Harish Natarajan - Advanced argumentation. Almaty WUDC bid training platform.

0:04 Okay, welcome everyone. Hope you are all doing well wherever in the world you all are. I'm stuck in my house in London for about the ninth consecutive month. So, but hopefully you'll find something I'm going to say interesting today. What I'm going to talk about is advanced argumentation. But just before that, I always find this work best if if you have any questions, anything you think is unclear, feel free just to ask anytime during my speech.

0:33 And then I'll definitely take more questions and have more of a discussion at the end about bonds argumentation or any other issues. This is going to last approximately 1 hour, though feel free again just to ask questions whenever. If it goes on a little bit longer, I think I should hopefully be okay. Don't mind getting slightly sidetracked by a few questions. But I want to just start with what I think is some of the important things to take away from this. And then I want to break it down into five lessons I find to be quite useful when it comes to trying to improve your argumentation in debating.

1:09 I want to start with the three core takeaways from this. Most of these should be fairly straightforward. I think ensuring that you always keep them in mind can help a great deal. The first is always note what you are doing in a debate. That is every single team in any format of debating is trying to do the same thing. And that is to show on balance our side of the debate is correct. And in BP, that on balance our team has done the most to show that our side of the debate is correct.

1:48 The important part to identify about that is in any relatively balanced motion with relatively even teams, there will be arguments you will win and there will be arguments you will lose. There is a question as to why the arguments you win are more important than the arguments you lose. That's what we normally talk about impacting or weighing, but we'll talk more about that in a moment. But just always keep that in mind. You can lose arguments, you can win arguments. Neither one of those imply you win or lose the debate.

2:21 The second part of this makes debating sound really easy. But it's worth saying, which is there are four tools you use to do that, which is can you frame? Are you tell me what the important issues are? Can you characterize? Explain how these things actually work. Can you construct? Make arguments to actually prove the point. And can you rebut? Responding to the other side. If you can do all four of those things, it's easy. You'll easily win the vast majority of debates.

2:48 But just bear that in mind cuz I think there's a couple trends in debating which are worth noting here, which is teams now spend an awful lot of time framing. And that is certainly a valuable part of it. It is not by no means the only way in which you will win a debate. And often it is not the best way. On the simplest level, you can have the best frame plausible as to telling me what matters in a debate.

3:13 But if you haven't proven anything, you're going to lose that debate. And often what we'll see now is teams think the disagreement is about framing much more about the core arguments. And that leads to a second issue, which I think teams now spend less time carefully considering how they construct and definitely a lot less time carefully considering how they rebut. So, the focus has been a lot more on framing and a lot less on actually constructing the best arguments and responding to the strongest arguments which could be made.

3:45 And the final one, and I don't think people say this enough, is what is the point of analysis? You'll be told by judges, I need more analysis. Well, what does that actually mean? There are two purposes of analysis here. The first one is to make sure your argument stands up in a vacuum. Which is to say that I will that with no other information, the argument is still robust enough for me to believe it is true.

4:16 But the second purpose of analysis is can you keep your argument such that it stands to challenge? And it's very clear that those are its two functions. So, it's never do you have enough analysis or not. It's does it meet the purpose that it needs to meet, which is does it prove that the argument is true absent any response, which is a pretty low bar, and the majority of arguments which are made which go beyond assertion do that.

4:45 But the second is does it stand up to challenge? There's an important implication there. Which is when you're thinking about how you explain an argument, the kind of analysis you need behind it, you need to ask yourself what is likely to be challenged. If it isn't challenged, you probably don't need to spend a lot of time explaining it. if it is going to be challenged or you think it's quite likely that it will be, that's when you need explanation.

5:15 So, you don't need explanation or multiple reasons on things which are trivial. You need a partial justification, a few words on it, a few sentences on it. Maybe just to hedge the risk that some team would decide to challenge it, but they probably won't. Where you need the explanation is in areas which you are likely to be challenged at. And I guess those are the three big takeaways which I think everyone just needs to appreciate because once you get that in your head, everything else becomes secondary. Everything else is a detail.

5:45 And if you can do all of that, debating actually does become quite easy. Sadly, as we all know in practice, it's not quite that simple. But just remember, think about on balance are you showing the most to show your side or your team is proving that to show that your side is correct. Are you using all the tools available to you, which is framing, characterization, construction, rebuttal? And are you using analysis correctly? That is the low bar to begin with of making sure the argument is plausible in a vacuum. But the much higher bar, are you explaining the parts which are likely to be challenged?

6:25 All explanation, all justification ends somewhere. But are you doing enough on the parts which are likely to be contentious? And that's that's the basis of what I'm going to say. But let's give five areas where I think people can improve their argumentation and will help a great deal. The first one of these is almost trivial, but I don't think we understand it enough, which is those 15 minutes of prep are not meant to be 15 minutes of coming up with arguments.

