Characterisations & Framing - Advanced Training Debate Workshop: Week 4

0:00 which is um yeah no arip is a a little jaclyn replacement for today uh but hopefully he's gonna like not be disappointing okay um cool so uh if we can do the recording just start it whenever i'm gonna start yeah i started it cool oh great okay um so i'm just gonna start so um hi everyone thanks for coming uh so today uh i'm gonna be talking about uh and about framing so um in terms of structure i'm going to start by describing what characterizations and framing are or more what i mean when i talk about those terms secondly

0:46 why you should be doing those things and why you should be doing them well um thirdly sort of broad principles of characterization so kind of how you should be thinking about it when you are doing it then a bit of practical concern so what to characterize how to structure it where to place it in your speech and how to rebut and lastly some tips about how you can actually win entire debates just by doing really good characterizations so first thing um so what are characterizations what is framing symptoms of characterizations i think this is quite simple so those are the parts of your speech where you are describing uh different actors so different contexts in order to make your arguments um sound more plausible or sound more relevant

1:32 now in terms of what framing is um i think that's a little bit of a confusing them and people tend to use it for a variety of different things so i think if you approach a few debaters like maybe each of them is going to give you a slightly different like idea of what they mean when they say framing so what i'm going to say now is how i use the word framing and how it helped me when i'm debating obviously you might have you might find someone else's definition may be more helpful for you but this is what i used and how it helped me like develop good thinking about characterizations so the way i think about streaming is that it's the aggregate of sort of all the pieces of characterization you deploy throughout your case so if you kind of smoosh them all together it ultimately happens to be like it ultimately paints

2:18 a picture of the world that helps your case make your case sound more relevant or plausible so it's effectively the same thing it's just characterizations are the individual pieces the framing is kind of the whole picture of the world they make up together again this is how it helped me i never needed to make any distinction between it there might be people who think there is some sort of subtle distinction and you might find that helpful uh but again for me this was the way that it always helped to think about it this way um cool so why should you do characterizations and why should you do them well um so i have four reasons but i think there's probably more i think the one and the most important one is that in

3:03 most um high level rooms debates are tend to be worn and lost on characterizations so what you will find out is that even from kind of mid-rooms teams tend to know the obvious arguments so most motions are thematically similar so people know broadly what the intuitive arguments are and teams are able to run them and the higher you go the less teams are making mistakes like not impacting their points or missing analytical links so when you get to a high room you find out that everyone knows the argument everyone is able to prove them quite effectively so where the difference is made is between which of the teams is able to provide characterization around those arguments making them sound more relevant or plausible and kind of diminish the impact of other team's arguments

3:50 so given that i think characterizations can be extremely important especially that you are progressing and you're getting better at debating and they are often very very powerful more than we realize and sometimes even more than the judges realize because very often they are just taken as like some sort of objective context provided by teams even though like teams are just doing really subtle sneaky characterization so very often even judges don't realize how really really powerful characterizations are so if you know how to do them it can really help you and the second reason is that very often right now the motions that are currently quite popular and you find to find them in most competitions are quite characterization heavy um so all the emotions that are about narratives or norms or like regretting glorification of something are motions that are basically about how you are

4:37 able to characterize how that narrative or norm or what the glorification looks like um so all of these are basically asking you to characterize or then come up with some like unique set of arguments i think thirdly it does make a massive difference for your speech and for your speaks uh i think there is a big big difference between how a speech without any characterizations is scored and how you are being perceived if you do characterize and you provide context you describe actors i think it usually makes like a big leap in the speaks that you get and lastly i think it's also something that you can actually improve uh in a relatively short period of time so i think usually the problem with people is that they do not know or do not consciously think about doing characterizations in the first place

5:23 um it's not that they don't know how to do them so usually when you start consciously thinking about it and you start doing them you become quite good at just improve a lot um this for example what happened to me and my partner back then before we went to the european championships i think the reason why we kind of improved quite quickly within a short period of like a month was because we suddenly kind of clicked on how to do characterizations well and helped us like improve a lot um so i think that's something that a lot of you could probably benefit from if you are yet not consciously thinking about characterization so first thing then in terms of the principles

