References

This AAAI paper builds argumentation knowledge graphs directly from text, extracting concepts and the causal and effect relations between them so that arguments can be queried and reused across documents. The paper cites it as prior work the web-native argument schema should build on.

Computational argumentation researchers at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Paderborn University and IBM Research Europe

The proceedings of the tenth ArgMining workshop, held with EMNLP 2023 in Singapore. Its preface describes argument mining as a maturing field whose methods find and visualize the main pro and con arguments on a topic, while noting that many tasks remain unsolved in open genres.

ArgMining 2023 co-chairs from Leibniz Universität Hannover, AIST, Columbia University & AWS AI Labs, University of Richmond and Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

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Argument mining (also known as “argumentation mining”) is a gradually maturing research area […] The ArgMining community is constantly growing […] it provides methods that can find and visualize the main pro and con arguments

A Cato commentary arguing that centralized authoritarian planners lack the knowledge to direct complex societies, a caution for any proposal that hands decisions to a single decision-maker.

Senior fellow at the Cato Institute; former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan

Tournament results from the Barkley Forum at Emory and the Glenbrooks, archived on the3nr.com, listing the varsity policy brackets in which the author debated alongside and against future NDT and TOC champions.

Tournament results archive hosted by The 3NR

Models liquid democracy, in which voters may vote directly or delegate their vote to someone they trust, and asks when delegation helps a group track the truth better than direct voting, finding that well-designed delegation can outperform direct democracy while unconstrained delegation can concentrate power.

Political scientists, computer scientists and mathematicians at MIT, Cornell and Harvard

Describes the Argument Web, linked argument data that lets a line of reasoning be followed across forums, comment threads and editorials, built on the Argument Interchange Format ontology.

Researchers at the Centre for Argument Technology, University of Dundee

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allowing opinions to be connected across the Web through semantically meaningful links […] a URI-addressable structure of linked argument data […] It is based on a common ontology for argument called the Argument Interchange Format

A hypothesis-and-theory paper proposing the Web of Debates, a human-centered web in which arguments published anywhere are linked by support and attack relations so readers can follow and evaluate whole debates rather than isolated pages.

Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece

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This paper presents the vision of the Web of Debates, a more human-centered version of the Web, […] the links may represent different types of support or attack relationships among the arguments

A repository indexing the publicly available argument corpora of the Centre for Argument Technology (ARG-tech), all of them annotated in the Argument Interchange Format.

ARG-tech, University of Dundee research group on argument theory and AI systems

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All of our datasets follow the AIF format.

Reports on argument network visualizations for online civic deliberation, arguing that showing citizens the map of issues, ideas and arguments helps them see the existing landscape of reasons and contribute where something is missing.

Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University (UK)

This short essay explains that because Congress is decentralized it usually considers policies one at a time, so presidents must build a new coalition for each proposal rather than relying on a standing majority.

George C. Edwards III is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and a leading scholar of the American presidency.

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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

This writing handbook for military leaders covers formal writing conventions, including how resolutions are introduced after the word resolved.

The handbook was produced by an enlisted leadership research group within the U.S. Department of Defense for internal training.

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a formal resolution, after the word 'resolved:'

The technical report that first proposed organizing web content as a Persuasive Web of linked, evaluable arguments, the precursor to the authors’ 2023 Web of Debates.

Researchers at the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, and University College London

This post criticizes the states counterplan, arguing that it thrives by distorting the literature base and that few authors actually advocate state-by-state action on national issues.

Ryan Galloway is a longtime college debate coach who directed debate at Samford University and writes on debate theory.

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the states counterplan thrives by distorting the literature base to answer it [...] [N]ot even the notion that something is currently considered to be a federal only activity protects the aff. I've seen federal nuclear policy, federal transportation policy, and federal lands policies Lopez'd back to the states.

This article argues that ethical pandemic policy must confront foreseeable risk tradeoffs openly and distribute their burdens fairly, rather than pretending any single measure is free of costs.

Lawrence O. Gostin is a University Professor at Georgetown Law and faculty director of its O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law; Sarah A. Wetter is a research fellow there.

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Since the start of the Covid‐19 pandemic, societies have faced agonizing decisions about whether to close schools, shutter businesses, delay nonemergency health care, restrict travel, and authorize the use of emergency Covid‐19 countermeasures under limited scientific understanding. When both action and inaction can result in significant harm and irreversible damage, decisions surrounding infection control measures become complicated. Yet ethics can help us think about hard trade‐offs that weigh competing values and have deep consequences for society and particularly the most disadvantaged. This essay discusses the challenges of making policy trade‐offs amid scientific uncertainty. While there may be no perfect formula for deciding what to do and when, we propose four key considerations for assessing risk‐risk trade‐offs and apply those considerations to the areas of education, economies, health care, travel and migration, social engagement, and medical countermeasures.

Presents an interactive tool that visualizes how speaker interactions and argumentative relations unfold over the course of a debate, using transcripts annotated with argument structure.

University of Passau and University of Tübingen, Germany

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we present a new interactive debate visualisation tool that leverages data annotated with argumentation structures

The cross-x.com forum thread in which the author posted camp backfiles for the community to download, an early instance of the open file-sharing norm debate coaches later formalized.

