If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him

I bring two pieces of good news (and one slightly sad rant, to do with the title of the post today, but that'll be in a bit).


First, the Thomians won the Thomian-Marian debate tournament this year, the first time they've done so in 8 years. (I should add that I added to this record: we lost the Marian-Thomian debate in 2005 because I — erm — got carried away by the crowd and did a horrible job as third). The motion this year: THW revoke the quota for women in executive jobs.

It was good because they did well, running a competent opposition case and clashing with the Marians at all points of the debate, as opposed to them winning on the grounds of being the 'slightly-less-lousy' team. Plus: we had a good time watching the match, and — I think this was true for Paul and Sam and Kevin as it was for me — we went home rather happy with the results. They were all pretty promising.

In other news, Ida, Kevin and I were treated to lunch by the Greenian squirrels earlier today. They carted us off to Hartz Chicken, after which Kevin invited us over to Swinburne to debate BP style.

(The Greenians were all very excited about this).


A note about the young Greenians: I have never before met a team of hyperactive debators so awesome and so driven. They're eager to learn, never down and out, not too serious, and are getting bloody good at debate. Granted, they've got a bit more to go before being absolutely great, but I'm willing to bet that they'll be a team worth watching in a couple of years.

Now on to the sad, serious bit: the BP style motion we debated on was THBT If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him. I was first speaker for the closing Opp.

Paul opened the debate by defining God as a principle, or 'anything we devote ourselves to, be it an obsession, a deity, a stance or a philosophy'. This was an odd sort of setup, bordering on a squirrel, but he thought it an interesting enough case to run.

Fortunately for us he then spent the last half of his speech on argumentation: that a moral landscape requires a God to function, without which moral systems would fall apart — this was an old Christian argument, one the atheists have long had responses for, and it was something Opp could grab on to and harp about.

Which was what happened next: Kevin opened the opp bench by misrepresenting Paul's case-set, and then he re-set it in a more conventional place: God is God, and if tomorrow we were to find out that He was a lie, then it would not be necessary to invent Him, for there are systems of morality out there that do not depend on God's existence to work. Kevin's main argument was that people can only believe in something that's proven to be real. Therefore, creating a religion around a fiction is no good for both the believer and the morality imposed by that system.

I extended Opening Opp's case by arguing that we are already living a Godless society. So what's the big deal if God were to die tomorrow?

We will go home today and drive back to our Godless lives; we watch and read a Godless media, we are governed by a Godless government, and we study — or at least our kids have — a Godless education. Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen: if God were to be proven fake tomorrow, society probably wouldn't even bat an eyelid - we're already living as if God did not exist.

It broke my heart a little when I said that. Mostly because I realized that it was true.

I can't decide if there's any way to reconcile that with a God-centric society. History has shown us that whenever God and Government are mixed, bad things happen. No matter how good God is supposed to be, man will screw up; so the saying goes: from the crooked timber of man no straight thing was ever made.

And this has been happening for a very long time. It used to be that God was the center of society. Religion played a huge role in just about everything - government, wars, schools of thought. And then it failed. Fast forward a couple decades - mankind turned its faith to the philosophies of government. There was, for a time, a huge amount of belief in democracy and communism, and socialism, and so on so forth. People fought wars over such things. But we all know how that turned out - we were let down, yet again, with the fall of the Second World.

Today, we live in what academics call a Postmodern world. There is nothing at the centre of society. Relativism rules the day: you can be of one religion and I of another, and it's perfectly alright because your religion governs your values, and mine governs mine. Everything is relative, nothing is absolutely true. And so the value systems that we regard highly today aren't particularly beholden to any one morality.

This was a highly simplified summary of the development of the Postmodern world, but again I spoke with an internal voice screaming away at me. I think it's an incredibly odd thing to be a staunch Christian and to argue for the development of a Godless society. It's sad because it's against all I believe in, and it's sad because it's true.

How does this link to the motion? Well, if God were to die tomorrow, we would not need to invent him. We already live without Him. And despite side Government's case that morality will crumble without a divine base, we know this to be fake: today, we live without God, and we have not descended into anarchy.

(...) What keeps mankind from descending into chaos? For starters, we already have systems of morality that do not require God to exist. But — and we know this, do we not? Society is kept from anarchy because we believe in secular ideas of wrong and right: ideas of human rights, and the social contract, and the harm principle, and the principles of truth and justice. Our government has long enforced right and wrong without the authority of God, and we can very well survive the loss of a deity. After all, we no longer hear a politician justifying a case with the Bible as his reasoning. We hear him arguing from principles of justice, or equality, or rights. This wasn't true a hundred years ago — a hundred years ago we would have heard theological arguments — but today, never.

And so, I wonder now: what if it's impossible to have a God-fearing, God-loving society? The right-wing Christian nuts in the GOP, for instance, have shown us how idiotic such an approach might morph into — instead of sharing in the grace of God, they mandate such laws as the right to deny service to a homosexual in the state of Texas, the right to teach creationism (and ignore scientific evidence w/r/t evolution) in Louisiana, and they reject global warming simply because 'the Bible doesn't say so.'

It's often a common refrain in churches to talk of 'revival'. "Let's bring revival across the land!", they cry. But what if that's not possible, due to the lessons we have learned that led to the separation of church and state?

I'm no longer sure I would support a theocracy, even one supported by a coalition of churches. But now that I'm writing this, I think that there could be something in having a Godly government. Like the founding fathers, who believed in the separation of Church and State and yet created their government on the bedrock of Godly principles. Maybe that would work. I don't know.

What I do know is this: if God did not exist, it would certainly not be necessary to invent him. Society already lives without him - it is possible to go through your entire week with no connection with God beyond the compulsory Sunday service. We live in a Godless world, and it would be a lie to say it isn't so.

Good Debaters

I've been thinking about training debaters for about four years now. It's not much, but it's been a very interesting, if at times frustrating, experience. Today I think I've found the answer to a question that has bugged me for the longest time: how do you create a good debater?

I started my coaching stint in 2008, thinking that perhaps the fastest route to scoring debate wins was to teach my kids case creation. This was a bias with how I worked, as a debater: I preferred using clever cases to win debates (sometimes to my own detriment).

But this didn't work out the way I planned. Good case creation requires a degree of creativity, and I was not equipped to teach creativity. A whole bunch of debaters got bored and walked out on me. I was distraught. Unprepared, the Thomians bombed the 2008 Swinburne Debate Championships.

In 2009, Paul and I thought that perhaps if we taught the basics of debate everything else would take care of itself. It was a pretty naive belief, in retrospect. We sat down and designed a basic syllabus for high school debate as we knew it, in Kuching (including, of course, what we thought about certain city-specific debate idiosyncrasies). This took us about a year to get right.

It was at the end of that year that we realized that this simply wasn't enough. As a result of our work, the Thomians became pretty good with the basics of debate. This is still true today (and will likely be true for the next few years, so long as they stick to the debate letters) But, as any experienced debater might tell you, mastery of the basics has very little to do with winning tournaments. Truth be told, the Thomians had a pretty bad run that year.