6:10 so the first thing to think about when you are thinking of characterizations and how you're going to be characterizing is that there is never a completely like fixed context fixed reality within which the debate takes place so there's always a spectrum of subjectivity like different interpretations of reality that you can use when you are describing it so this gives you the opportunity to just pick the interpretation that kind of suits your case and if this sounds like a little bit abstract then you're not sure what i mean this is something that happens in real life all the time for example if you look at say newspapers when they are describing the literally same event like depending of where politically they are leaning they're able to describe it and paint it in completely different ways

6:55 similarly like politicians again can paint exactly the same thing very very differently so there is always a spectrum of subjectivity where you can pick and choose but i don't think this is quite important there are always things that are outside of that spectrum so you can do an interpretation of reality but you can't try to lie yourself and claim something that is completely outside of any interpretation of reality so you tangle completely silly um so even if you analyze it if it's just outlandish that it's not going to be useful so always stick within what is within the kind of plausible spectrum so for example to illustrate this if you are trying to describe russia and if you are trying to describe putin's regime for the sake of any argument um

7:41 i think it's plausible that you can describe putin's regime as very stable for example by pointing out the fact that russia is quite nationalistic or like that you have had some recent like very successful projections of power um on the other hand if you are like opposing this you can describe putin's regime as kind of potentially vulnerable so you can point out things like there were recent protests you had like issues of rich referendums or like scandals with like poisoning your opposition which made people kind of angry and now it's more vulnerable so know that like all of those facts in both of those descriptions are probably true and co-exist the difference is which of these aspects i'm going to be emphasizing and which of them are i'm going to be neglecting so both of

8:26 these things can sound plausible as long as i'm making like the aspects emphasized or neglected but i can't go completely wild so i can't claim that like russia is this like north korea like state and like all the russians are like brainwashed and like they have no idea about like anything else than putin nor can i claim that there will be a revolution in russia tomorrow insofar as probably anyone reasonable will not buy that sort of characterization um no matter like how many lives i'm gonna come like i'm gonna make up to support it so yeah you can you can always tweak the truth but you can't outright lie so yes so that's that's in terms of how you should be thinking about characterizations no october revolution sad yeah no it will be fun but like

9:13 realistically not going to happen cool so yeah so that's in terms of which way which on what spectrum characterizations exist i think the second kind of principle is that know that characterizations more than arguments are very powerful because they sound objective so if no one else is characterizing and you are the only one you can get away by just like pretending as if you are saying objective truth and if no one questions you like it just might sound completely objective and if you manage to present the characterization that helps your case like you are halfway winning just by being able to do that so like there is i think confidence and is quite helpful specifically characterizations because the more objective you can make it sound the more successful you might be with it

9:59 um cool okay the second thing in terms of those principles is that your characterizations aside from having to be within the plausibility spectrum um they will be more plausible the more nuanced you manage to be so how to achieve the sort of nuance so um so i'm using four mistakes that i think people are making very often when they are characterizing uh but and explaining how we can try to fix it so the first one is like stop thinking about actors it's like monolithic one entity so i think what very often happens when people talk about countries or like social movements or like companies they kind of analyze it in a way as if the country was like one entity almost as it was like one person like china

10:47 with one incentive and like one um like one way of behaving um the way you should be thinking about this is when you are thinking about these like more complex actors decisions are not made by one single entity but are being made by groups and individuals that exist within those actors who have varying levels of influence so for example when you think when you're talking about countries and what countries will do and what countries and cities are you thinking about more of political leaders political parties or like other actors within the country or religious organizations or army who might have influence of how the country behaves and the more you are able to describe the incentives of those specific actors who actually make the decisions the more plausible your characterization

11:33 will sound uh similarly i think the example for social movements like very often people are just like oh like feminist movement as if it was like one thing like one entity again there's always things like allies leaders donors not even talking about different fractions within those movements um or even corporations again people are like corporations are profit incentivized um but again cooperation is not like one entity that like hounds for profit um you have shell stakeholders you have workers you have board of directors all of these people have differing incentives different levels of influence and have influence on what eventually like the corporation behaves like the second thing um stop thinking of actors as inherently rational so i think that

