Discourse on Meth

The recombinant convolutions of high school debate

Valerio Adami, Study for a Drawing after Glas

For a long time I’ve been obsessed with the question: how do you discuss the terms of discussion? Every conversation is grounded in a set of practices which enable that conversation to take place - language, conventions, protocols, and norms. This shared context specifies when to speak and when to listen, what kinds of statements are allowed, what counts as a valid argument, and so on. Without this underlying foundation, the conversation is impossible. But how do these foundations get set in the first place? How do we bootstrap our way into them. And, once they are in place, how do we discuss them? How do we criticize or defend them, evolve and modify them, without getting pulled into a self-referential vortex of paradoxical recursion?

Mathematicians wrestled with a version of this problem with their early-20th century attempts to put formal logic on a solid foundation. It seemed like a straightforward task at first - let’s establish a rock solid process for determining whether, given a set of starting assumptions, any particular statement is true. Then it turned out to be impossible.

Mathematicians continue to do math, they just gave up on the vision of doing so within a global framework of certain truth. The process is messier than we once hoped, more provisional, more ad hoc. This isn’t a flaw in math, it is a necessary and unavoidable feature.

Likewise, in the real world, we manage to have debates and discussions, however clumsily. It’s not obvious whether our struggles to make these debates productive are related to the kinds of paradoxes that happen when you attempt to use the tools of discursive thought to examine their own contextual foundations (let’s be honest, we both know the real problem is just them.) But there is some indication that these issues contribute to the complexity of the challenge. A lot of public discourse is about the terms and conditions within which public discourse takes place. Free speech, de-platforming, evidence, ortho- and hetero- doxy, what does or doesn’t count as a serious, good faith argument, etc. Some of this meta-commentary is really interesting in its own right. See, for example, Overton Windows, the new podcast from Robert Wright and Tamler Sommers, John Nerst’s erisology project, and Julia Galef’s book on The Scout Mindset.

I think, as AI continues to bring the messy world of conversation and the precise world of mathematical logic closer together, the ability to think coherently about these foundational issues is going to become more and more valuable.

This is why I was so amused and delighted by this recent Maya Bodnick article about how critical theory is affecting competitive debate.

WARNING: I think this is a very difficult issue to think about, representing, as it does, a white-hot battle at the heart of the culture war. But If you allow yourself to view it entirely through that lens, to be swept away by indignation and despair at the thought of Maoists indoctrinating impressionable teenagers (or, conversely, swept up in enthusiasm for the revolutionary energy of whatever it is Maoists believe,) you will, in my opinion, miss some of the interesting and useful features of what’s going on here.

What’s going on here, as highlighted in the article, is the popularity, in competitive debate, of a technique called kritik. A kritik is a tactical swerve in which one of the debate teams calls into question the background assumptions of the official debate topic as it is presented. Rather than directly addressing the arguments for a specific policy position, the kritik addresses the whole foundational worldview which the position takes for granted.

If this sounds like postmodern shenanigans of the kind made famous by Derrida and Foucault, that’s because it definitely is. Kritik is an application, within the context of formal debate, of the classical critical theory move of invoking a meta-perspective that highlights how the foundational logic of any specific discursive context operates to simultaneously enable and limit thought - making some ideas appear natural and inevitable and others practically unthinkable.

But what’s amazing about kritik is that it does this within the context of high school sports. It’s funny and surprising that it works. It’s like when the coaches at Piedmont High looked at the rulebook, discovered that, technically, you’re allowed to have two quarterbacks and 11 receivers, and, in the subsequent confusion, led a rag-tag bunch of lovable slobs to victory over the entitled bullies at much wealthier schools.

Despite the claim of X Braithwaite, one of the debate judges referenced in the article, that “debate is not a game”, competitive debate is very much a game. Like math, in games we create little pockets of order by establishing explicit, arbitrary rules and then we try to discover all of the consequences of those rules. You can tell debate is a game because the people who do it have their own specialist lingo that they love using. Here are some random examples from Judge X’s profile:

• word PICs against K affs are not a good look

• Friv theory belongs with tricks

• Util framing is kinda ridiculous

• Fairness isn’t a voter, read it and I will not flow it as an impact

• Y’all like to run T against K affs

To be clear, I love this. I love the way games generate their own languages. And it isn’t just about in-group signaling. Games need precise technical shorthand because, in them, we are working together to explore the detailed permutations of the miniature world created by the ruleset.