But — and it behooves me to say this: in 2010 Saravana, one of our juniors, got to be a really good debater, as president of the Thomian debate team. And he did it with no help from us at all. Aha! We thought. Perhaps the secret to becoming a good debater was to teach juniors! Because if you taught other people, the logic went, you'd be so motivated to keep ahead of them that you'd become good in the process.

So we tried that this year. Or at least, we put an experiment to test: there was a new batch of juniors who had to teach the next generation of debaters. Would they become good, too?

The answer: no, they didn't, not really. They were good, good enough to give most teams a fair fight, but they weren't good enough to be in the teams that entered the breakout rounds. Oddly, they didn't get as good as Saravana did.

So that wasn't it. And at this point we were at a loss. What could it be, possibly? I was frustrated beyond belief at this stage. I didn't get it. How could this be?

My frustration was, I must admit, made worse by the fact that we had no idea how we got good. Or, worse, how we got good in the absence of proper debate training. My juniors have, on average, three times as many debates in a single year in 2009 than I did in my entire high-school debating career. And yet I was still better than them. How could this even happen?

When Paul first entered Swinburne debating, he was considered a 'prodigy'. He was a high school debater who was at least the best of his batch, and good enough (and promising enough) to be part of the club's roster. It was only a few months later that Swinburne sent him to the World Championships.

A year or so later, Paul invited me to train with his Swinburne mates. I was rusty, and somewhat bad, but I could at least hold my own against them. This surprised me. I wasn't as bad as I had imagined.

Immediately, a couple of elements presented themselves as possible factors:

1. Debate demands maturity. I was older, and therefore better read, and therefore I was better than my juniors.
2. I had more 'experience'
3. The Thomians aren't intelligent. Other schools had bigger, cleverer pools to choose from
4. The Thomians are all male. Only debate teams with females on them had a chance of becoming great
5. Good debators need good general knowledge. The Thomians had lousy general knowledge.

One by one, over the past four years, Paul and I began to test these possibilities.

A few were quickly proven to be false. 2) was wrong, because in 2009 I simply did not have as much 'experience' as my juniors did, on a debate-for-debate basis. Yet I still thrashed them. 4) was wrong, because at the highest levels of debate, teams are heavily weighted to male debaters. 5) was also false — other teams had equally bad (or perhaps slightly better) general knowledge, yet performed disproportionately better as compared to the Thomians.

So that left 1) maturity, and 3) intelligence.

1) is likely a factor. I've not had the time to devise a test for this, but generally speaking, you need a baseline level of maturity to be a good debater. This we take as common knowledge.

But there is a problem here. In the Junior category in Swinburne, teams compete with more or less the same levels of maturity. And from anecdotal evidence, maturity usually is constant, to a degree that does not explain disproportionate differences in ability. Yet these other teams (like Hui Mei, Malachi and Melanie of Green Road, winners of 2011's Junior Category) have something that I don't see in my Thomians.

Factor 3), intelligence, is harder to argue against. Paul and I sometimes bring it up in the guise of 'talent'. We would say: perhaps our ability is something we both had, and that we can only hope to see in our juniors. I hated this idea — if it were true, it would be crushing: I would have to accept that excellence in debate was nothing more than a series of flukes, determined by the quality of talent that just so happened to join the debate club in a particular year.

"But no!" Paul said, earlier today. "That's not true! When Stephen Obed first joined SDC, he completely sucked! He stuttered, he couldn't speak properly, he had no analysis, he had nothing!"

Stephen Obed is one of the best Swinburne debaters I have ever seen.

He got good by hounding adjudicators. He spent hours arguing with seniors, sometimes to 1am in the morning, in bars after debate meetings. His neighbours thought he was slightly mad, because he rehearsed whole speeches on his balcony, at night, speaking to himself (and rather loudly, at that).

"He's obsessed." I said to Paul, my eyes growing wide. "We're obsessed!"

In high school, I spent days practicing arguments: testing speeches against myself, out loud, while watering the plants or cutting the grass or doing laundry. Paul would obsess over debates long after the fact, thinking through every second, wondering if he could tweak certain bits to favour his team. Saravana went insane teaching debate to his juniors; he also spent hours at night reliving debates he lost.

"Every debater I know to be good," Paul said, slowly, "Obsessed about getting better."

It was obsession. That was the secret sauce. Not everyone had it.

Now of course it's true that debaters have to be matured enough, intelligent enough, experienced enough, and knowledgable enough to be truly good. And it's also true that forcing debators to teach their juniors will make them better, just as it did Saravana and me. And it's also true that getting debaters to adjudicate will accelerate their growth, just as it did Ida and Julie. But I realize now that I had it all backwards: it was not enough to teach debaters to be matured, smart, experienced and knowledgable; nor was it enough to execute a million and one coaching tricks — all this was useless if they weren't obsessed.

A normal debater would be depressed about a debate he/she lost, and get on with his or her life. An obsessed debater would spend the next six months thinking up rebuttals to arguments his opponents made. I still do — in fact just last month I thought of a brilliant case set-up to use in a semi-final debate I had lost over a year ago.

But I think there's another element to this that I had not previously realized: Swinburne, Green Road and Lodge have largely been built around loose, autonomous teams. Teams were free to pursue their own strategies, as they saw fit. St Thomas's keeps its debaters without teams for a good part of the year; most of our organization is at the club-level, not the team-level. By this I mean debaters often have more allegiance to the club than to their own individual teams.

Paul and I became obsessed because we had each other; we would grab a small nook after every debate to analyze what we could have done differently, regardless of the outcome. We egged each other, and got better in the process. Likewise, debaters in teams will tend to get better the same way. Perhaps that is one way we can organize to encourage obsession.

By and large, however, this discovery has made me very happy. It is not my fault that my Thomians have performed badly. It is the result of a trait, one that appears in debaters individually. Getting better is thus no longer a function of training more extensively — it is now a function of finding obsessed individuals, putting them in teams, and then letting them take their training into their own hands.

Courage, My Friend

I'm programming right now, so I'll make this quick — just to record a few thoughts I had this morning.

I learned today that St Thomas's Junior Team dropped out from Swinburne WSDC, because a member of theirs got scared and pulled out from the team. As a debate coach, I used to find this sort of thing despicable. (I still do, to be honest). With that said, there isn't anything new about this when you're working with high school kids. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to sit down with a scared first-timer, and talk to him into joining a competition. "It'll be alright." I tell him. "You'll thank me for the experience." (The ones who do go almost always do).

Sometimes they listen, and go to Swinburne, pale-faced and clammy at the start of the tournament. Other times they make some lame excuse and drop out, and let their team-mates, their school, and their coach down.

The funny thing about these kids is that I find the ones who dared — the ones who were brave enough to go, who were willing to swallow their fear and fight for their school — more impressive as individuals. And almost everyone I've met in Uni who've done cool things have this element of facing up to their fears and conquering them. Regardless of whether it's applying for a scholarship, or applying for an internship (I have two friends who are going to intern at Facebook, and then later Google, this summer), or tackling some new problem in a field they know little about.

