Yang,+Jason

Jason Yang toc Debated for Kinkaid for 3 years with Eric Emerson and Akhil Gandra as coaches, Katy Taylor for 1 year with Gay Hollis, Eric Beane, and Neel Yerneni as coaches.

As a debater I always liked the more detailed philosophies, so I’ve done that. However, if you do not have enough time, the sparknotes should be plenty of information.

=Sparknotes (in order of importance):=
 * Speed- please go 70% speed because I’m bad at flowing. I will say clear or slow as many times as necessary. **Esp important for analytics**
 * Advocacy texts and interpretations of any kind must be conversational speed.
 * tags should be read slowly (not necessarily conversational speed)
 * There is such a thing as zero risk
 * **if theory is your strategy please read the theory section**
 * **Please explain phil**
 * I like policy arguments and K’s that I can understand
 * I will vote on disclosure theory but will not hack for it.
 * I probably will not vote on new 2AR theory, kritiks, etc. But I might.
 * Extensions only need to be as detailed as needed. For example, if you’re explaining why the case outweighs a DA, probably need more detail. But if the neg only contests Aff framework, you probably don’t have to explain the contention much.
 * Will not vote for morally reprehensible arguments regardless of circumstance.

Hard and Fast Rules
=Terms and Definitions= I’ve lost some debates because I had a different definition of what a term meant than a judge. So I’ll put down what I think a certain term means. Of course, you can alter the definitions in the debate- just make sure I know what they are instead of throwing out the jargon. If you don’t define the term for me, I will default to this definition. This list is not exhaustive, but these are definitions that come to mind that have caused misunderstandings.toc =General= =Policy Arguments= =Kritiks= “K affs” Links: Impacts: Alternatives: Framing: =Ethical Framework= =Tricks= I’ll vote on them. Innovative spikes are a plus. =Theory= =Topicality= =Speaks=
 * You must transport evidence you read to your opponent by some means (flash, email, pass pages) if they request it. Giving them your case during prep time or only let them read over the shoulder it does NOT count.
 * You get 30 seconds to transport the documents to your opponent. In total. Afterwards it comes out of either prep time or speech time. Ideally, the flashing time for the 1AC is zero. If you can’t press save as + drag to USB/email within this time, you need to practice it. If your flashing requires more than save as + drag, then you have not completed compiling the speech doc which means you need more //prep time//.
 * I won’t vote on args I didn’t catch or don’t understand by the end of the debate.
 * Speech times are set- 6-3-7-3-4-6-3
 * jasonyang19923@gmail.com for those who wish to add me to the speech doc chain.
 * I vote for one debater.
 * RVI: Reverse Voting Issue, if the responder to theory has net offense that links to a competitive counter interpretation, the responder of theory should win the debate. This necessitates that theory is drop the debater (or effectually drop the debater).
 * Permutation as Test of Competition: Negative advocacies test the opportunity cost of the aff, and permutations means the advocacy goes away and the negative now defends something else (either another advocacy or the status quo).
 * Permutation as Advocacy: If the affirmative proves the negative advocacy is not competitive (through a permutation), then the permutation becomes the new affirmative advocacy. This means that any internal net benefits to the counterplan (offense that the counterplan resolves) are now aff offense that can be weighed against other neg offense.
 * Conditional: The negative may “kick” (not advocate for) the advocacy under any circumstance.
 * Dispositional: The negative may “kick” the advocacy under a given condition.
 * Unconditional: The negative cannot “kick” the advocacy under any conditions. This will be their advocacy for the rest of the debate unless it is proven to be not competitive to the aff.
 * Truth Testing Paradigm: The affirmative’s burden is to prove that the resolution (or plan text) a true statement, while the negative tries to prove that the resolution (or aff plan text) a false statement.
 * Comparative Worlds Paradigm: The affirmative defends an advocacy, the negative defends an advocacy (advocacies). Whichever advocacy has more net offense wins. The affirmative advocacy should be an example of the resolution.
 * Severance: When the affirmative no longer advocates the plan specified at the beginning of the round.