12:19 is a thing that people tend to do um quite often that they just assume that every actor just makes that decision based on like what's most beneficial for them from like a really rational utilitarian point of view but very often if you think about even yourself or anyone around you people do not always weigh up like make the cost benefit analysis and then like make the decision so people act on emotions like anger like confusion like grief so think of what are the different psychological processes people might have when they are making decisions and like insert it into your analysis that can help you like get away with a variety of different analysis uh for example um quite recently uh me and jacqueline byron final which was about um as a scientist in like during second

13:05 world war um if you are if you would or would not like eat really really important seeds that you researched when you were doing like a siege of leningrad um so whether you would rather eat the seeds that were very important for your research or whether you would rather die so we won't decide defending that he would rather die and again obviously you can't like you would you have to run arguments that kind of depend on the fact that you have to go around like claims that everyone is like instinctively trying to get as much utility for themselves and sort of self-preservation we had to make arguments about why there is some level of like irrationality and some level of like passion or like interest in the utility of other people rather than about yourself so again you can think about different

13:51 emotions people can have that drive their decisions rather than just like the interest in their own like selfish utility um then thirdly uh thinking of actors as independent of external circumstances everyone you can describe environments actors operate within how they shape their goals how they hinder them accelerate them for example social movements um like very often they don't they don't just exist in a vacuum they have some environment they're operating in um so take that environment into account and how it affects how that actor acts and lastly um conceal long-term trajectories and consider long-term trends so i think very often when people characterize and they don't really know how to do it they do it through like examples so instead of just pointing out examples

14:37 it's better to research some structural reasons as to why an actor is likely to act a certain way across time and space i think very often it's with examples like us and interventions so every time i judge any debaters about like the u.s intervening anywhere um there is a team that's going to say something like this is a really bad idea because like u.s intervened in iraq and then it was bad and then the team on the opposition goes like ah but like then they intervened in like kosovo and that was good so to avoid that sort of back and forth examples try to think about what is the reasoning the structural reasoning why the intervention went badly would those structural reasons be present still right now so can we expect that if there is

15:23 another intervention it would likely to go badly would it likely to go well because these structural reasons are the same as they were for example with the during the example of kosovo if you think that was a good invention so being able to characterize through those long-term trajectories is often very very helpful and make you sound more plausible than just throwing in examples even though they are useful but they again same as with arguments they should just support your actual analysis cool so um have any questions uh regarding those of the principal spot or can i go move through practical consent cool uh i'm gonna assume that that was either clear or really confusing hopefully very clear so um in terms of

16:10 the practical concepts the first one is in terms of how to characterize so very often you are running cases that are quite complex and you have a lot of things that you could potentially characterize a lot of actors that you could talk about so how to pick what to prioritize i think in some cases this is very obvious from the motion and you kind of just have to develop the intuitions to find out what these things are so like for example if i'm going to be giving an actor an extra power so for example i'm going to allow the imf to intervene in some some some way in in economic affairs even more than it can right now of some countries or like different emotions about whether parents or teachers should have more power with curricula or similar motions like that you want to characterize the actor that

16:55 you are giving more power as good or for example if you are banning something you obviously want to portray or characterize that thing as as uh something that is that is very harmful um so those are quite obvious examples and i think you intuitively know that those are going to be important characterizations uh it's just about working on your intuition so the more you're going to be debating the more you're going to be prepping the clearer this will be so again i recommend doing exercises like long prep um just sit down take some motions and think about what are the important things and here they are and need to characterize and the more you kind of get the intuitions the more in prep it immediately clicks for you um in cases where this is not obvious and you have to figure it out yourself i think you can often figure it out by like

17:43 working backwards so as you if you were here last time you kind of know the prep strategy that we gave so once you work out the main points that you are going to be arguing you can figure out which of these are going to need characterizing um through asking yourself a um is the other side likely to contest this so if you know that the other side is going to question what you are trying to say um about the particular act about the particular context you know this is going to be a high priority thing and you really need to characterize it properly or but even if you it's not something that they're going to contest you can still ask yourself are the impacts i'm making is the strength of my case dependent on these characterizations do i

18:28 need it to be true for my impacts to really matter if that answer is yes then again it's something that you should characterize if none of those like none of the questions are answered yes then probably it's not so necessary to characterize it in depth cool so in terms of how to structure characterizations and i think this is where people tend to make the most mistakes and it's where the difference between good and bad characterization lies so if if people's characterized at all very often the way they do it is just stopping at the very first point i outline so the basic structure i think is good is a starting with the descriptive claim then you have to do a justification and then you have to do an implication most people just do the