Now, I'm not saying that the kids who don't conquer their fears would end up as failures in life. Life is too long and too random to predict anything of the sort. (It's fair to assume that some of them would come into their own in Uni, after all — and I really hope that they do). But by and large, I'd say that the people who matter — the ones who change things, in the world — are the ones who face their fears, swallow bile, and conquer them.

In this way, all the kids who attended Swinburne today are winners. Each and every single one of them. The ones who dropped out of WSDC— or worse, the ones who dropped out and caused their team-mates the opportunity of going and learning — are the real losers of this tournament. My only hope is that they grow up to realize that.

The Debate Letters

In 2009 I was in my second year of teaching debate at SMK St Thomas's. During that time, I began writing weekly letters to the Thomians, as an aid to the things that I was teaching them at the regular training sessions. I called them 'The Debate Letters', and intended them to be a syllabus for debate training in the school after I left.

(I did most of the writing, but Paul helped me design the structure of the syllabus - e.g.: which concepts to teach first, and so on.)

Three years on and these letters have proven their worth: St Thomas's went to the semi-finals last year, and are now regarded as worthy opponents in Swinburne's WSDC Tournament. A number of other schools got their paws on the letters: St Colomba in Miri use them for training, and St Mary's had them by default, seeing as I was coaching both St Mae and St Thom for a time. I'm also fairly certain Batu Lintang and Kuching High have a copy, though I'm not certain as to their dissemination or use.

I am, today, on the eve of the 2011 Swinburne WSDC tournament, making these letters available to all schools. You may read them here. I've actually been considering this for a few years now: if the debate letters has been so helpful to the three schools who use it, why not make it open and give all other institutions the benefit of this experience?

I have two main reasons for doing this:

1) A rising tide raises all ships. If all the debate teams in Kuching improve, then St Thomas's, too, would benefit. There is no joy in debating in an environment where crap teams win because of crap adjudicators. The more teams recognize quality debating when they see it, the better off everyone would be.

2) This is in line with my debate philosophy: I teach debate not merely because I like the sport, but because I believe it's a wonderful tool with which you may teach kids the elements of critical thinking. And God knows, we need more critical thinkers in Malaysia.

Print it, read it, copy it, modify it to suit your needs. And please, if you're reading my blog, I'd appreciate it if you spread this to as many debators in as many schools as possible.

Your Hair Tickles My Ear (WSDC)

1.

The Grand Finals for the Swinburne World Schools Debating Championship is held in the Swinburne Sarawak campus Lecture Hall, a beautiful, carpeted, multistage auditorium with plush green-and-white padding for walls and crystal acoustics (if you're interested, that is - like I was - in the tonal differences of each speaker's voice). The adjudicators sit in two rows of cushioned ecstacy, 2nd and 3rd from the front; flow sheets and paper on black plastic surfaces that swing out at an angle from the sides of the auditorium seats. In front of them is a scrum of photographers. Their faces are attached to the behinds of their mounted SLRs, which are in turn attached to silver aluminium frames and adjusted to handle the orange downlights of the hall. Everyone, from adjudicator to lensmen to the 100 odd students seated in all extremeties of the auditorium, is staring at two benches and a presentation platform; rising up over these is a projector screen, displaying the motion for the Grand Final; in the middle, dead centre in the front of the hall, is a single mounted mike. It is from this mike that the final speeches of the final debate of WSDC 2009 are delivered, and it is from this mike that the dreams of so many individuals of the past four days are awarded, or destroyed.

To understand the weight of the competition in that room, in what is but an intra-school debate competition, you would first have to understand the context of this final debate. The Swinburne World Schools Debating Championship is a yearly tournament held at high school level in the icy classrooms and the carpeted halls of the Swinburne Sarawak campus. Most of this competition happens in the aging G-block auditorium in the main Swinburne building, with its vomit-coloured carpeting and its 9-flights of stairs and its lack of reliable elevators; and also in two rooms with uncovered ceilings in the B-block. Each high school is allowed to enter up to four teams, divided by age category: two teams for the Seniors (Form 4 and above), and two teams for the Juniors (Form 3 and below). WSDC is four years old as of press time; it is organized by a team of highly-experienced Uni-level debators and administrators, it owes a huge amount of support to Swinburne's academic staff, and it owns a solid reputation for being the only debate competition worth joining in the whole of Kuching city.

This year, however, that reputation took a hit. The Grand Finals (THW respect the right of North Korea and Iran to develop its nuclear potential) between Gapor A and St Joseph A turned out to be one of the messiest debates in the entire competition. And that is strange, if you think about it, for two particular reasons. The first reason is that the scoring systems in debate tournaments are designed to promote the very best teams to the finals (as in every other competitive sport system, to be honest). Good teams don't normally cause messy debates - if they do, they know how to salvage them at the latter part of the round. In simple terms, an uncharacteristically messy debate in the finals would mean that the two teams in the finals aren't the best in the competition, but they got there anyway. Secondly, consider: it is within the organizers' best interests to have a lively, high quality debate at the tail end of the tournament, not only because the finals is the round that matters most, but also because they are the ones with the most people watching. The very fact that the GF was a lacklustre debate should raise a few red flags in anyone's head - and for good reason. Something went wrong in this year's WSDC. Something allowed two lacklustre teams access to the finals, and something allowed two uncharacteristically lousy debates to happen in front of a hundred-odd audience. The feedback I'd gotten from high school students, post-competition, have largely been negative, with one or two telling me that they're 'pissed off with Swinburne'. I do not believe that this is Swinburne's fault. I believe instead that a series of things came together in exactly the wrong way to cause a general skew in this year's competition results. This post attempts to explain how this happened.

2.

Swinburne WSDC as a debate tournament is organized in the generally accepted fashion of international debate competition. It's divided into two stages: the first, called the preliminaries, consist of a collection of rounds used to determine the 8 teams that would later advance into the second section. This second section are the elimination rounds, where losing means being kicked out of the competition. Swinburne's system is designed to keep the strongest teams in play, and they accomplish this via two particular ways. The preliminary matchups are done by power placement, a mathematical approach to pit teams of equal ability against each other. How exactly they calculate this and what algorithms they use I won't know, but let's say for the sake of argument that this system is perfect, and that it gives us at the end of the prelims an ideal list of teams arranged according to ability. The top 8 teams on that list for both categories is then taken out and moved into the elimination rounds. The second system that Swinburne uses is simple: in the elimination stage the strongest teams (that is, the teams that placed at the top of the break) are pitted against the weakest teams (the ones at the bottom). This means that the top team goes up against the 8th team, the 2nd against the 7th, and so on so forth. Hypothetically, at least, this system allows the good debators an easier run into the finals.

The second system that we need to talk about when we want to figure out what went wrong in WSDC is the way adjudication is carried out. Swinburne's system does not allow conferring of opinion between adjudicators while giving out scores. They assume that all adjudicators have experience in judging debate, and therefore each and every individual should make their own decisions according to that experience. Again, this system makes sense at an international level - in a competition where all adjudicators are above a certain threshold of experience, a prevention of opinion-sharing helps to stop overly-opinionated people from influencing the decisions of other adjudicators. A gag-order also provides a check and balance to the inherent subjectivity of the sport - sometimes (though this happens very rarely) debates are so close that the winning team becomes a matter of opinion, in which case a majority decision in an odd-numbered panel is the fairest way of deciding the winner.