Policy debater; creator of the Debate Synergy paperless template

The signup thread for the cross-x.com virtual debate league, which ran written rounds with 2,000-word constructives, cross-examination periods and 1,200-word rebuttals.

Policy debater; organizer of the cross-x.com virtual debate format

A guest essay, first posted on The 3NR, imagining debate tools that would take years to build: web-like argument maps, keyword-tagged argument roots, shared argument gardens, in-round quote suggestions and a multi-viewpoint public knowledge service.

Policy debater and author of the Debate Synergy paperless template

The archived source of the Debate Synergy paperless template for Word and Excel: Word macros, the speech timer, the Excel flow template and the installer. Its description notes that its ideas were adopted into the Verbatim template.

Creator of the Debate Synergy paperless template

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Debate template macros for Word 2010 (deprecated) - ideas adopted into Verbatim template

The Rights Institute’s statement of a substrate-neutral theory of consciousness and the universal rights it implies for biological and artificial minds, including assessment protocols based on functional capability.

Founder of the Rights Institute and Debate-AI.com

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The Rights Institute advances a substrate-neutral theory of consciousness […] Assessment protocols must be substrate-neutral and focus on functional capabilities rather than underlying implementation.

The Rights Institute’s policy for responsible use of AI and large language models, covering verification of outputs, privacy, safety and rights protection, and truthfulness and transparency.

Founder of the Rights Institute and Debate-AI.com

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Ethical policies for the responsible use of artificial intelligence and large language models.

This article on realism in foreign policy defends realism by arguing that foreign policy should be judged by its results, using the Bosnian war to show the cost of pursuing the "most moral" outcome without matching capabilities.

Executive Editor, The National Interest

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As the name implies, realists focus on promoting policies that are achievable and sustainable. In turn, the morality of a foreign policy action is judged by its results, not by the intentions of its framers. A foreign policymaker must weigh the consequences of any course of action and assess the resources at hand to carry out the proposed task. As Lippmann warned, Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.8 Commenting on this maxim, Owen Harries, founding editor of The National Interest, noted, "This is a truth of which Americans—more apt to focus on ends rather than means when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world—need always to be reminded."9 In fact, Morgenthau noted that "there can be no political morality without prudence."10 This virtue of prudence—which Morgenthau identified as the cornerstone of realism—should not be confused with expediency. Rather, it takes as its starting point that it is more moral to fulfill one's commitments than to make "empty" promises, and to seek solutions that minimize harm and produce sustainable results. Morgenthau concluded: [End Page 18] Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible, between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.11 This is why, prior to the outbreak of fighting in the former Yugoslavia, U.S. and European realists urged that Bosnia be decentralized and partitioned into ethnically based cantons as a way to head off a destructive civil war. Realists felt this would be the best course of action, especially after the country's first free and fair elections had brought nationalist candidates to power at the expense of those calling for inter-ethnic cooperation. They had concluded—correctly, as it turned out—that the United States and Western Europe would be unwilling to invest the blood and treasure that would be required to craft a unitary Bosnian state and give it the wherewithal to function. Indeed, at a diplomatic conference in Lisbon in March 1992, the various factions in Bosnia had, reluctantly, endorsed the broad outlines of such a settlement. For the purveyors of moralpolitik, this was unacceptable. After all, for this plan to work, populations on the "wrong side" of the line would have to be transferred and resettled. Such a plan struck directly at the heart of the concept of multi-ethnicity—that different ethnic and religious groups could find a common political identity and work in common institutions. When the United States signaled it would not accept such a settlement, the fragile consensus collapsed. The United States, of course, cannot be held responsible for the war; this lies squarely on the shoulders of Bosnia's political leaders. Yet Washington fell victim to what Jonathan Clarke called "faux Wilsonianism," the belief that "high-flown words matter more than rational calculation" in formulating effective policy, which led U.S. policymakers to dispense with the equation of "balancing commitments and resources."12 Indeed, as he notes, the Clinton administration had criticized peace plans calling for decentralized partition in Bosnia "with lofty rhetoric without proposing a practical alternative." The subsequent war led to the deaths of tens of thousands and left more than a million people homeless. After three years of war, the Dayton Accords—hailed as a triumph of American diplomacy—created a complicated arrangement by which the federal union of two ethnic units, the Muslim-Croat Federation, was itself federated to a Bosnian Serb republic. Today, Bosnia requires thousands of foreign troops to patrol its internal borders and billions of dollars in foreign aid to keep its government and economy functioning. Was the aim of U.S. policymakers, academics and journalists—creating a multi-ethnic democracy in Bosnia—not worth pursuing? No, not at all, and this is not what the argument suggests. But aspirations were not matched with capabilities. As a result of holding out for the "most moral" outcome and encouraging the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo to pursue maximalist aims rather than finding a workable compromise that could have avoided bloodshed and produced more stable conditions, the peoples of Bosnia suffered greatly. In the end, the final settlement was very close [End Page 19] to the one that realists had initially proposed—and the one that had also been roundly condemned on moral grounds.

