The Standard for Debate Decision-Making
Figure 3 - The Concerned Reader Framework
Intrinsic Opportunity Costs and the Average Concerned Reader
Under hermeneutic theory of interpretation, evidence can be evaluated only within the context in which it was written. Judges should therefore ask what would persuade the interested reader the author addressed — someone weighing solutions to a concern, open to being dissuaded by an intrinsic tradeoff or opportunity cost, and projecting that choice onto society. What society should do is a matter of values: Affirmatives prove the should statement of the plan by winning value claims that would lead an intended reasonable reader to support the plan. Decision-framing rules cannot ignore the harms as if we do not actually pass legislation because we are just asking the judge to conclude if a reader would support the plan as a value principle that society should do. This is how debate was intended to help students and citizens persuade on social issues and to learn how to decide our lives’ goals and values. House committees evaluate legislation issue-by-issue, divide jurisdiction, specialize expertise, and control scheduling: “Because of its decentralization, Congress usually considers policies serially, that is, without reference to other policies. [...] Congress has little capability to examine two policies, such as education and health care, in relation [...] Congress distributes its workload among committees” (Edwards, 2000). Affirmatives should no longer have to defend roleplaying as policymakers. Almost no article read in debate is written to a policy maker. The only context we can evaluate the case articles through is the one they are written to: to persuade the public to support government action. Debaters ask the judge to filter what cites and quotes would most persuade an average reader concerned on this issue as to what society’s views should be. Debate is within the decision perspective of considering intrinsic values of should-statements. Any decision-maker would respond to “could” trade-offs with more actions they have control over. Debaters are not experts and cannot access the truth to scenario plan every risk that could be, since we just have access to arguments in the literature and can only filter forward what would be persuasive. We need arguments that occur in real evidence to base comparisons off. Do not reward finding a warrantless line in a different context as the illusion of predicting 1% plausible risk, as intervening actors and spillovers can create too many outcomes to pretend to be able to assign risk to. We can only weigh should-statements of case authors under the values and concerns that persuade the readers on a given issue, meaning solvency turns and general principles and concerns as internal links. We'd disrespect our own authors if we ignored feasibility, which requires asking how the readers would react to their systemic harms ignored and all issues delegated elsewhere or a global revolution. The public does not find political agenda dissuasive as a negative intrinsic to any given plan and still support it as a value principle since readers assume party leaders know how to schedule. No real world decider would worry about trading off with later actions they have control over, and the public does not project those unforeseeable tradeoffs onto the state, compartmentalizing news media debates.
Figure 4 - Re-Aligning Debate with Reality
A Town Hall Discussion For Concerned Readers to Debate Researched Solutions
Why would you assume “fiat is not real”? We challenge that assumption and suppose that we could “fiat” that a popular topic author or alumnae would present the outline of the best cases online, in news media, and then to lobbyists to pass through the House committees. Only in debate do schools come for the distinct purpose of researching the best proposal for a current issue. That uniqueness shapes our purpose: “If not us, who? If not now, when?” This call to responsibility to the collective is often attributed to Pres. Kennedy. Tournaments are like open-source academic conferences focused on synergizing relevant ideas from all domains. We compete with persuasive research essays and then defend against opposing arguments others red-team – all to solve a current social concern. We owe it to society to present the best papers and underlined quotes, which the media, lobbyists, students, and activists can then use. The common purpose incentivizes us to seek and share articles others would find game-changing. It is like a national curriculum set by peer recommendations of crowd-sourced online article sharing. Debaters may even use online platforms to shift to a word counts format to limit underlined words in quotes to a total like two thousand words, which others will read on their devices. Speakers read out loud detailed summaries at-pace like in this research paper and quote partial phrases to develop their own argument in the voice of their own paper. It is already a norm in research papers for every sentence to be backed by a cite. We also require qualifications, underlined context, and access to full text, and open-source sharing of quotes for peer-review. Researchers will take incentive from their peers following and liking their news feed, and compete to find the most relevant quotes, to raise their cited by count, and to earn peer respect.
Figure 5 - Ethical Grounds for Fiat
Fiating “Fiat”: Ethical Grounds to Projecting a Choice onto Collective Conscious
We will all shape our interests, values and mindsets via introspection through the collective consciousness. Everyone benefits through peer-review to help each student find the most persuasive opposition to their advocacies that they missed. Feaver (2001) furthers, “Often, when the policy implications are considered, flaws in the theory (or at least in the presentation of the theory) are uncovered. Thus, focusing attention on policy implications should lead to better theorizing.” Linus’s Law, a quote of wisdom about open source, echoes that: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Thus, refocusing debate on practical comparisons renews its original intent: fostering rigorous citation, structured topic mapping, superior research, compelling communication, and sound personal judgment. Students can roleplay as their favorite authors and fields of scholarship, and should not be asked to strawperson as institutional mindsets. Everyone can find their favorite authors to advocate for and help those thinkers apply it in context of an issue to get those concerned with that cause to form coalitions and think like those authors. Creators benefit when their works are remixed, reviewed, and redistributed, fostering a shared global culture of collaborative creation, while blockchain attribution ensures creators receive recognition and compensation through transparent, automated systems.. We can base fiat in key concepts in ethics. Early religions had ideas like the Golden Rule of like treatment in kind, which began projecting others in terms of common value groups. Later thinkers like Sartre based ethics on the existential maxim, “In choosing myself, I choose humanity” (Sartre, 1946/2007, p. 24). Kant supplies the parallel universalizing check: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant, 1785/2012, p. 31). Sartrean responsibility makes every advocacy socially expressive, while Kantian universalizability requires the judge to justify projecting that advocacy from an interested reader’s concern to what society should do. Sartre gives the affirmative a language for why projecting an individual value choice outward is unavoidable, while Kant supplies a stricter test: the principle behind that choice must be one the advocate could will for everyone. Together, they make fiat less like pretending to be an institution and more like defending a publicly generalizable commitment. These principles unify how one evaluates different styles of debate. Judges should evaluate a plan like a geometry proof asking if a concerned reader would still be persuaded to support the thesis advocated.
Figure 6 - Why Scenario Forecasting Fails
The Failure of Scenario Forecasting
Experts make confident-sounding scenario forecasts but statistically fail to predict tradeoffs since politics is value-driven (Tetlock, 2017). Issues like abortion are matters of “should” with readers persuaded by intrinsic values and scenario-forecasting like third-world overpopulation can lead to a mass-manipulation mentality of a bigger impact that ignores intervening actions. Fiat is not a video game where the judge imagines both sides as the movie scenario they would like to watch more and compares what is missing. Permutations test if any of the negative’s claims are compatible values to hold and then resolve differences under scenarios of what “would” happen. If one is convinced “governments should provide clean water” then the claim that if it were to happen now then there’d be a shortage and tradeoff with the agenda would only persuade one to implement gradually, not to dissuade one from the original should. Otherwise we teach manipulation via logic fallacies. Officials state what they are resolved in as a principle first but clarify with later laws as unforeseeable circumstances dictate. One can form a general value that government and capitalism should end, but anyone would still account that it would be a hard long-term goal and that is not an intrinsic opportunity given up by agreeing that the government should adopt a policy. We do not have to defend live-action roleplaying in a scenario that passes: this was just added as one way to think of how to persuade. Even in a mindset that the state should end, one can speculate in theory if values justify a policy.