The one last thing that we've got to make clear before we move on to what went wrong: adjudication in debate is a tricky thing. There are half a dozen different things an adjudicator needs to look out for - and the most important of these is the difference between a good debator and a good public speaker. There is a tendency for inexperienced adjudicators to award rounds based on the speaking ability of the speakers, ignoring in the process the importance of debate skills like strategy and flexibility and the ability to highlight relevant issues at the right time in the debate. I'd say that non-debators have a harder time knowing when a debator they're adjudicating is doing something smart vs when he's just spewing wonderful-sounding garbage. The earlier matches of WSDC saw teachers entering debate rooms as trainees, under experienced Swinburne debators. They had no say on who won or lost the round. Midway through the prelims, however, some teachers demanded that they be allowed to adjudicate in proper, at which point Dr Sooch agreed and placed them as panelists.

3.

So what happened this year? If we look at the the preliminary rounds we will find that certain teams had an easier time breaking into the elimination stage: St Mary A for instance, went up against 4 junior teams. On the flip side, we see junior teams like Green Road D competing against 4 senior teams in 4 out of their 5 prelim rounds. I'd like you to note that this happens even in top international competitions, especially when those competitions have teams that number in the hundreds. But in this case the random-luck effect was made more pronounced by the fact that the algorithm used in power matching failed to take into account the real ability of these teams - like whether or not these teams were junior or senior (which, I'd say, matters more at high school level than at University level, due to the large gap in maturity between the two categories). All the system takes note of is the number of wins vs the number of losses, and the teams who win go up against other teams who also win. In this system, it doesn't take a genius to figure out there would be scenarios in which junior teams who win against other junior teams suddenly find themselves up against a senior team that has also won in the last round (and that when they lose that round, they suddenly find themselves against another senior team ... but one that lost the last round). Because the algorithm does not discriminate between quality of wins, certain teams benefit, going up against multiple junior teams, while other teams lose out.

These imperfections in the preliminary matchups meant that the results in the elimination rounds were affected as well. Teams that shouldn't have met up in the Quarters and the Semis did, and having two high-quality teams go up against each other in earlier elimination rounds meant that there was less of a chance of the best teams ending up in the finals. 

But there's more to it than that. Let's take a look at the two finalists of the Junior category - which by the way, between them performed a classic lousy debate in the Junior finals. Both these teams benefited from an added effect - one that came about through a flaw in the adjudication systems. The gag-order between adjudicators in debate rounds that made sense at international level worked against WSDC, simply because they were not designed to compensate for inexperienced adjudicators. St Teresa C won a prelim round even though they'd presented a hung-case because two high school teachers overrode the Chair.^[1] Lodge C, in turn, won an elimination round because two teachers overrode their Chair and awarded their team the debate, making their decision solely on the performance of Lodge's 3rd speaker. ^[2] 

A few things happened as a direct result of such overrides. Firstly, two teams that otherwise would not have made it to the Junior finals did, and performed a below-average debate in full view of the 15 schools that were watching (108 or so students, plus teachers, plus photographers, plus VIPs). Secondly, because inexperienced adjudicators are more pursuaded by style over strategy and substance, the speaker rankings were skewed in favour of debators with better elocution. The top 3 speakers in the rankings, for instance, are the ones with impeccable delivery, while other debators displaying more valuable but less obvious debate skills like strategic savvy and the ability to construct a response-case on the fly were displaced, and placed lower down in the overall competition.

4.

An obvious question to ask now would be: who do you blame? And the answer to that isn't as clear-cut as you might suppose. Some high school debators got prissy with Swinburne in the aftermath of the competition, but now that we've taken a look at the systems and the flaws that lead to these results, I think that we can no longer say that Swinburne and Swinburne alone is at fault for these imperfections. A major problem with this competition was from adjudication, and the lack of experience amongst the adjudicators that took part in this year's tournament. But let's be honest: how many high school teachers out there have debated anyway? And how many adjudicators could Swinburne pull in to handle the huge number of teams that participated this year? You've to remember that all the universities in Kuching - even the Swinburne students themselves - were on study leave for their mid-term exams. Adjudicators that came from UNIMAS and UiTM last year could not make it this time around because they were caught up with their own exam schedules. And, most importantly, you cannot blame the organizers for the imperfections of a fair system, the same way you cannot hate the government for the occasional hiccup that happens in a democracy.

That isn't to say that I don't worry. I teach debate in St Thomas's and in St Mary's. I teach my speakers how to create cases, what good arguments are, and how to best deliver them. I worry whenever teams like St Teresa - who benefit from public speaking ability - win places in debate finals due to adjudicator inexperience. I wonder too if there is any way to circumvent this, considering that we're in East Malaysia, after all, and we have but a small pool of debators to source adjudicators from. For if undeserving teams win debate competitions, and undeserving speakers win speaker awards, then the connection between effort and reward will eventually and irrevocably be severed, and frayed, and torn asunder. And then it'll be harder to get kids to continuously improve, for why work hard when winning is but a lottery?

5.

The first speaker of the Grand Final is Rebekah Dawn Ba'o Ritchie. Her hair is orange in the glow of the auditorium's downlights, and her face pale against the black of the microphone. She is one of the better debators in this year's competition. I suppose it wouldn't be too far along to say that she is the reason Gapor A are here in the finals - I remember adjudicating her in Prelim 5 over a motion I had advised my debators never to touch, and by the end of her 1st Opp speech I realized that I was looking at a classic policy-response case - the kind that I myself would've done, had I been in her shoes.

Bekah walks to the front now, in white baju kurung, while Ashik introduces her as '... wants to be a bouncer in SoHo when she grows up' and the crowd cheers their approval. Dr Sooch is sitting directly in front of me and he's drawing lines on a sheet of paper with a black pen. I look down at my flow sheet, and up again, in time to see Bekah tapping at the mike ...

She looks up at us now, the hundred or so people in the hall, and begins. "Good morning I bid to the Floor ..."

And the debate has started proper, and I remember thinking to myself, praying, even, that it would be a clean, good one. But in the space of those few words the debate is still full of promise, because just sitting at the Finals, in an adjudicator's chair, you don't think of systems and flaws and problems, you think of ideas and arguments, and the verbal wordplay that will unfold before you. I bite my lip and begin writing furiously. The debate is on.

^1. You can't blame them, really - not many high school debators know what a hung case is, what more to say their teachers? ↩

^2. This is known, in debate circles, as the Crescendo Effect. The Crescendo Effect states that speakers who speak later in a debate will have greater influence on the adjudicators, primarily because speeches you heard last are easier to remember. Good adjudicators usually compensate for this effect by keeping rigorous notes, and giving wins based on those. ↩

B. F. Skinner's Return

We're sitting down at one of the tables in the Swinburne auditorium, waiting for the start of the Kuching League. Justin and Sophia are cuddled together at a seat in front of us, Paul is looking at the other teams, Ashik walks around asking "So where's the free breakfast?"