19:14 descriptive claim and think that's the end of characterization um so the descriptive way is the kind of the assertive part of your characterization where i'm gonna describe the actor the context for the norm i'm gonna say oh like donald trump is irrational or i'm gonna say uh like russia is currently like vulnerable um so this is the assertive one i'm just asserting making a claim this is where very often people just stop so they start their speech they say ah like we think like the regime is really vulnerable and then i'm gonna like go and make my arguments and then the other side says ah no we don't think it's true and then it kind of becomes a back and forth so which is why you have to do the other two steps

19:59 but within that descriptive claim one tip i would do in addition when you are making the initial claim think of the language you are using so you're trying to use the appropriate words to forward the correct emotion to the judge so for example think about if you are saying something is going to be coercive or are you cursing someone with your policy are you encouraging someone with your policy this can describe the very same thing but it makes it sound as very very it's it conveying very different emotions so just through that initial assertion you can already kind of make the judge feel certain way about the thing that you are characterizing so once you do that descriptive claim the second step is to justify it so in the same way as you justify arguments

20:44 you are providing reasons as to why what you are claiming is true so for example with the russia example you say uh putin's regime is vulnerable three reasons why first reason is the fact that like um you had recent scandals with the opposition that made you look really bad um second reason blah blah blah et cetera et cetera so you do you provide several reasons and try to provide as many as possible that are strong for the claim that you are making lastly and i think this is incredibly important you tell the judge what the implication of the characterization you've just done is and this is what people don't do almost at all and i sometimes i'm guilty of that as well and i need to be very conscious of doing it tell the judge very very clearly what

21:30 your characterization just did for the debate so for example the implication is that my argument about blah blah is significantly more relevant in this context the implication is that i mitigated everything that the other side said about this or like it completely shifted the burden etc etc so making it very clear what you strategically did with that characterization is very useful because otherwise the judge might just be sitting there and being like cool this sounds nice i buy this why do i care um so don't trust the judge to make the links for you be really explicit and tell them have any questions about that structure or does that make sense cool so this is long but it's just an example

22:20 of how this could look like and i also want to just outline how much characterizations uh matter as a in terms of how you are doing your how do you do implications if you are opening government yeah ah what's cursed chris sorry okay so how do implications for opening government so again uh if you are opening government you have the issue with not being able to hear what they're going to say but um about what the other sites are going to say but again same as you do with normal arguments you have to be preemptive so um your dpm already hurt uh already hurt the yellow at least so you can at least do it

23:06 directly with the opening opposition but you can always make sure that a you are doing the implication about how it strengthens your own arguments because it's independent about what the other teams are actually running but secondly you probably if you are doing the prep right as we said the last last week you already kind of know what the other team's main points are going to be so you can already kind of preemptively do the implication against the points that you know are going to come um yeah obviously it's harder it's much easier to do it if you are in whip uh but like even in opening government i think you can still like kind of preemptively get away cool so in terms of the example um even though chris thinks the motion was cursed i think the motion was brilliant

23:51 um so this is an example of a characterization um me and jaclyn have done obviously this is caveat for this is i'm using it but not because i think that this is the um the best characterization possible it's because um it's easy for me to explain my thought process so again take it critically um if you think that something is wrong about it like feel free to really think about how you would do it potentially better i'm not saying this is a good character like brilliant characterization it is just a good example like an outline we thought process on so in terms of demotion the motion was that this house believes that it's in the interest of ruling party of kazakhstan to hold free and fair elections of local officials so the argument the mechanistic argument we wanted to make and that's the only like actual argument we

24:37 made was it's the thing that is at the bottom so the one line where we said this is going to piece the population by giving them a democratic right that they care about which is going to descend disincentivize them from protesting so that's the argument itself now everything else that's above it is basically characterization where we are trying to make the arguments that in and of itself sounds like good but why do i care sound very very relevant um so the way we did it isn't we're actually opening government on this so um this can be helpful in the question of how to do it on og because this is kind of um also explaining how to deal with the preemption so we gave two broad pieces of characterization the first characterization was that people are still going to vote for party sympathetic candidates in these