7:02 This sounds paradoxical. But the reality is that if you practice carefully enough and if you focus on debating in the right way outside of the debate room, you will walk into the vast majority of debates with a large repertoire of arguments already. And those 15 minutes will be picking between them, applying them, and thinking how you will frame them. Now, let's stop and just think about how you actually do that.

7:35 We do most people most people listening to this will probably do quite a lot of time watching debates or actually debating. But if you think about debating as an academic sport, maybe that's self-aggrandizing or aggrandizing more than needs do, but just use that as analogy for a moment. Most of the time when you're actually practicing for a sport, it's doing drills. It's not actually doing the active debating. And almost similarly isn't simply watching debates or watching a sport. It's a lot more than that.

8:09 What I think we need to do here is come up with a repertoire of potentially powerful arguments. And how exactly do you do that? Now, there's two bits of it. One which sounds trivial and the second one which is a little bit less trivial and I'll spend a bit more time on. On the first issue, which is every single debate you ever do or any debate you watch, you need to think how would I do it better the next time? Or how would I make that argument better?

8:43 And teams sometimes do this when they lose a debate or they come second or they come third, but far rarer if you win a debate. But that's equally important. There is no debate which you are probably ever going to be in where you could have not where there isn't something you could have done better than how you do it. I think just training your mind to say, what would I do next time? What arguments would I make next time? What did I not like about how I even expressed this or the argument I made?

9:14 There will never be a debate where there isn't a way of you improving. And I'll go further. There probably will never be a debate where you couldn't make better arguments or better make the arguments you made. That's the first really straightforward one in terms of how you end up improving and how you have better arguments all the time. But the second one is how you read. I stress this. It's how you read more than what you read.

9:41 There are two things related to this. The first is if you just read newspapers, if you read The Economist, what you'll get a lot of is lots of examples, lots of facts. And that's useful, but it's not actually what you need. What you need in a debate is effectively a model. You have to have a model of how the world works, which is you need for a protest movement for instance. You would go, "Well, I've read all of the stuff about protest movements, but what do I actually extract out of it? What is not just about the civil rights movement in the United States or about Black Lives Matter, but can be used in a large number of debates?" What you're looking for is the various parts of the model which are underlying that.

10:25 What do I mean? Well, think of them in potentially sequentially. Why did Black Lives Matter become so successful? Well, you had a large incident, but that's happened before. So, it can't only be that, but it's probably a necessary but not sufficient condition. Step two, you probably need a lot of coverage of it. So, you need some kind of buy-in from the media. Well, what kind of media? Is there a difference between the social media age and the the pre-social age, the mainstream media age? The answer is probably. Maybe that has a difference in power dynamics. Or third, you now have a vanguard movement.

11:04 So, a handful of committed activists who use the information available, use the big incident as a way of starting a movement. Now, you need more people from within your group to join that movement. Maybe you need support from people outside of that group. And even then, you've just got to the point where you have a large protest movement. And you can keep doing this process as to how do you get to the outcome. That's sequential model-based thinking. So, you're starting with an example, which will be very widely covered, but the vast vast majority what you read would just be about that example or be about specific things which happened in the world. What you need to do is induct backwards. If this happened, why did it happen? What's the logical way in which it occurred?

11:58 And if something happened in the real world, there must be a logical reason of why it happened. If someone says, "This is the driving factor," it's probably one of the factors, but think about how you generalize it. And this is just a very important point, which is we read a lot, great, but you need to find the general model from it. And that is and that is an important implication. It goes well beyond just reading about international relations. Reading about absolutely anything which could come up in a debate, which is broadly almost anything, is useful cuz it allows you to uncover the general logic behind it, which is what you need to find.

12:40 I want to give you a couple of specific examples of where I find this to be useful. one for instance is the New York Times last year released a podcast called Nice White People. It was looking at the problems of white allies. It was focusing very narrowly on school districts in the United States. And the argument it was making was that well-meaning white allies created negative effects for the black community.

13:13 Now, the story underlying it is a lot about moving schools, about school integration, about Brown v. Board of Education, but the model was broader. What the model was is broadly this. Step one, there is a difference between the understanding of issues from those within the affected community and those outside of the affected community. In some cases, it's your life, you really experience it in everyday life.

13:44 In other cases, you have partial information and your own priorities. So, in the example of the podcast, a well-meaning white families in New York when being pushed to make a determination about whether they supported the building of a school which would primarily be, at least to begin with, for Puerto Rican and black students, they did support it. But they supported it being built closer to white areas.