I'm a little jittery. I've been brought in as a 'guest debater', as Mdm Christina puts it, and I'm debating as first speaker - something I've only done four or five times to epic failure. I remind myself that National Judo tournaments are far scarier than any debate league. Paul applies for a name change for our team, because I'm not a Swinburne student. We reject Team Jihad, laugh off Ashik's Team Al Qaeda, consider Team Gemilang and finally settle on Sungai Sarawak. All the other teams are busy opening metafiles and looking through motion notes and they huddle in small groups all over the floor; I pass by an IPBL team and hear one of their lecturers explaining the mechanics of hydroelectricity to them and feel a little strange, considering that both Swin teams are sitting around and talking about food, and I know from experience that such knowledge is almost useless in debate.

We wait. A couple of minutes later Choulyin goes up on stage and briefs us on the rules of the debate tournament, and it's remarkably similar to the other debate tournie I'm painfully preparing my teams for (ie: the Swinburne high school tournament) with the 3 motion system and the uber-air-conditioned rooms and the wall-to-wall vomit coloured carpet and the black shirted runners with little signs who lead you to your rooms and demand that you hand over your handphones to keep in large white and yellow Swinburne paper envelopes. And there's this little spike of deja vu as we copy our lineups and our first motions; and as my team sits on the steps between floors 2 and 3 to prepare I remember St Thomas and my first debate and a small lump forms in my throat.

But that doesn't last. The Kuching League gives all teams 15 minutes to prepare for a motion we've never seen before, and Paul and I quickly work out a prep system. 2 minutes of silence while we marshal our thoughts, 8 minutes of chaos as we outline the problem, pre-empt the other team, consider and then discard possible arguments, create a policy, let Ashik eat fries and hammer a case together. We do this very quickly - and looking back at it now I realize how much trust we have to place in each other: when Paul suggests something that I say won't work, he accepts it and moves to an alternative within the space of seconds.

The first motion is THW pay morbidly obese people to lose weight. We are against three very nice young gentlemen from IPBL A, who joke with us about the no-handphone envelope when we enter the room. We are opposition and our case is simple: we support the need for Government intervention in cases involving morbidly obese people, but we question the ethics of using a monetary incentive. Paul is extraordinarily witty and he opens one of his points with "the fat become fatter"; Ashik, however, closes his speech with profanity.

We win the first round with a huge point difference.

The second round pits us against INTI 2, on the bloody long motion THBT sporting bodies should penalize teams when their players commit criminal acts off the field. We are government, which worries me incessantly - I'm a third speaker by training and I do best when I open with rebuttal. Being gov means that I've to open up the whole debate on my own - something I attempted to do in Form 4, failed, and immediately got switched to 3rd because Cikgu Orlnda thought I handled my POIs quite-nicely-thank-you-very-much and wondered if I'd be good doing rebuttals as a full time thing (she was right). But anyway. I take the floor and frame the debate as value-judgement, and I keep 'sporting bodies' broad (no specific sports) and 'penalize' narrow (no suspension, just fines and point deductions) which turns out to be right thing to do. The opposition doesn't understand what we're getting at, shoots blanks for most of the debate, and scores us another decent win.

Come third round, we're feeling rather pleased with ourselves and we find Sungai Sarawak up against UNIMAS 1, the best team in the tournament. Paul and I are happy to get this challenge; Ashik on the other hand - with only 3 weeks experience in debate - is rather jittery. Things go badly soon after.

The motion is THW protect the rights of smokers, and it becomes clear that UNIMAS is puzzled with our take on the debate. We define the topic as about whether or not smokers are entitled to the same rights as other citizens of a democracy, considering they harm other people with their habit, but UNIMAS defines the topic as whether or not smokers have a right to smoke. I'm worried. I lean over to Paul and tell him we're in a definitional debate, and then I try to brief Ashik on what to do.

A definition debate is a horrible thing to participate in. There is a complex, multi-pronged strategy to tackle these little beasts, but it's very difficult to communicate that strategy in the middle of a debate to two other equally stressed teammates. Paul gets the drift and pulls the thorny carcass of a definition onto the table, but Ashik doesn't and he kills us.

"What are you talking about DUDE! Smoking is the latest trend - what's wrong with being trendy?"

I tell Paul that I'll be doing the reply speech, and he agrees because we're in deep shit and I appear to know what I'm doing. I go up after the barrage of Opp 3rd speaker and reply; I look up: by then all the adjudicators look pissed and frustrated with the debate. Things cannot be worse. "Go on," the chief adjudicator says, waving her hand at me, "I've got nothing to say."

I begin. I have only a distant memory now of what my reply speech contains, but I remember that the words flow easily and the structure I put on paper leap and take shape in the air as I speak. I thread the fine line between lecturing and debating, telling the opposition what they should have done, and where they could've done better. The room grows silent; UNIMAS shift in their seats like schoolboys caught playing truant, the chief adjudicator slowly looks less and less pissed at the whole thing. I remember closing the debate with a quiet, conciliatory tone,

and my last line went, after a long pause: "So, in the end, there was no debate." and an even more quiet "Thank you very much." 

There is a split second of silence. And then the whole room explodes into applause: the adjudicators, the opposition, the UNIMAS supporters; Ashik is banging the table and Paul's face is glowing as I return to my seat; the moment is beautiful, powerful and I don't want to lose it because I feel like frigging Obama for God's sakes; and later I tell Paul that it's the speech of my career and if I stop debating now I'd be happy.

And I would. Sometimes in life you want nothing more than a second chance to prove yourself, to close up on the bitter scar of never doing what you believed you could. This was my second chance, a chance with Paul to create as far as was feasibly possible a Thomian team and I know now that I am good, that I am not a fraud, and that I can win in a debate. And I'm contented with that; contented to hold it in my hand, a perfect thing, for just a little while longer.

N.B. The title of this post is an inside joke. When we first started debate we used to collect a list of names of psychologists, economists and researchers. B.F. Skinner and his work on the behavioral psychology was one of our favourites, and we'd attach him to whatever child-related study we could make up in a debate. Paul used him again on Saturday, in a debate we won. And what a wonderful circle that was.

Nostalgia

There are a few incidents I remember in debate, apart from the losses. One of them was after the inter-secondary debates in 2005. It was my first year debating and I was 3rd for Aaron and Aldrin. I was the wildcard in the team.

Shortly after losing the St Thresa debate I made my way to the toilets. I remember pushing past the crowd that had gathered outside the classroom, ignoring looks, catcalls and the general hubbub. Amanda was still there, she was talking with Jacintha outside in the corridors, I looked the other direction and walked past them. This was the first of many defeats to come in my debating career. I did not talk to anyone on the way down.

There are a few faces there that has remained in the debate scene. Nicholas was debating for the second time for Gapor, and Justin was the 1st speaker for Green Road. Today Nicholas (and his teammate Abraham) are still debating, and Justin is one of the senior debators for Swinburne.

I made my way back from the toilets.

The crowd had dispersed somewhat. The other debators had come to watch us take on St Theresa, then the reigning debate champions, and most of them thought we had won. The St Theresa teachers were looking very worried as Aaron wrapped up our case. When we lost the room had exploded into disappointed noise.

