I was a debate kid in high school. I competed in public forum all four years, though I'd say I only started taking it seriously my sophomore year.
I was pretty good at it—my senior year, my partner and I were pretty confident we could beat any team in the country, and we went into tournaments with the intention to win, not just break or reach a certain outround.
Debate is no longer a part of my life, but it was one of the most influential and important things I've ever done. Competitive debate is unique and trains you to think in ways you can't get elsewhere. This is everything I have to say about debate.
Debate is not about persuasion
At the highest level, debate is a technical game with distinct and objective win conditions. This is the reason you might have seen videos of high school kids speed-talking at 300 words per minute. They're not trying to persuade the judge in the conventional sense. They talk fast because debate is a game of competing arguments and being able to say more is an advantage, all other things equal.
Learn to identify win conditions
Debate has very clear win conditions. Most technical judges operate on an offense-defense model. You win the round if you achieve an offense differential over your opponent. In that sense, it's much simpler than you might initially believe.
In life, it's helpful to be clear and precise about what success means. Figure out what needs to get done and work from there.
If you're not winning, you don't actually understand it
I don't think I truly understood debate until halfway through my junior year. Looking back, it's almost like I wasn't even sentient my first two and a half years. I had no idea what I was doing and the little success I had could probably be attributed to luck.
But after internalizing several fundamental concepts around debate, I started to see success—more consistently and to a greater magnitude. Once you understand how debate works, at its deepest level—I'm talking the axioms of the activity—what to say in a speech becomes obvious 99 percent of the time.
The hard part is that before you do, it's hard to tell you haven't. You don't know what you don't know. Anything you work on outside of understanding debate at its core is peanuts compared to actually figuring it out.
You might think you get it, but if you did you would be winning tournaments.
In real-life, I sometimes get a similar feeling that some people just have it figured out. The game of life is less defined so it's hard to make a blanket statement that you can just “figure it out,” but I think it's worth trying to determine what axioms or core principles you need to understand to have outsized advantages in life.
Once you figure out the game, it comes down to effort
After you figure out debate, most of your gains are found through topic research and prepping out specific teams and strategies. If the teams you'll inevitably face in late outrounds all understand the game, it will come down to what kind of informational advantage you have.
Part of this is information about the arguments—do you have better responses, responses to their responses, etc. Some of it is also specific information about the team—what is their strategy, what are their weaknesses, etc. To win, you need to learn this and it really comes down to how much time you're willing to put in.
I still practiced more conceptual stuff, like refining speeches and strategy. But most of it was topic specific and the rest yielded only marginal improvements. I will say that speech redos specifically were great for building round vision and confidence. Many hours were spent re-giving speeches from rounds that I won in order to make them as close to perfect as possible.
Big wins can unlock potential
Honestly, this might be in tension with #3, but big successes are often breakthrough moments in debate. There are many teams who, after one big tournament run, become perpetual presences in deep outrounds of tournaments. Maybe it's because they figured out debate before their big run, but sometimes it's a mental block.
A real-life analogy might be Roger Bannister and the four minute mile. People can easily convince themselves that something is unattainable without good reason for believing so. Sometimes it takes someone doing the "impossible" to recalibrate expectations and goals.
People make decisions for a reason, even if it doesn't make sense to you
Debaters love to complain about judges. "Lay judges"—judges who don't evaluate rounds as a technical game—receive the most complaints. This usually happens because debaters debate as if the round is being evaluated on the offense-defense model when in reality, the judge has a completely different model for how debate works.
The true win condition of every debate round is to get the judge to vote for you. We don't typically think of it like this because it's not practical, but it does reveal an insight.
The judge has to vote. At the end of the round, they must move their mouse on Tabroom1 and select a winning team. Something is going on in their minds when this happens, whether or not it makes sense. Maybe one team had a banger line in one of their speeches, maybe one team was dressed better, maybe the judge just flipped a coin—but there is always a reason.
As a debater, you need to figure out what mental model the judge is operating under. It is a failure on your end if you can't effectively communicate a reason to vote for them. Understand this and dealing with lay judges becomes much more bearable.
Debate is a hive-mind (and the best debaters take advantage of this)
A funny thing would happen in the debate world. If a successful team said something that sounded cool, the entire debate circuit would start to parrot it. If enough people start saying something, everyone beings to think it's true.
This took the form of catchphrases, clever responses, analogies, and even entire arguments. Certain ideas, if they caught on, became ingrained in the debate meta and people would accept them as true without scrutiny.
The best teams would take advantage of this—both ways. They would repeat these ideas to quickly shut down arguments, but also question them when facing against them.
The lesson here is that it's easy to convince yourself that something is hard, complex, true, or that you don't understand it when in reality it just doesn't make sense. Have some trust that, if you have studied and scrutinized something, you can identify a bad argument.
If you want to be great, you need to relentlessly pursue improvement
Debate was one of the few things I can describe my attitude towards as relentless. There are individual speeches that I've given over a hundred times. I willed myself to read research papers and entire books on ostensibly academic and "boring" topics. In the weeks leading up to a tournament, my arguments and strategies were all I could think of. I have dozens of gigabytes of voice notes, round recordings, and speech redos that I would listen to in my free time.
I attribute a lot of my improvement to being obsessed with winning and getting better. It's difficult to become exceptional at something without some obsession. Obsession makes everything easier—motivationally, but also logistically. When you're obsessed, you think about how to improve outside specifically allocated practice times. You have a clearer sense of what needs to be done. You worry less about how to do something and more about just doing it.
Don't get played by clout
As teams achieve success, they begin to accumulate clout among the debate community. You start to recognize names and perceive debaters as larger than life. Don't think this way. Every team is beatable, and it's easier to win if you believe this.
Obviously, it’s hard to think this way if you've never beaten a team with clout, but once you do, you realize that they're like every other team. They write their arguments with (more or less) the same resources you have. They have to make tough decisions and sometimes get flustered. Learn what makes them better on average and trust that there exists a combination of words you can say that will win you the round.
The best teams care
I used to hate it when teams did well despite not putting in much effort or caring about debate. I desperately wanted to be like that—someone who could just show up, win, and then walk away to something more important. But it didn't take long to realize this wasn't possible for me.
It's possible to do well without trying too hard, but with the best teams, you could tell they cared. It's incredibly hard to outperform someone that lives & breathes something, works hard, has talent, and cares deeply about winning.
It's okay to care about something. It means you have skin in the game—you're putting your identity on the line. You are making it known that you want to win and you’re going to do everything you can to win. If you don’t, that’s a failure and there is nothing you can point to as an excuse.
It’s scary, but it’s okay. People should care about more things. Living any other way would be boring (and lame).
Link dump
Shout out to Riley Wilson’s piece on competitive tennis for inspiring me to write this
Thinking about how to design a life closer to friends thanks to this and this
Social lists are a pretty cool idea
Tabroom.com is a tournament management system. Judges submit their ballot electronically via Tabroom.