14:15 Why? It wasn't because they wanted the school for themselves primarily, it's because they thought it would be great because that is wonderful for integration. But if you're black or Puerto Rican, why do you care about school integration? You don't care about it because you think of integration as a good in and of itself. Maybe you care a bit about integration. Probably what's more important is you get better schools. Well, now that think of these two communities.

14:44 The white community thinks, "I'm a good person. I like the idea of integration, so I support integration." The people actually affected are "Integration may be beneficial to the degree it gets our children better schools." That's step one, difference in understanding of the problem. In one case, the understanding is that the problem is a lack of integration, and the other case, the understanding is "Integration may be beneficial if it functions to get us better schools or get us better goods."

15:18 Step two, as a result, you're going to be pushing in different policy directions. In this case, you end up with a school further away from the community who is meant to benefit. That may be beneficial if your goal is purely integration. It is probably harmful if you want people to routinely be able to go to school, go to extracurricular activities, going an extra two miles can be very inconvenient for that. Step three, there is a difference in incentives here.

15:50 If you are black, your oppression is very difficult to separate from you. It's your life. These are things you have to be very committed to or to fight this level of oppression because it affects you in your everyday life. If you're white, maybe you you're reasonably committed to these, but at the same time, there's probably a limit to that because there are so many other things which matter to you and matter in your everyday life. So, it might be determinative maybe of your vote, maybe you'll decide to protest one day or write a few letters, maybe you want the school to be built.

16:27 But then, five years down the road, when you're trying to make a determination whether you send your child to the school and you're not convinced it's a good school, or you're you still like the idea of integration, but you don't like it so much that you're willing to subordinate your child's own interest to it, it's very likely that because your incentives don't align, that what you are happy to do is not send your child to the school.

16:53 You've already done your good deed. So, there is both a difference in understanding, which pushes you towards different solutions, and the difference in incentives, your commitment to be part of that movement and support those policies if they're detrimental to you, particularly because you can say, "I was a good person. Look at this stuff which I pushed." And the final part of that is all this is highlighting is you have a very powerful community which does not have a shared understanding with the with the minority community, which does not have shared incentives and commitment to the minority community, and at least in some cases, arguably in many cases, this leads to net harm.

17:44 So, the point I want to drive from that is if you read the article, if you listen to the podcast, what you get is the story. What you want is the model. And that is just about reading or listening or watching TV with the right mentality. It's not about the example, it's about finding the model which you can generalize in more and more cases. And then the example's great to make this all sound more plausible, but it isn't the goal in and of itself.

18:19 The final part related to it is if you are going to spend time reading, read about concepts. What do I mean by that? Well, find the concepts you think are which appear in multiple different debates. An example might be a collective action problem, network effects, ideas of positives and benefits of identity politics. Make sure you understand the theory of all of this. And you don't need a deep theoretical understandings. for instance, when it comes to philosophical concepts, people sometimes go to the Stanford Encyclopedia, which is a great resource, except it goes into far too much detail such that if you're trying to deploy more than a fraction of it in a debate, you'll end up probably both confused and confusing. But find those core concepts and work out how you explain them, and then just think about all the different cases you can apply it to.

19:15 So, if you're doing both of those things, reading, listening with the intention of finding the replicable model which you can use in multiple debates, and throw some nice examples on top of it, but that's the secondary point of it. And you're reading about concepts, thinking about how you explain them easily, and then just think about all the ways you apply them, what you'll end up with pretty quickly is probably a list of over 100 arguments which you will be familiar with, and you'll be able to deploy in debate after debate after debate.

19:55 And underlying all of this, there are very few debates which you will then ever find where you won't already have a good set of arguments to it. I probably estimate that if you do this for 6 months, not even very committed over that period, you will be able to come up with three arguments per debate at a very easily for either side. And maybe you'll have to think a little bit more deeply about some new material you want to add in your second speech.

20:29 But there'll be a lot of stuff which will just be immediately present to you. So that's the first one. Those 15 minutes aren't really about coming up with arguments. You will have those arguments before, and it's just about making sure that you have enough of them and a high enough quality. The second one I think I want to talk about much more quickly. And I do think it's a problem people run into, which is what I call step two, minimize replication.

20:58 We often watch debates from from anyone, or often in a debate room, and we hear something we like. And then you take that argument and you replicate it in another debate. And that's fine. I think that's part of the of the learning. I think if we're entirely honest, when you people have these arguments as to when debating is better now than it used to be. And one area where it is better and it's going to continue to get better is people are building on a corpus of arguments made in the past, which is things which may have been groundbreaking 15 years ago, something which was said in the debate, are now ordinary because we've heard it so many times.

21:42 And that's in some ways a positive. But here's my question related to that. If you've heard this argument a few times, someone wants you to deploy it. And someone else has heard this a few times and is able to deploy it. They probably know you're going to say it. They probably may have thought about a response to it. And how are you really impressing the judge? What are you doing here which makes your speech any different from all the other ones which were said before?