Another way you can tell debate is a game is that it leads to bizarre, unnatural behavior. Here’s what high school debate sounds like: 2018 NPDTOC Finals. Not every type of competitive debate features this auctioneer-style hyperspeech but it’s common enough to have it’s own term in the lingo: spreading.

Here’s a reddit thread about the exercises debaters do to increase their speed:

Again, I love this stuff! It may seem absurd to us, as outsiders, but games are absurd. In a game, if something is optimal, and allowed, it will exist. (This is probably true of the real world too, it’s just that in games it’s easier to tell what is allowed, and what is optimal. This is one of the things that makes them so cool, and so ridiculous.) When players are inside of a game that they want to win, they will doggedly, enthusiastically, joyfully, seek out every legal strategy, every exploitable shortcut, every [pickle] advantageous [pickle] glitch [pickle] in [pickle] the [pickle] code.

It is into this strange sporting ritual that the Heideggerian turn of critical theory introduced the kritik as a strategic maneuver. It’s important to note that K’s have been around since the 90s. This isn’t a recent phenomenon generated by super-wokeness. It’s also, important, I think, to recognize that, whether you like them or not, K’s contain an element of powerful, irrefutable truth. It’s not that any specific K is irrefutable. (Being refutable is, after all, a necessary feature for being part of this game.) But consider the necessary, unavoidable truth of the overall spirit of kritik, which reminds us that every conversation takes place by virtue of, and within the invisible limits of, a set of arbitrary, or at least contingent, conventions. Now imagine yourself as a teenager, trapped in a world of arbitrary rules, conformism, and obedience. Imagine being invited into a secret club where, long after the last bell has rung, this dangerous, powerful idea is casually unveiled. Picture it casting an otherworldly glow on the maps pinned to the walls around you, on the calendars, and the timelines, and the inspirational slogans. Imagine all of these things, and the very walls themselves, which before seemed so solid, becoming, in the flickering light of this not-quite-unspeakable truth, insubstantial, unfamiliar, Unheimlich. What used to look like the world, now looks like a world made for children. Imagine being handed this idea, wrapping your head around it, and learning to wield it like a hockey stick.

If you will allow me to indulge in a bit of K myself, let me just ask this - what is the purpose of competitive debate? Is it to turn bright young minds into useful neoliberal policy-makers? Or to make them into interchangeable Aumannian agents in a Bayesian truth-seeking ritual? Or to train them to be revolutionary thinkers fighting for liberation against an oppressive hegemonic status quo? Or is it to create a simulacrum of political debate so obviously artificial as to make the official version appear real by contrast?

Perhaps it is none of these things. Maybe it’s just a weird hobby. Fascinating and compelling and bizarre and full of strange truths about itself and, thereby, the world. Like cup stacking, but with more Nietzsche in it.

A final thought. According to some people, K’s first appeared in competitive debate as a counter-strategy to the popularity of utilitarian frameworks, in which policies were evaluated according to quantitative measures of their expected outcomes. On the one hand, these frameworks seem eminently sensible. However, infamously, if left unchecked, they can lead to their own thorny problems - Pascal’s wagers, utility monsters, repugnant conclusions.

Out here in the real world, we seem to be living through something like an era of ascendant utilitarianism: effective altruism, long-termism, AI itself, as well as the question of AI as existential threat. Each of these is a way of applying the rigorous methods of quantitative logic to otherwise vague and messy topics. Each, perhaps, in its own way, taking too much for granted, assuming a natural, inevitable, universal, framework where one doesn’t exist, and thereby leaving themselves open to the surprise slap shot of postmodern theory. For any given question, we can’t know beforehand which kind of argument will win, but it’s good to have options.