A Canonical Debate Lab essay answering Scott Alexander: because debate arguments are transient and repetitive they never accumulate shared knowledge, and persistent argument maps can make the basis of a disagreement, in values or in evidence, transparent and harder to bias.

Co-founder of the Canonical Debate Lab

Introduces a method that breaks arguments into propositions linked by support, attack and warranting relations and draws them as graphs, then applies it to the Cold War debate over the strategic window of vulnerability.

Political scientists; Homer-Dixon now directs the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University

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Arguments are analyzed into sets of propositions structurally linked by support, attack, and “warranting” relations. […] we apply the method to a debate about the strategic window of vulnerability

A book arguing that the unified self is a construction of the social brain, assembled from the people and stories around us rather than a fixed inner essence.

Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol

Surveys argument mining, the automatic extraction of arguments from text, framing each stage of the usual pipeline as a machine learning task and arguing that machine learning has so far been under-exploited in the field.

DISI, University of Bologna

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The main goal of AM is to automatically extract arguments from generic textual corpora […] This task is typically implemented by a machine learning classifier.

These comments argue that large states use their market power to compel nationwide compliance with their regulations, effectively overriding other states and displacing Congress's role over interstate commerce.

The authors are scholars at the International Center for Law & Economics, a nonpartisan research center; Geoffrey A. Manne is its president and founder.

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When large states leverage their market share to compel nationwide compliance with their regulatory schemes […] whether in vehicle emissions, data privacy, AI governance, or payments […] they effectively nullify other states’ policy choices and usurp Congress’ constitutional role in regulating interstate commerce.

A blog analysis arguing that slowing Chinese growth raises the risk of nationalist and external tension as the leadership seeks other sources of legitimacy.

Economics blog by Lars Christensen

Asks whether judges should receive speech documents during paperless rounds and concludes that sharing should be the default with an opt-out, because rapid delivery already strains listening and documents improve comprehension, flowing and accountability, while judges must not let reading replace listening.

Director of Debate, Missouri State University

A defense of reason and truth-seeking critique against postmodern skepticism, arguing that critical theory loses its political force once it abandons claims to truth.

Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy, Cardiff University

Introduces OpenDebateEvidence, a dataset of more than 3.5 million documents from American competitive debate, built for training and evaluating argument mining and summarization models.

Machine learning researchers including Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (NYU Center for Data Science)

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We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization […] providing valuable resources for training and evaluation

A workshop-based roadmap of the scanning, modeling and computing capabilities needed to emulate a human brain in software, and of the milestones that would show progress toward it.

Researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford

Argues that Semantic Web vocabularies can mark up the claims, support and objections scattered across blogs, wikis and forums, so Web 2.0 discussions become machine-readable argument structures.

Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway

Argues that possible AIs which do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings would deserve similar moral consideration, and that owing their existence to us could create further obligations.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside

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Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings.

This testimony argues that interstate compacts that receive congressional consent become the equivalent of federal law, and examines the constitutionality of a proposed regional compact.

Ilya Shapiro was a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute when he gave this testimony.

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interstate compacts receiving congressional consent are now clearly recognized as equivalent to federal law

Develops a psychological account of collective consciousness, the experience of attending to and knowing the world together with others, and how shared attention shapes what people believe and value.

Professor of Psychology, University of Tennessee

An explainer on unilateral, mutual and common mistakes in contract law and the remedies courts apply to each.

Contract lifecycle management company

An essay connecting collective consciousness to the need for independent media that let a public share facts and reason together instead of fragmenting into partisan audiences.

Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

Sets out integrated information theory: consciousness corresponds to the amount of integrated information a system generates, a quantity defined by causal structure rather than by the material the system is made of.

Professor of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Field experiments with an adaptive, machine-learning-based writing tool that gives students feedback on the structure of their arguments, finding that dynamic feedback measurably improves argumentation skills.

Information systems and learning science researchers at Bern University of Applied Sciences, University of Kassel, University of St. Gallen and Carnegie Mellon University

A Wired feature on paperless policy debate, covering how laptops and the Debate Synergy template changed how evidence is organized and delivered, and how debaters now speak faster than ever.

Wired contributor

Wired’s short documentary on high-school policy debaters spreading at 350 words a minute, the most viewed video about debate, whose comment section is quoted in the word-limit section.

Wired magazine video

Presents a class of models in which simple rules rewrite abstract relations, finding that rich behavior emerges and that the models show striking correspondences to core features of known physics.

Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research; creator of Mathematica

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Even in cases with simple rules, rich and complex behavior is found to emerge […] striking correspondences to some important core known features of fundamental physics are seen

Proposes linked argumentation graphs that let specialists from different disciplines contribute arguments to a shared decision, with patterns that make the rationale for a recommendation explainable.

School of Computer Science, Hubei University of Technology, and Queen’s University Belfast

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We propose, in this paper, a method of linked argumentation graphs and three types of patterns […] in particular, facilitating explanations of decision rationale

A short paper that extracts the claims and evidence within scientific papers and links them into a visual argumentation graph of the literature.

Information science researchers, Wuhan University