22:08 So, let's think then through how you would potentially deal with these two contrasting issues, which is you do want to build on other people's arguments. People are going to say smart and useful things, but you want to do something new. Well, it's fairly straightforward. One, once you hear it, ask yourself, how would you best respond? And once you work that out, ask yourself, how would you respond to the response? And you want to be building all of this up into the argument you eventually make, which is you may be making the same argument someone else made, but you've thought about the best responses and you're responding to those responses in the way you make the argument. The second one is pretty straightforward, which is how would you make the argument more compelling the next time you make it?

22:55 That could be how you say it, but it's also what you say, which is this one. ask yourself in a BP debate, you have nothing more to add except new analysis on this claim. What would it be? What I want from all of that is these arguments which you hear a lot should always be evolving. It isn't just that someone said it and you're going to say it. It's that someone said it and you're going to be saying it better than they did.

23:26 So things keep improving rather than simply replicating what was said before. And it doesn't matter who says it, and this is just trivially obvious. It can be in a world final, it can be in a world semi, it can be in Australs final. It can be in any any single room. I guarantee there are better ways of making any argument anyone has previously made. And it's about from your perspective, just to find a better way of you making it, making it better than you made it the last time, making it better than the last time you heard it.

23:58 And that can and that gives you added value. So let's think of an example of something which people use a lot in debates. Somalia. So from a world final, most debaters have heard a speech about, you know, the streets of Mogadishu and how the United States pulled out of Somalia because a few US soldiers were dead, which shows a lack of political will to maintain a maintain a true presence when you have your own soldiers dying. And you know, at face that's a pretty plausible argument.

24:37 It's not though a great argument unless you think how you go a little bit deeper into it. So here would be one of my responses if you were just thinking about that, which is sure that happened in Somalia, but how about Iraq, where US contractors were being killed, where their bodies were being burnt alive, and it was shown all over the US all over the US media. What was the response then?

25:07 Cuz the response doesn't need to be despondency and I give up and I surrender. Almost intuitively, in more cases, don't you think the response is you killed our soldiers, we want revenge? And similarly, a lot of global international relations seems to be about that. And actually I think this is a powerful observation. Someone takes a data point and goes, here's a general lesson we're trying to draw from it. Good, that's effectively when you're uncovering a model.

25:40 But is that the whole truth? Pick another data point, and you're coming up with a another you're coming up with actually the exact opposite conclusion. Not just different conclusion, literally the opposite, that you're more likely to go in, you're more likely to be violent, while the other side is saying you're less likely. you're more likely to pull out. You can't sustain these conflicts. Now, what do you do with these two observations? Well, we'll probably go talk a bit more about that later, but it's simply trying to explain that we can get outcome A, we can get outcome B.

26:12 Both of these are plausible, both of these happened in the real world. Which one is more likely and why? Or, under what conditions do you get outcome A? And under what conditions do you get outcome B? And you play around with those conditions depending on what side of the debate you're on, or what works best for you. But that's actually a fairly easy thing to do, not necessarily in the 15 minutes, but if you've heard the argument before, and you're not trying to replicate it, but you're trying to build on it.

26:45 On either side, this is incredibly powerful. Because if you're arguing the you're very likely to pull out because your troops die, and now your criterion as to why that is likely to happen, your added value here is here are the circumstances, this is why this happened. Maybe there are some examples where it doesn't, but here are the three features which mean whatever we're debating is similar to Somalia. And you can throw in that maybe it's different in other cases. Why isn't revenge a dominant motive here? But just having that means you're not repeating an argument, you're adding a great deal to it.

27:23 And if there's a general lesson from that, it's minimize replication, and always try to evolve the arguments which are being made. Be as critical as you can be about it. And the fact that 10 great debaters say it and everyone else tries to make this argument again and again does not make it true, nor does it necessarily make it good. Make that final step. Ask yourself, what is the best response? And you can do this in a debate often, but it is much easier if you're doing it before you are in the debate at all.

28:00 Let's go to step three. And as always, if anyone has any questions or any thoughts, feel free to ask as we go along. But step three, be generous. Underlying the skill in debating is to try and make yourself sound like you are the reasonable team. That one side is being unreasonable, i.e. they cannot be reasoned with. You're thinking about how complicated the world actually is, and not going to extremes alone.