 * Reasonability: Negative can win on theory with defense. I think Arjun Tambe’s conception of reasonability (that he got from Christian Tarsney) is pretty good: “presumably, if it would be bad to let someone get away with abuse, it would be about equally bad to punish them when they weren’t abusive, so if it’s less than 50 percent likely that they abused you, my default assumption is that theory is not a sufficient path to the ballot.” This definition is probably the most prone to change in the debate since there are so many different conceptions of reasonability.
 * Debate is **comparative**- this means both debaters should **weigh** in addition to winning individual arguments. This is true for every kind of debate- phil, theory, substantive, etc.
 * Debates are also won and lost on the top level framing- isolate the key issues and use the speech to explain why you’ve won them. Line by line is excellent at winning arguments in isolation, but that’s rarely sufficient to win the whole debate because you’re probably not winning every single arg.
 * Cx as prep isn’t a thing for me.
 * I will evaluate embedded clash when I recognize it, but you would be best served to make the connections explicit for those that are less obvious and/or crucial for winning the debate.
 * PLANS: Great. That said, I am not afraid of voting on “plans bad” or “Nebel/Generics T”.
 * Counterplans: Go for it. I have less experience with complicated process counterplans or whatever. Regardless, you should explain what it does and why it solves the case. A good 2nr overview is say “Here is the advantage, here is why the CP solves it”
 * Disadvantages: Sure. The affirmative would benefit a lot from proving why the internal links are bad with analytics, because they usually are. I think Disad+Case debates are the most interesting type of policy debates.
 * Lots of people are reading Da’s that are like 30s and none of the cards have warrants… Affirmatives should point this out
 * Turns case arguments are really awesome esp when specific to the plan
 * Solvency advocate theory doesn’t make much sense to me on its own, they just seem like solvency arguments. However, a solvency advocate can be a litmus test to determine whether or not a process counterplan or a PIC was predictable.
 * Pretty predisposed to vote on framework if your affirmative has nothing to do with the topic. You don’t necessarily have to defend USFG, but please talk about the resolution. Otherwise I have no predisposition as to whether your aff is an instrumental/100% defense of the resolution or not.
 * Creative approaches to the topic do count as talking about the resolution.
 * Against debaters that are establishing violations for policy framework please do not be evasive.
 * Contextualize the link to the aff- don’t just read the state link every single time and just reread the tag from your policy backfiles in the 2NR. I think the strongest links have good evidence and include quotes from the 1AC speech, CX, etc. that demonstrate the link.
 * I feel people underutilize impact turns. Obvi do not say stuff like racism good, but cap good, heg/militarism good, is great.
 * Negatives should do comparison- how do the DA’s to the perm outweigh the net benefits?
 * What does the alt look like, and how does it solve the links? That’ll make it a lot easier to vote for it. Even if your aff is just plain old rejection- questions like who rejects the aff, what distinguishes this from the status quo, etc. are all still relevant. If I have to ask myself what the alternative is or does at the end of the debate, you lost.
 * The presumption that kritiks are always “pre fiat” and therefore excludes the aff doesn’t make sense to me. This distinction should be explained not only generally, but also in the context of the affirmative.
 * Theory vs K is kind of a wack debate. To make it less so, you should try to make your warrants as specific as possible.
 * I am usually very confused when people kick the alt and claim that the K independently turns the aff. To my understanding, the alt generates uniqueness for the link/impact. If you do decide to pursue this strategy, explain to me why you don’t actually need an alt.
 * I’m not going to pretend to be the best judge for these kinds of debates. You can fix my lack of understanding by explaining the phil like I’m a child. This includes even common frameworks like Ripstein equal outer freedom, Rawls Veil, etc.
 * I will default to being “epistemically confident”, simply because that’s the norm at the time. This means that I will only use the winning framework to evaluate offense. I can be easily persuaded to use epistemic modesty.