Nelson stepped in front of me as I made my way down the corridor. "Hey," he said, "I didn't know you were debating!"

I shrugged. The lump was still in my throat, and it felt even bigger now in the match room. "Yeah I'm third." I said, gathering up my palm cards.

"How many times have you debated before?"

"This is my fourth debate."

"And you're returning next year?"

"Yeah."

"Wow. Shit. You're good. Okay." And then he laughed. It was a nervous sort of laugh, the kind you make when you're not sure if what you're hearing is a good or bad thing. I grinned at him, and we walked out of the room together.

It was moments like this that had kept me going on in debate. Despite the defeats. Despite the biasness. Despite telling myself every year that I was not going to debate ever again. The little moments when somebody came up and told me that I was amazing and that I had done a good job, even if we had lost as a team.

Those moments made me feel high.

So I kept at it. I kept working on my ability to see angles to arguments. I read up basic philosophy and child psychology and I followed up on global politics. I started learning about systems of governance and I started laughing at Malaysian politicians. I remember snorting at Rene Descartes's Animal Machine theory, and I remember laughing with Aldrin and Cikgu Orlnda over utilitarianism.

At that time debate was for me an ego game. I remember Aaron humiliating the hell out of Amanda in 2004 - I friggin loved it - and I remember thinking to myself: "One day, I'll be able to do that." And it underlined my entire attitude towards debating: as a third speaker it became my aim at every debate to humiliate at least one speaker, to trip them up and make them look stupid and to fumble their speech. In my last interschool debate I humbled all three speakers from the opposing team.

We lost, but at least I had my moments.

There was just one problem with this whole approach to debate. I didn't want to be humiliated the same way I tore others apart. So I went over my team's cases like a hound, making sure the other speakers wouldn't say anything that I couldn't defend. So I wouldn't look stupid. I knew I wasn't Joash, who could present even the most daft of cases and make them stand. And I definitely wasn't Kong Fook Ann, who at the time seemed to me to be saying stupid things for the sake of saying stupid things.

That was how I learned to case create.

I'm recalling this only because it's a lot nicer to remember things you can control over things you can't. St Thomas's didn't do very well in the Swinburne debates.The highest speaker ranked was Johnathan Sim, a risk I took that was supposed to backfire. And Jared who was ranked in the top 10 last year didn't even make it past 40.

I was supposed to debate. I was supposed to be in St Thomas A. We were supposed to go further this year, because hell we had training. Not proper motion preparation, true, but training nevertheless. We had Aldrin and Ravin and Paul coming back to teach and everything seemed perfectly fine until I received news that the National Judo Competition was one week after Swinburne.

I had to choose between two loves. I had joined both sports at 16 (okay yeah I was in debate meetings at 15, but that doesn't count), and they were both obsessions. But in the end it was my obligation to the state that won out - so St Thomas's debate teams suffered from my exclusion.

I am to blame. I made strategic mistakes during the competition in both team setup and case setting, and I wish I can go back in time to rectify them. It was very painful for me to see other teams with less training win. It was even harder for me to see them grow, because I wanted to grow too.

Yes, it was a better time, that 2005. When I had first started and I was wildfire and I had two pillars to lean on. When Orlnda was the team coach - not me - and I had only my rebuttals to worry about. When I was up there speaking and I knew everything I said to be true and strong and kick-ass.

2005 was a time when I was still new. And I want to go back to it.

Kenny Is Wise

I've just finished thinking about Kenny Voon's reply to my post on leadership, and Paul has done a sterling job of articulating most of what I want to say in the comments there. I do, however, feel that a reply on my end is in order.

First off: to Kenny, thank you. You are wise and I've always respected your opinion, and this is no exception. I'm grateful for the things you've pointed out.

In his post there is a very humbling paragraph that goes like this:

We had a joint debate meeting with the Marians today. I went out and bombed my speech. And I was very, very pissed while creating the case and organizing the teams - most of the Form 4s had all done a bunk. Tuition, blah. Sports training, blah. Shut up and come without an excuse for once, can't you? This meeting's for you - I wanted you to feel how it is to go against a better, more articulate female trio.

As I read the statement above, I find it interesting... Those excuses were given to me by Cedric in the olden days...

Ouch. Talk about low-blow, Kenny.

But he's right. I wasn't committed to the Prefectorial Board, the same way these Form 4s aren't committed to debate, and I gave excuses. This paragraph alone was a kick to my nether-regions: it was painful, yes, but it was also necessary for me to see I wasn't very different from these people I am angry with. Though it must be said I never gave excuses for Judo in that same time period, and I never gave excuses when told I was to organize a camp for my church. It was all a matter of priorities, and the Prefectorial Board simply wasn't very high in mine. (Just as debate isn't very high in my Form 4s).

Kenny's main point that what you take out from the Prefectorial Board is what you put into it is absolute true. I agree with him, and it must be said that his point applies to many of the other things in life. I didn't put much into the Prefectorial Board, so I didn't gain much, in terms of leadership.

But it also must be said that the 2005/2006 Prefectorial Board, while being so highly held in Kenny's regard, is inherently flawed. The ideal leadership training course is one of advancement. If members were to start as OPs, then to move up as SPs, and then SSPs, and then on to KPs, they would gain a lot of leadership ability. But try to imagine, for an instance, that an SP were immediately promoted to Ms Chong's job (which is a good analogy to the role of debate founding president). Would leadership seem so easy then? You would have no teacher to help you, no system to follow (except that which you create), and your Exco people would not respect you until you prove your worth to them. You have to deal with office politics, you would have to deal with the administration, you would have to fight for the rights to your club, you would have to organize and work with people from other schools, and you would have to lecture your members/prefects when the need arises. All of them. Including your Exco.

Leadership is not as easy as peanuts.

In fact, being leaders are as easy as peanuts. I remember the days I played the role as leader in clubs and Senior Prefect, I didn't really get to do stuff. All I had to do was just commanding people...

Which explains everything. That is management, which is quite different from leadership. You had superiors to help you if things went wrong. If a prefect did not comply to your requests you can always refer him/her to Ms Chong for disciplinary action. I am 'Ms Chong', for all sakes and purposes here in the debate club. And I do not have her skills, her talents, or her abilities. Which is why I am learning so much on the job - I doubt even the Head Prefect would know everything there is to do in Ms Chong's position.

Sometimes I actually wish Ms Chong was still here, so I could ask her for help.

But Kenny's reply has done me a lot of good. I've let my ego grow uncontrolled these past few weeks, and it's about time somebody (and circumstances) brought me back down on my knees. Sara has done that already, and so has Paul, and now it's Kenny's turn. Kenny has always had an eye out for his friends, and now, even at the other end of the South China Sea, he's whacked me hard in the shins.

I'm very sure, very certain... it's most of the time Cedric feels all himself is right ...

Oh, Kenny, you have no idea. There's reason to the word Knucklehead, and my sisters waste no time in pointing that out.

Thank you very much.