28:38 The reality is for most people in most debates, the right and the best approach is to think somewhat more centrally. Try to think as to what's a reasonable, normal condition in which this will occur, rather than going, let's look at the extreme. So, if there's a debate about this house supports the norm that parents that children unconditionally love their parents. of course you can oppose that by going, yeah, but how about when you have parents which are abusive? Now, maybe that's part of the debate, maybe it's not, it probably isn't that vital there, but that isn't very effective cuz you've immediately gone the extreme case. That the side might go for the other case, parents always love their children. And theirs is probably actually in this case more compelling than yours, but even if it isn't, you're both just debating the extreme. They've taken one extreme position, you've taken another. Well, how about you go to the center and go, look, there is a huge spectrum of parents. Let's talk about the median kind of parent. Should you care in that case? Or ideally, go one step further towards their side. The parent who's trying but not always good, should you care in that case?

29:52 And the reason you do that is one, you can't be accused of only being extreme, but more importantly, you can go to the other side. They can be correct in these small set of extreme cases. We don't think that's the majority of the debate. We want to talk about the realistic majorities sets of cases here. And I think that's just partially the value of being realistic and being generous rather than being extreme. Now, that's only one very one very specific way in which this operates. I want to give you one which I think is probably going to be used more often.

30:34 Which is let's pick a motion. okay, so this isn't a great motion, but it's probably a good one to illustrate it. So, a while ago there was a motion about this house believes that the World Health Organization should determine all countries' responses to a pandemic. Now, let's leave aside how plausible this is, etc. Let's just assume that that happened. What is the first argument most people think about?

31:04 It's probably going to be that countries make decisions badly. Lots of reasons you can come up with politically or otherwise. Fine. what effectively you're saying is the system is broken. The status quo is broken. Let's pick something else. Now, you can make that argument pretty well. But let's be more generous here. Because what you're then setting yourself up for is a debate as to who makes better decisions, the World Health Organization or individual countries. And the answer is probably going to be it depends. Are we comparing Are we looking at Singapore or are we looking at Brazil? Are we looking at Taiwan or are we looking at the United Kingdom? And the answer The answer is going to be different.

31:53 Here's a better way of doing it. So, the motion we're looking at is the World Health Organization should determine countries' responses to COVID to a pandemic. Now, now the thing is, what's a more powerful way of approaching this motion? It's not to go the system is broken, people don't work well now. It's instead to go, let's assume countries act rationally or reasonably, that they act as they should act.

32:30 In other words, let's assume the system works as it's meant to. Is that good? And actually, there's a lot more you can say about it then. Because what you can say is, for instance, let's imagine Italy, which would have a which could at a case have a low numbers of infections. It may want to open up because that's in its own rational interest given the economic harms created otherwise. However, pandemics do not respect national borders, and by Italy opening up, even if that's rational for Italy, it may be bad for the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.

33:14 Now, you can agree or disagree with this argument. The core claim is just this. You are starting now with the claim that let's assume everything works as it should. Let's assume these countries are great at making decisions. How are they making those decisions? And who is it good for? And why is that bad for the world? Then if you want to step back, you can go, and they're not good at making decisions.

33:45 But it's similar to a debate about banning smoking. You could go, individuals make these decisions irrationally, and you probably want to make that argument. But you can also say, let's say they make the decision entirely rationally, even if they have information, and it's still bad. And there you're being more generous to the other side because you're not making out to be deviant cases of some people do things badly, some people do things well.

34:17 You're making it a general claim, which is even when you're doing things as they should be done with the incentives in place as they are, that is broken. So, if you're taking something away from this, it's don't go to the extremes, be generous, and you are then able to just come up with lots more arguments cuz it's not going to be everything is broken and everyone does this badly. It's even if they do it well, and they probably don't do it well.

34:53 And the fourth step related to this will be be reasonable, which is building on the last one. which is Let's think of it this way. let's have a debate about this house supports Trump's Twitter's ban on Donald Trump. Now, let's go for an argument most people probably wouldn't make. You could argue that it is wrong in any circumstance for a private company or for any company to ban anyone from a public platform, irrespective of what they say.

35:30 That would be entirely principally consistent. You could probably even run a really hardline principle to make that sound plausible. But you would almost immediately be in a difficult position. Not just cuz the other side and the judge probably has different intuitions. Someone would easily ask, "Okay, are you okay with outright incitement? So, incitement to violence." And then you've got a slight problem there. So, here's the question then. What is the middle ground?

36:02 In very few cases are things going to be absolutely clear or generally true for everyone. What you're looking for analytically is what criterion do we use to decide? Now, this sounds a little bit more abstract than I like it to be, but let's pick a couple examples. Let's start with a straightforward one. if you have a debate about legalizing all drugs, you know, if you're on government, that one of the arguments you'll probably make is people can rationally make that choice.

36:40 Opp is going to say, "Yes, people often will not be making that choice rational rationally or be because they're depressed, because of peer pressure, for all kinds of reasons that this is not a rational reasonable choice for individuals to make." Now, the second you realize that's going to happen, what's the reasonable position for you to be in? It's actually to concede the other side. It is reasonable to say that there are people who are going to make this decision rationally. Some people will.