25:24 elections anyway so we give two reasons for this that is first because the opposition kazakhstan is actually kind of weak because it was stifled so there were no opposition candidates to actually properly run and two because the ruling party is not like massively resented yet um people are kind of content to some extent with providing decent economic development so the implication of this is that it's unlikely to weaken the power of the ruling party now this the reason why we did a characterization is because we knew that at some point there's going to be an op that's going to stand up and say aha like the ruling party is going to lose all that power because everyone's going to go and vote in the opposition so even though we didn't hear that argument yet we knew that someone's going to say it so we like preemptively characterized against it

26:10 the second piece of characterization is that we said the current trend is going in such direction that it is likely that if you do not do any change at all people will eventually and likely soon become quite resentful of the government which can lead to much more furthering protests and riots so we gave again three reasons that the justification part of the characterization so we said things like you have a new president that like doesn't have the personality cult as the old president had um like this isn't like spec knowledge that you probably don't know we knew it because like i prepped for like a kazakhstan based udc uh so i don't feel like you need to know stuff about kazakhstan uh but like again like those would be always like applicable like the structure is applicable to an emotion that's like not as weird specky uh or we said things that are very recent scandals about freedom of press

26:55 or the fact that you have protests in nearby countries such as belarus that could inspire um like similar sort of behavior um in in the country so the implication of all of this which we said is oh okay the implication of all of this is that we study context the ruling party in kazakhstan finds itself is very very delicate so it has enough support at this very moment moment so this move would not threaten its power but there are reasons to believe that if nothing is done there might be very significant risk of them losing power in the near future well this means that the argument about the peace in the population is extremely relevant in the current context so the reason we did the second kind of characterization

27:41 and the implication underneath is because a this is making our argument relevant and two it's also clarifying why the two characterizations are not contradictory just pointing out like why the context can be both that it's not going to lead to like massive overthrow via the elections but also if with why without the elections you would potentially get some sort of writing so um i hope you can understand like or see the difference that the characterizing makes to the argument because without the characterization it's unclear why in kazakhstan he would care about peace in the population at all um why kazakhstan cares about people protesting at all now with the characterization it now sounds really really relevant why that sort of move is necessary

28:26 because the context requires it um any questions about this does it make sense i get if it's like quite yeah i'm just trying to describe like my own thought process so like if you confused just feel free to ask any qualifications on this okay cool yeah if it was astana udc runs then that would be great like we waited all for kazakhstan motion for australia udc then it never came so all of us prepared like kazakhstan for euros and it never happened okay um another in terms of practical concerns where do you actually employ your characterizations um so just to go through this very quickly i think what the problem i'm trying to address sometimes is that people sometimes people tend to think

29:11 that they need to characterize at the very start of their speech being like i'm going to do these three pieces of framing and then they do then they say three things and then they don't link them and then they go through the arguments so you the distinction between arguments and characterization is often kind of blurry and characterization can be employed throughout your speech so just couple examples of when when uh you can do that when you can employ your characterization um the first you can actually do it at the start of your speech i think very often smart thing is to do it during the introduction so sometimes you will notice with speakers like especially very good speakers that they use the sort of fluffy intro at the start not just like just like nice rhetoric but instead they are already kind of

29:57 implicitly characterizing so whilst the judge is not being super critical of it because it's not like an argument they're already kind of subconsciously framing everything and characterizing stuff around and like often the other teams also don't notice so they don't rebut it so that can be very useful tool to like shmoosh your context this characterization in your introduction um i think secondly you can also just do it at the start of the start of each argument so in the example in the kazakhstan you could say just things like in context in which you should consider this argument is x and then you do the characterization then you provide the argument or sometimes characterization is kind of like the very first point in your speech eg like first we're going to tell you how this will look like

30:43 uh i think the emotion um there was an uh imperial iv motion uh that was this house believes that sex education classes in schools should teach techniques for sexual gratification i hope you like this motion because i will make you do an exercise on it um that uh the the first point we would kind of make and both sides probably should make is kind of one always look like and give some characterization about how it's going to look like obviously helpful for each side of the house um so those are examples of where you can employ your characterization it basically means throughout your speech the only one thing i would say is i recommend not to do it like after your argument sort of with impacts the reason for this is that judge might already kind of zone out during your argument because they did