Leadership Sucks

Being a founding president is never easy. I sometimes wish Ravin had done it before I did, but he did his part in the creation of a debate club and I can't complain. But there are days when I just break down and wonder if it's all worth it. The passion. The training. The expenditure of energy to train a bunch of 15 odd blowhards who probably won't appreciate what you're teaching them anyway. The preparation of debate motions at 12 midnight, after Judo training (I've a small gash on my chest at the moment; I think it'll leave a scar).

Creating this debate club has been a fight from the start. I fought with the administration for about 6 odd months, and then I fought with certain factions of the English Department who didn't want to disturb the status quo (much less the creation of a new club), and then I had to make promises that the club would deliver a win sooner or later.

So the club got created, after a 2 period meeting with all the teachers of the English Department, the principal, the co-curricular administrator, and me. We settled our conflicting interests (somewhat), and in the end the school suggested a system that placed the debate club under the English Language Society, though with an independent board, independent meetings, and an independent leadership.

Which was very stupid, if you asked me, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. I took the package. I started recruiting. Then the trouble started.

Now I've to admit here that I know very little about leadership. You know the Prefectorial Board's claim to train you to be a leader? They're lying. Through their teeth. Being a leader's a whole lot different from playing games in a group and checking student uniforms at recess. It's all up to you: you make or break your organization. So I ran on my own power for the first few months.

But boundless energy does have its limits. I may be a so-so teacher, and I may be an above average debator, but put that together with State Judoka and STPM student and you've got a very tired boy on your hands. Ravin once said it seems, at times, that I eat coffee beans for breakfast. But guess what? Coffee-bean-hyper-boy grew up. I was Form 3 then, the world seemed a nicer, brighter place, and I didn't yet know the joys of doing 95kg deadlifts.

So I realized that I could not do this on my own. I talked to the Form 5s. And I made a mistake of thinking them all as Judokas. Dedicated, passionate, not lazy. No excuses. I forgot that they were typical Malaysians, and that none of them has had mental toughness drilled into them by a sport. You may think I'm boasting, or I'm an arrogant blowhard myself, but you try attending one of our Sukma sparring sessions. It's a thrown-and-get-up mentality, and no excuses for stopping a match, unless you've broken something. So far 5 people have broken something. Go figure.

So two Form 5s dropped out. Too many activities, too busy, excuse after excuse after excuse. I let them go. Nevermind. Still got Form 4s. I selected my board - my team - and it seemed the only thing I did right then was to choose Saravana as vice-president. He's coffee-bean-hyper and he's not afraid to stand up to me when I'm doing something wrong (or not doing something at all), and that's what I needed. I am grateful for Sara. A godsend.

The other Form 5s are good, passionate, serious debators. I can work with these people. We joke, we talk, and we argue. Though sometimes I think they don't understand what I'm saying, because I talk too fast. Always been a weakness of mine. My brain moves faster than my mouth and everything comes out a convoluted mess.

The people I cannot work with, however, are the Form 4s. They're not even serious. They come in and shoot all kinds of off-tangent, immature, unpolished points. They're all over the place. They start talking about gigolos when I'm discussing male vs female driving. It's partly my fault - I guess - I had too high expectations and I introduced the tough bits of debate to them too early.

We had a joint debate meeting with the Marians today. I went out and bombed my speech. And I was very, very pissed while creating the case and organizing the teams - most of the Form 4s had all done a bunk. Tuition, blah. Sports training, blah. Shut up and come without an excuse for once, can't you? This meeting's for you - I wanted you to feel how it is to go against a better, more articulate female trio.

And you can see what I've been doing wrong: I tried to do everything myself, at first. When that failed I got myself a team, but I did not communicate my plan and my vision to them. Heck, most of them don't even know how hard I've worked my ass off for the creation of the club, and for their training. And then after that I couldn't leverage these people, because they weren't on my side. They didn't get the whole picture. My fault again. And now? I don't know how to bloody hell get the Form 4s serious. To wake them up and say: 'hey, I'm working my butt off for you, what the shit are you doing for me? Or for your school?'

So it's more like a lack of communication, and a lack of leveraging teams. I've got Sara on my side now, that's something. And Paul, Rav and Aldrin have been godsends. They've come and adjudicated, and we've really learnt a lot of things from them. It's also slightly hard for me to train my juniors because I've always been a wildcard myself. I can save debates single-handed, and I can fail everyone and polarize the judges so badly we lose. And now I have to teach them all I know, and I realize most of this is ... what? Second nature? Inbred? I don't know. I'm not very good at teaching. How the hell do I explain my rebuttals come from a little voice in my head?

The important question is this: how am I going to make it right again? To make sure the debate club succeeds long after I leave the school? To ensure everyone gets a fair chance at learning something, rather than just the talented ones, the ones handpicked by Cikgu Orlnda, like during my time? I'm not a leader. Never have been, unless you count the times in social gatherings when everyone's bored and I take it into my hands to do something about that. And it's so friggin difficult. Head prefects have existing systems, and Interact presidents have adult attachment organizations helping them, teaching them. Me? There's no path for me to follow, no system for me to adhere to. And that is very liberating until you figure out it's you who's got to create the system.

I may not be a leader, I may completely be out of my depth, but I better start getting used to it. Because it's what I wanted. It's what I chose. Leader qualities or no, I am one.

And I better start acting like it.

Debate 'Shang' Workshop

So of course it had to come and pass.

I arrived at the English room at about 8 and found the room in a healthy tangle of cables and laptops and papers and people. (The tangle meant that these random objects were thrown together, not that the people were tangled around each other).


Ben was watching Heroes on Tay's laptop. Tay was playing minesweeper on the desktop, with the projector for a screen. Tay's ipod was hanging from a speaker, blaring out a Nicholas Teo tune (I requested ... Must. Stop. Noise. Pollution ... ). The rest of us were doing whatever it was that mattered to us.

SMSing, for instance.

Or reading debate books.

Or just plain posing.

We started late, with Cikgu Orlinda's Powerbook (Stupid Macs! - she says, waving her hands) failing to connect to the projector and forcing Tay to resort to creative measures to get everything up and running. Shang is forced to fight for time for the rest of the workshop, forever asking us:

"Am I going too fast?"

"Do I have to elaborate this slide?"

"Oh gosh, we don't have enough time, do you want me to do the 2nd example?"

And of course we all nod our heads (or shake them) allowing him to speed along at a just-slow-enough pace. Which means fast lah, for those of you who can't catch.

Ravin was pissed by the end of the workshop, though. He thought that the younger students just didn't understand what Shang was doing for us - by actually taking the time and coming over and teaching. I don't think you can blame them, really - the brilliance of what he talks about is only apparent in its entirety with some basic debate experience.


But what amazed me most was Shang's passion for the sport - it's like something I'd do ... but for Judo. I never regarded debate as something I'd blog and shout and talk about ... it was always something that yes, I was in, and no, I couldn't get out of.

So maybe it did teach me a lot about critical thinking ... but not at the level Shang operates. His passion takes him out and away, reading books I've never even heard of and expressing complex concepts in a few sentences - in words that just seem to fit together. That's one skill I think we can all do with - what we've got is a lot of brilliant minds in the Thomian debating team; the only problem? We can't seem to express the ideas that pop up in simple enough English.