37:13 And some people will make it irrationally. You are the reasonable side making the second you make that concession. You are not making a global this is true in every single case claim. You're making the claim it is true in some cases, and it is true and your case is also true in some cases. The question now becomes not whether people make the choice rationally. It's what is more important.

37:44 And the argument now becomes do we prioritize those individuals who make it rationally or those individuals who make the choice irrationally? And just think about this is slightly different than how we normally think about debating, which is you would probably get that motion, and you would probably almost immediately jump to a choice argument. But the real part of the analysis of this argument is not the fairly straightforward people can make choices themselves and decide what is good for them, and they will have information, we provide these in school, etc., etc. It's actually when some people make the choice rationally, and yes, it is true, some individuals may do things of peer pressure.

38:27 How do you make How Why is your group more important than ours? So, why is our group more important than yours? And there's lots of responses you can have. Is it about risk reward? sure, you're depriving individuals and of a way of enjoyment, and that is unfortunate, but you are also preventing a much greater harm, which is people being addicted, that costing them out large amounts of money, harming themselves, harming their families, being unable to work, whatever that is. It could be that this is just another distributional decision.

39:02 By that I mean that maybe one side says that you cannot a right is only a right if it cannot be if you if to exercise it irrespective of what other people do. I It doesn't seem to make sense that my right to free speech, which you consider to be an important right, is limited not because I misuse it, but because you misuse that right. Is that really a right when someone else can take it away from me not because of something I've done, because of something they've done?

39:31 Maybe that's one piece of analysis you can throw at us. An alternative one is this is just distributional. Some people gain, some people lose. This is similar to the to the notions of taxation which we will have, which is we are going to take money away from people who are more wealthy to redistribute it to people who are less wealthy. And that's the kind of decision we are all happy with the state making presumably to some degree.

39:57 Well, this is doing the same thing. Yes, you lose out cuz you can't enjoy a certain good and other people gain because I'm not going to be addicted. But we are okay making that choice. It's a reasonable legitimate choice to make particularly for these reasons. So, the focus of the analysis is no longer about proving the choice is rational or not, but actually proving how you weigh it up against each other. And that's just being reasonable because you're taking the other side.

40:29 You're conceding some of what they are saying. And the second you do that and you know you're going to do that, the actual analysis which you're going to be using shifts fairly dramatically. So, think of another principle which could be used in this case. let's go for let's talk about an act of omission principle. So, the idea of an act of omission principle is we all agree that doing harm is wrong. Is it also wrong to prevent harm being done?

41:03 And this is a pretty important principle in debating and within political philosophy and there are multiple different answers to that. But let's think about what you would potentially want to do if you're being very reasonable and generous to the other side. You probably would note that look, maybe we're un- we are unsure morally whether not donating to charity or an effective charity is in fact immoral. But here's what we all believe.

41:35 That not feeding your own child is not just an omission. It is immoral. And indeed, if you just look at the law, that would be child neglect and you would be punished as a result of it. Now, that might sound like an extreme example, but the point of the extreme example is to tease out an intuition. That it is not the act or omission which matters, but there are clearly cases where it is wrong and cases where at least we it's morally questionable. I say morally questionable here because it depends what the debate is. In some cases, you'll be happy to say that this is we accept this to be morally reasonably fair.

42:20 Well, now you've got that. Some cases where it's where to be on the back foot. You don't want to have to make an argument and then hear four responses which you hadn't previously included or preemptively responded to.

45:18 And it should be fairly obvious as to why. The first reason is clearly with a BP debate, there's the risk that that's from a team in the bottom half they've already taken down your argument. The second is it's going to take an awful lot of time for you to respond to. It's going to become a little bit messier. And the third is that almost irrespective where you are in a debate, you'll be missing some responses. So, say you get when you're in a debate, you'll be writing your speech, you'll be thinking about your POIs, you will not just be listening. And judging contrast at least if they're judging well is paying a lot more attention to the debate than you are.

45:56 An argument you miss which may be vital to your case could nonetheless be made even though you don't hear it. Now, if we heard everything whichever team says we miss nothing, that's that would be ideal, but that is very rarely going to happen. All of that means that what we need is to have previ- to be preemptive, to have a pretty good idea of what the responses are going to be and not wait for them to respond to them.

46:30 Now, how do you do that and how does that how do you make that sound relatively elegant? Cuz you don't want to be saying and as they will probably say blah blah blah blah blah. You just want to make it seem to be natural within the speech. and that isn't necessarily that difficult as long as you just think, well, what's their response going to be? Here's the premise I need to strengthen more. Here is my few sentences which are going to be responding to that claim. And even if no one makes the claim, your argument now sounds better. It sounds more robust and it almost certainly is better. So, there's no huge negative on you. Maybe a little bit of time is going to be lost, but the reality is we waste plenty of time in speeches anyway.