 * Lots of frameworks are impact justified- point that out and explain why that’s bad.
 * I have no idea why RoB arguments should preclude a standard just because it has the words Role of the Ballot in front of it. This should be explained.
 * Reasons to prefer a framework should be weighed against eachother: for example, the affirmative FW is better for actor specificity, while the negative FW is better bc it links to a superior meta ethic. Which moral theory is more likely to be true?
 * Defaults:
 * Competing Interpretations
 * Drop the Argument on Theory - **this is one of my stronger defaults**. Read the next paragraph for more information.
 * No RVI
 * **Won’t presume a voter - debaters should justify them.**
 * Drop the debater should be internally justified eg why the practice was so unfair that the only solution to rectify is to make them lose. I think responders should cx on this/point it out. Even if there’s no obviously immediate argument to drop like spec arguments, there’s a way to make drop the arg work
 * I don’t really care if your theory argument is shell format as a “new off” or just “x is a voting issue” tagged as an argument against the counterplan etc.
 * If your theory is clearly trying to abuse competing interpretations, the threshold for responses goes way down. For those that read this kind of theory, remember your opponent can win on zero risk of the interp under competing interpretations.
 * Theory debates need tons of weighing, and not just “ground outweighs predictability because we need ground before we can predict it”, but weighing that accounts for your strength of link to the standards. For example: perhaps lambos are worth more than a ford focus, but the same cannot be said for the driving wheel of a Lambo.
 * For me, less is more.
 * Competing Interpretations means offense defense paradigm. Other shenanagins like the answerer has to write down the CI, has to have a CI, should be justified.
 * If the answerer does not have a counter interpretation, I will assume that it means the opposite of the interpretation.
 * Unsure what drop the argument means on theory arguments concerned with advocacy like spec- it can mean drop solvency, drop the whole 1AC flow (so the aff can still win on link turns to the NC), re-evaluate the plan under the new interpretation, etc.
 * I think conditionality is good but that contradictions are bad.
 * I am somewhat persuaded by the argument that goes something along the lines of “It would have been just as hard to give the 1AR if I replaced the CP with a DA or a few case turns. Condo bad devolves to multiple arguments bad.”
 * I think that topicality is more than just tech, it requires a vision of what the topic should look like through your interpretation.
 * It would be cool if your interp/counter interp was very specific to the topic for example, providing caselists, evidence when appropriate from the topic literature to quantify limits or ground arguments, etc.
 * Semantics vs pragmatics I do not really have a default here.
 * But debaters should make clear the implications of what it means if you win semantics vs pragmatics: does semantics first mean the affirmative must have a counter definition? Does it mean the definitions debate always comes first?
 * Drop the arg doesn’t make much sense here and should be specified- does this mean we drop the 1AC piece of paper? Does it mean we re-evaluate the interp? Can the aff read a new advocacy? Drop the debater?
 * Just like for theory, reasonability should have a brightline that is clearly explained.
 * Again, a caselist would be great.
 * Random pet peeve - try not to call theory topicality and vice versa.
 * 27.5-28.0 is average
 * Speaks will be awarded for good debating (strategy, technical ability, persuasiveness, good CX, etc). I do realize it’s kind of arbitrary, sorry about that.
 * Lower limit is a 26.0-26.5, less than that means you did something severely unsettling.
 * I don’t suspect that I will inflate points, but then again, I am a first year out.

Bonuses:

 * High risk high reward- jettison the aff and turn the NC, 7 minutes of case, etc (what counts as high risk high reward is kind of arbitrary and determined by me)
 * **Good CX**
 * **Good overviews that point out the key points of clash in the debate**
 * Using less prep time (if more prep = better speech, that will probably result in better points than the time you save)
 * Using less speech time (same stipulation as above)
 * Unique arguments
 * Good disclosure practices (I will check wikis before or during the debate)
 * Fast speech doc transfers