Urm, what that means is ... the Thomian debating team sucks.

And it's true. A major flaw in the 2006 team was the lack of intra-team communication - rebuttals are solely by my ability, as is recording the opponent's cases (and almost anything and everything else, really, like input during the writing of the speeches, or going over them). Things were a lot easier when Aaron was around - he'd delegate and we'd operate, and the components would just click together.

No idea how he does it.

Okay, okay, better stop on the analysis. We had a demo debate, with unexpected results. (Read: terrible).


I think it's the worst debate among all those workshops Shang has conducted.

Okay, maybe the worst debate Shang has ever seen.

No, make that the worst debate to ever grace the English room (and that's saying something, considering its history).

Motion: 'The house would abolish the death penalty.' I was gov, with Samuel as first speaker. He was new and he just about broke every first speaker rule there was. No stand, vague definition, no case allocation, and 6 blaardy points of information that was absolutely amazing to watch.

Amazing means laugh out loud funny.



Amazing also means desperately awaiting divine intervention.


Then Jacob came up. If Sam made us laugh (and die inside), then Jacob made us die of laughter outside. He walked up to our table in the middle of his speech and asked,

"Actually I'm waiting for more POIs. Got any or not? Mr Bong?"

*

Thing pretty much went downhill after that. No formal time keeping, no formal adjudication panel, and we were losing the audience like the disciples had Jesus. The only good thing out of it were the comments (which also weren't very good because we weren't very good to start off with). But Shang was really nice about it, and the only speaker who was anywhere near a competent level was Joash. I made my speech fizzle out, and I was shaking (something which hadn't happened since my first debate).

I am officially losing it.

What did I take out of this whole experience? Hrmm. Shang said that overall the 3rd speakers were okay, but that's just him being nice. There were the major points of contention of the debate, which we failed to address in our speeches and there is this whole Government case which we thought was smart, but turned out too smart to be on the verge of stupidity.

Okay I have officially lost it.

What I've learned today will probably fill a booklet. This worskhop was great ... it showed me that there is good yet in this sport. That there are whole levels of thinking out there - whole vistas of clash and reasoning and doubt.

And that there are individuals completely crazy about travelling the world ... and disagreeing with everyone they meet.

Thank you, Shang, thank you.


Oops wrong picture ... there.

Advanced Debating-lah: Truisms

The better I got at manipulating stands and definitions to my advantage the more I realized it was possible to create an argument that was impossible to destroy. Before you start jumping up and asking me how this can be done allow me to elaborate further.

An argument that cannot be argued (paradoxical, isn't it?) is known as a truism. In international level debates using a truistic argument is illegal. You get kicked out immediately.

At interschool level, however, most have no idea that such an argument exists.

I'm not sure that's such a good idea.

Alright, alright. Truisms aren't something you can pull off with every topic - in fact it is very, very rare. If you define a topic to be true by definition you are using a truism. An example?

Motion: Australia is an island.
Truistic Definition: An island is a mass of land surrounded by water, therefore Australia is an island.

The only truism I've seen at interschool level was used by Kolej Abdillah against St Mary's in 2005. We Thomians had actually prepared the exact same argument, but we drew Government and couldn't use it.

Motion: The best things in life are free.
Truistic Definition: Free is defined as having no form of exchange, monetary or otherwise; therefore the best things in life are not free because everything is a form of exchange.

And they went on to win after proving nothing is free (how ironic). Is it possible to defeat such a definition? I'm not too sure - though if I were in the Marian team I'll proclaim every few seconds that the motion assumes the existence of 'free', and then proceed to use an advanced debating technique called 'conditionalizing the truism'.

It is a technique I have no confidence in, nor any experience with.

I'd like to see truisms made illegal. If you're reading this don't you dare use one if the opportunity arises.

For my sake, at least. ;P

Advanced Debating-lah: Rebuttals

I'm writing this as a sort of tribute to the start of the interschool debates. Rebutting is something I'm exceedingly good at - 3 years of 3rd speaker debating does strange things to your psyche. So on with the article:

Rebuttal
A good rebuttal undermines the opponent's argument. It snaps it in half ... When preparing rebuttals I aim for at least a 3 second pause from my opponent (preferably open mouthed but rarely so). So far I have succeeded on 6-7 speakers (the others mumble incoherent nonsense in reply). This is not my skill, though I wish it was - it is the result of a waterproof argument (presented by a team) being pitted against a weak one. The only reason I have never been unprepared with a biting remark is due to my teamates. Woe betide the 3rd speaker who thinks he bites on his own.

We'll start off with some basic rebutting techniques and move on to my favourites.

1. Factual error. The most obvious thing to do is to point out a factual error in the opponent's argument. "Dear sir, Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, not English."

2. Irrelevancy. Another basic form of rebuttal - if the opposition veers off to argue how women mind control men your reaction shouldn't be trying to prove men have better brains - you should just mark it off as an irrelevant argument.

3. Contradiction. Many debators jump on any little chance to prove the opposing team is supporting their side. While it appealed to me at first I have learned - rather painfully - to shy away from this technique: it is relatively ineffective, and it wastes time that I could have spent on other points. The best way to use this is when two speakers contradict each other, even though each are strong, solid arguments - in debate, speakers' points must always be in tandem.

4. Unreasonable argument. This works by pointing out the opponent has made assumptions in their reasoning. If they propose studies that show more men cause more traffic accidents it would be prudent to tell them that there are more men driving on the road then women.

And now for my personal favourites:

5. Implications. In 'Cometic surgery should be banned ' I frequently used this technique to help Gabrielle construct rebuttals. I justified it against the implications of banning a multi-million dollar industry. If they said 'Cosmetic surgery involves medical risks' - I'll point out that

1. All forms of surgery include a degree of medical risk.

2. Would you justify banning a multi-million dollar industry involving jobs, investments, economic interest, R&D and medical tourism for such an unsubstantiated reason?

Show the opposition the implications their proposed solution might have.

6. Questioning the link (properly known as causation). This is a complex technique, one of my absolute favourites. Basically what you're trying to do is to disprove that X causes Y. If someone tells you that Abdullah Badawi is losing hair because of defective shampoo you can argue there is no evidence (or link) to suggest a connection between the two factors. Then you can go on to say that there are other factors that contribute to hair loss: age, genes, diet, sexual preference, favourite colour ... so on so forth.

This is done in three steps:

1.Question the link that connects two factors (eg: immigration and rise of crime).

2.Show other factors that may contribute to rise of crime.

3.Tell them immigration has little or no weight ... or is not a major contributing factor.

7. Alternatives. The best form of rebuttal ever. This can and should be used in all forms of rebuttals. It is usually possible to back up your attack with an alternative to lend it more credibility ... if I were attacking 'Cosmetic surgery shouldn't be banned because it boosts self esteem' I would point out visiting a psychologist as a more effective, healthier, cheaper, less risky alternative.

When I used it against Gabrielle during her preparations she was reduced to spluttering garbage. Amazing what alternatives can do.