

93:00 and therefore improve your capacity to be able to run better impacts and better mechanization into the future so this is just a couple of pieces of advice as to how you can be able to improve and this pretty much hits the hour and a half mark and this is also where i am done so if there are any questions people can ask them now if not i thank you for inviting me and i hope this has been

93:22 useful to everyone i'm gonna give it like 30 seconds