47:14 But the positive is the argument will stand up to challenge and even if those challenges never come up, it will seem better than it otherwise did. Now, how exactly do you think through this? Well, broadly every argument has three steps which is X is true, X being the argument. Step two, X is good or bad. Step three, X is important in this debate. Every single argument will explicitly or implicitly have all of those three parts.

47:45 So, step one when you think about preemption is which of these is likely to be contested? More often than not, someone will not contest whether this is good or bad. If they do, it's incredibly powerful cuz they flipped the entire argument. But more often than not, they don't do that. But just make sure that there is no way the other side can say compellingly that that's actually an argument for our side. So, let's put that aside.

48:17 Let's go to do you think they are going to question whether something is true? The increased trend now is people spend more time questioning its importance than its truth value, but that's only really general comment. There are going to be teams which will question the truth value of your statement. To which I think there's a couple of things you need to ask yourself. The first is we normally have several mechanisms now for an argument, but which ones of them are actually important? Do any individually prove that this happens? And the answer often is going to be yes, we just don't state it.

48:56 So, every time you have a mechanism, ask yourself not just is this a mechanism, but actually how powerful of a mechanism is it? Does it prove it in isolation or do you need a compound number of reasons to make something to be accurate? If it proves it in isolation, great. If it needs to be compounded, also potentially good, but bear that in mind because that's probably going to be slightly less powerful reason. And then ask yourself is which ones of these are most likely to be attacked.

49:29 Now, the point of this is twofold which is if you have say three mechanisms and they attack one, but the two other by themselves make prove the point, your argument still stands. If they knock down all three, presumably it doesn't. Well, how are they going to be attacking these? What are their likely responses going to be? And the best proxy for that is potentially how you would respond to your own argument, particularly if you thought about this before the debate. If you thought about it for 20 minutes, how you would build it, how you would attack it, you're probably going to have some damn good responses to it. So, you can definitely think about the responses to those responses and make all of it stronger than it otherwise would be.

50:17 And then it's just about making it sound relatively natural, ideally, but if you can't, then just like and and and potential responses include blah blah blah, but none of these work for blah blah blah reason, I guess do that, it's still better than not responding. The second is why is it important? It will be fair It will be fairly clear that teams will try often to respond by saying it's untrue and it's unimportant, fine. Well, how are they going to claim this argument is unimportant?

50:49 Again, because of what you've done, because you've thought about all of this beforehand, you'll probably know the answers to it. If you don't know the answer to it, it's something you have to work out in those 15 minutes of prep and something which you'll have to be thinking about in the debate. If you can avoid being preemptive cuz you know the likely attack when it comes to being important, avoid being reactive, and you can be preemptive instead, you can be so much more powerful and you'll be saving yourself a lot more effort and you can make the other side look bad. It just goes and we responded to this with I don't even need to repeat all the analysis my partner said, here is an additional response.

51:33 So, being preemptive is vitally important. Trying to do so elegantly is nice, but the best way of being preemptive is to think about the responses you would have given yourself. That is a lot to do, and this is kind of a point I'm making from the start. All of this is a lot to do in 15 minutes. It is not a lot to do if you've actually done a lot of the work before you've ever stepped into the debate room.

52:01 And that work is going to be partially about hearing up the arguments and iterating and improving on them and partly about reading more effectively and finding the models and then finding the responses from that. So, I'm going to stop now and just answer any questions and take it from there. Okay, as part of being generous and reasonable, what do you think it makes different arguments that are contingent on different scenarios, argument A, scenario A, argument B, scenario B. This is just proving one scenario is likely to happen. Scenario A happens 90% of the time, so argument A is the most important argument and then proceeding to make arguments from there.

52:48 Okay. so so there are two things which are relevant here, which is if I paraphrase the question, an argument can be compelling in a certain environment with a certain characterization of the world and uncompelling in others. So, do you go through all the potential scenarios or do you focus on one, which is likely to be the most is going to be the one which is most likely? it depends, but what I would say is the following.

53:27 If you decide to say this debate is about scenario A because that happens in 90% of the cases, my entire case is going to be based on it, the risk to use really clear that the other team goes, no, this is about scenario B. And the debate then becomes which one of these scenarios, which one of these characterizations of the world is more likely to be correct. And that's a debate you can win, but it's a pretty hard It's pretty narrow debate. It's going to be which characterization does the judge believe in.

54:02 If you are doing that, you need to be very, very aware that nothing the most important argument is scenario A happens much more and is what the debate should be about. If the alternative is to do the following, I think teams probably do have enough time, which is well, there's two alternatives here. Alternative one, which is the one you talk about, which is here is a scenario, it happens a lot, here are the arguments which win as a result of it, and maybe later in the debate, if you're stuck and you can't win on scenario B or scenario C, you go back and say this is why scenario A is the most likely, even if we lose on those two extreme cases, this is the one which matters the most. So, you can evolve it into a characterization debate if you have to.

