Paradigm

Shreeram Modi (he/him)

Lynbrook, NYU

Coaching LD and UC Berkeley

College Policy Chain

debate@smodi.net;caldebatedocs@googlegroups.com;debatedocs@googlegroups.com

HSLD Chain

debate@smodi.net;dolsd@googlegroups.com;lddocs@googlegroups.com;

HSCX Chain

debate@smodi.net;dolsd@googlegroups.com;

I have had the privilege of working with some of the most motivated debaters on the circuit and hold an immense appreciation for the dedication debaters have to this activity. My strongest conviction is that debate is a strategy game where everybody wants to win. The best debates to adjudicate and watch are ones where both sides have come prepared with a robust defense of some novel or strategic approach that they expect maximizes their chances at victory.

I will never discount your argument for its delivery, content, germaneness to the resolution, or how it relates to what some may view as ‘real world truth’; truth matters to the extent that it influences the difficulty of answering your position. I've held many opinions over the course of my time in debate, quite a few of them wrong. As such, my preference is to evaluate each round solely based on what both sides have presented, and only insert my own personal beliefs or knowledge when absolutely necessary.

My strongest conviction is that debaters should try their utmost to win, the rest is all malleable. Go for the most strategic arguments, not necessarily the ones that maximize clash or display virtue. Deleting analytics, engaging in argumentative sophistry, and establishing win conditions via clash avoidance are not only permissible, but recommended. I will reward approaches that improve your chances of winning and won’t punish you for taking the easy way out.

Evaluation

I view each speech as a long series of claims. I've found most other understandings require the judge to insert their own meaning to what debaters have spoken. There are a few consequences of this view:

I don't believe in the distinction between ‘claims’ and ‘warrants’; both are merely premises that have a truth-value. What many refer to as ‘warrants’ are just further claims that have a causal influence on the truth-value of a prior claim.
I don't believe argument cross-applications are intervention. The position of a claim has little bearing on its implication. To illustrate, if the negative has justified that “non-resolutional theory is not permissible,” why does it matter which piece of non-resolutional theory this was responding to? The argument is still the same. However, I tend to be pedantic and will hold debaters to what they've said.

Flowing

I will flow each speech straight down, and will not attempt to align arguments for you. Giving a speech in the order that reflects how arguments were placed in previous speeches is therefore recommended.

I will have documents open to check for rules violations such as clipping, but will not refer to those when flowing.

I may refer to evidence after the round to resolve questions my flow is insufficient to answer, for instance if there is a lack of clash or impact calculus in final speeches or if litigation of evidence is a deciding factor in the round.

Procedure

I will not say “clear” during your speech unless your lack of clarity is nearing a rules violation. Prompting you to be clearer would be no different than telling you to change your speech, i.e. intervention. It is the burden of debaters to make complete and flowable arguments in their speeches.

The speech document is not an authoritative record of what happened in the round, merely a device to share evidence. Failing to read evidence you sent is never a problem, nor something you need to correct.

I can understand English, and to a lesser extent, Marathi and Hindi.

I will disregard speaker point instruction.

You are under no obligation to answer ‘flow check’ questions outside of cross-examination.

Personal Views

Though I will strive to not let any of these influence my evaluation of a round, I am only human. I've inculded these so you have a better idea of what I think about debate, and what types of arguments I spend most of my time thinking about.

Zero risk is only achievable through technical concessions.

Critiques on the negative are best when advancing a plan-exclusive framework. By nature, most criticisms are not plan-focused arguments, and therefore have difficulty establishing uniqueness for their impacts.

Teams who wish to deploy critiques and win under a plan-focused framework need compelling answers to “permutation do both” and utilitarianism combined with an appeal to the magnitude of the aff’s impacts. The latter usually demands some alternative to utilitarianism.

I'm unsure why skepticism is self-defeating. It seems that there is a distinction between ethics-based arguments won for the purposes of evaluating impacts in a debate, and what a judge should abide by in procedure. Consider: if a team dropped an ethical framework that demands that I hand over my laptop to the opposing team, would I be under an obligation to do so? No.

The ‘sequencing’ permutation is a variation of ‘permutation do both’, and requires the affirmative to win via reading definitions that it is permissible for the affirmative to occur in the future. The negative can defeat this by winning definitions that impose expediency or an order of sequencing on the affirmative, and cross applying deficits to ‘permutation do both’.

Glossary

Many arguments in debate rounds rely on misunderstandings of terms and jargon whose meanings have been passed around, often through word of mouth which leaves much to desire. Here is what I understand these terms to mean. As always, this can be overcome with an argument made in round.

Plan text in a vacuum does not mean that inclusion of certain words in the plan text is the basis for topicality. Rather, it's a question of whether there is a permissible reading of the plan text that falls under the bounds of the resolution.

Winning a topicality violation indicates that the affirmative, in defending their plan text, has failed to meet their burden of proving the resolution true. I'm unsure why this guarantees a win for the neg other than for presumption reasons.

A counterplan is textually competetive if there is a net benefit to the exclusion of certain words in the plan text, not merely if it uses different words.