54:54 but you're at least covering your bases, which is you have said something about scenario B, you have said something about scenario C, and the odds are that they'll be wanting to talk about some of those scenarios, too, so you're also responding to their case directly. And you're giving it to them on their grounds. The alternative way of doing so is what scenario do they want to argue is the most likely? What one works for them? Let's win on those grounds. Now, it is not the majority of cases, but even in the case they believe it exists, we still win that.

55:31 And if you do, that's very powerful, not just strategically, but particularly if winning scenario C implies you win scenario A or B. I'm trying to think of a good example of when that would be the case, which is Okay, this is this is a crazy hypothetical, but like this house would spread democracy, this house would use all necessary means to spread democracy. If you are able to prove that this is a good idea in China, as in to try and spread democracy through military means in China, you probably won a debate which is this is a good idea to spread it by in less military powerful militarily powerful state.

56:12 That's an extreme example of it, but I think it's actually quite illustrative of sometimes winning the one which is beneficial for them could imply you win other ones as well. It doesn't necessarily, but that would make it very powerful. But if you win the China debate, you win all of them. I wouldn't necessarily recommend trivia We would not recommend that strategy for that debate, but I would be wary about just trying to go one scenario which is very likely to happen and we win all the arguments there because you're leaving yourself very exposed to a rejection of characterization and making it about characterization.

56:50 Any other questions? Okay then. Okay, great. How would you unbalance pre Yeah, so balance preemption, this is giving them an idea of what to run. Here's the thing. there are there are two different kinds of preemption here. One is trying to preempt an entire new strain of argument they're going to run. The other one is preempting responses they are going to give to your case or could give to your case.

57:23 If you've already thought about what the responses they're going to give to your case are, who cares if they run it? You you know how to defeat the argument. They are wasting your time. You've got a reasonable response preemptively first, you know the argument they're going to run, and second, you're going to be able to say a great deal more about it. It is disadvantageous to them to then try and run it because you partially responded and now you can respond again very, very easily. They're not catching you off guard. The loss here is 15 seconds at most.

57:53 Second, I actually think very few teams get lots of ideas of big things to run in a debate, which is if you particularly a team directly across from you. It's a little bit different on the bottom half, which I'll talk about in a moment. And you go, here's an entirely new argument which I think you're going to run and here's why it's nonsense. They have two choices here. Either they had already prepared that and now you attack it, fine.

58:22 you're you're the exact same You're in a better position than you would be if you had to just respond to it when it was later made. Or they haven't thought about it and now they think about it and now they're going to build it. How many speakers or how many teams are really good at making a good argument, a good constructive argument in 60 seconds of thinking when there are multiple other things to do? The answer is not quite that many.

58:48 And even if they are, they'll be needing to do this rather than listen to the rest of your speech. And what I said before, which is and even if they make it well, you've already thought about the argument, you've pre-batted it, and if you have to go further into rebuttal, well, you've already thought a great deal about it. So, none of that seems to be a huge risk to me unless it's something really subtle and really powerful which you don't think anyone else would think of, then sure, don't don't go down that line. I think that's actually a really small number of cases where you think there's something really great they won't come up with, but you have a really great response in the small chance they do, okay, leave that scenario out, but I don't think that's happened that often.

59:30 In terms of what when not to do this because what the bottom half could do, I think I think you just kind of have to treat them as if they are going to run it. The reality is you have no idea what they're going to run. This is an argument you think to be powerful, you think they could make, you might as well try and respond to it. Because here the two risks are There's two risks here, which is you give them an argument, not great, but at least you've done something about it. Or you don't give them the argument and they run the argument anyway, and then you're totally screwed because you could have responded to it. Maybe you'll get a 15-second chance to do so.

60:11 But odds are you probably won't even be able to do that. And even if you do, if you've already preempted it, it makes life much harder on them. So, I think there are very few cases where preemption is a bad idea unless it's preemption of a really subtle argument or one which is really great or one you think would actively or one you think you cannot potentially preempt. which is it's just too powerful. Which in which case you're kind of in a difficult position. Though, to be fair, if there's an argument you absolutely don't think that you'll ever have a response to that's really powerful, perhaps you just concede it and hope no one responds. That or no one even notices and they don't bring it up again. That I think that's probably a rare scenario.

60:56 Any other questions or clarifications on either one of those? Okay, then. well, for all of you, enjoy the rest of your day, which I don't think it's going to be long for most people. So, enjoy your weekends. And feel free to ask any questions later. Bye.