31:29 not see the relevance so if you go through an entire mechanism and then you're like why does this matter and then you start talking about the context very often the judge has already kind of zoned out for the argument itself so it's more helpful if you put it at the start so the judge is like ah this is going to be relevant let me listen and making sure that they actually note everything down if you tell them why it's relevant only like retrospectively they might have zoned out um and um oh and um and uh they won't be able to credit it as well as you maybe want to cool um does this make sense just to check with this light okay right okay

32:14 um so here is the exercise um so i am not sure if i can do it from here but so basically what i'm going to do um is that this is the the motion that i just outlined so this is this house believe that sex education classes in schools should teach techniques for sexual gratification so this includes but not limits to anal sex oral sex mutual gratification masturbation so if you have on two sides um there are obviously range of arguments but for the sake of the exercise i what i want you to do is to think about how you would analyze and justify uh the um the the statements that i just outlined for each site so in

32:59 golf you're going to you want to characterize it such that this is going to be something that is empowering that's going to provide information that is otherwise unavailable or misleading and it provides in safe manner and in a safe space so you want to make it sound that's going to be empowering on op you want to do the opposite you wanted to say this something is going to be very uncomfortable very humiliating so as a result you're going to have more of unhealthy attitudes among kids towards sex because of the associated shame and like it will actually prevent you from teaching useful things so i want on one side i want it want you to characterize why it's going to be empowering give me the justification for it for why it is likely or op i want you to make it sound like it's going to be uncomfortable um so the way i would want to do it and

33:44 i actually don't know how to do it as i'm screen sharing so ari is the host so he can do it for me is if we the 22 people apart from me could be divided into two breakout rooms i'm gonna give you five minutes where you can one break out from one will be golf the breakout room two will be up um a breakout room so hopefully no one is like stuck in a breakup room uh they should be closed so i think it's good okay um in which case maybe someone just looked at me and they're gonna come back in the waiting room and we're gonna let them in that sounds fair okay cool great um so i hoped you had uh

34:32 some fruitful um discussion on that so if we can just uh get so the other side can hear the characterizations that you came up with so whoever wants to um don't know if you came up with someone who wants to do it or if the people who are leading and want to do it um just for each of the styles you want to give me about um what you as a group came up with um starting with anyone who wants to from the golf side so why would it would be empowering what would be good uh sure i don't think we nominated someone so that's good leader i guess i will feedback on this um so first there were kind of two key things that the group identified that we would want to be characterizing in the first place one is exactly what the kind of

35:18 misinformational problems that arise in the status quo are both in terms of what people end up believing and where they are learning it from secondly why what the classroom setting in which children learn is likely to look like how they're likely to engage in it um because of like time we didn't go into detail on both of them so i'll just talk about the detail we did go into on the second one there were two justifications that were given for this for the classroom step why the engagement in the classroom telling is good firstly that children are likely to be eager to learn because they are inexperienced and eager to be good for their partner the first times or the early times that they have sexual experiences and therefore are actually likely to want to engage well in the lesson especially because children these days are aware that the internet isn't an accurate place to be learning this kind of thing secondly on the teacher's side that

36:03 there are some reasons teachers are naturally incentivized to do this well both in terms of like increased pressures in terms of curricula in order to do this but also because they tend to care about their students and be like empathetic with them because they are motivated to go into such careers and therefore are naturally likely to want to do a good job for their students uh finally then the impact of this framing is a any arguments uh that gov make about why this is likely to be empowering i.e this document are significantly stronger because they are based on the premise that the classroom setting will teach these well but also b any arguments to the contrary start to drop out of the debate if this characterization is true um okay yeah no that's great um i think that's probably what i envisioned so cool um can i have someone

36:49 from the upside do you do the opposite does anyone from my room want to take it wait five seconds all right cool it's like i'll just do it so uh in terms of like descending order of like things people thought were important uh particular characterizations were and we had a multitude of them so one uh specifically why it's likely that specifically conservative parents in terms of how it looks in terms of like ah like impacting like our morals and like where they're teaching children et cetera oftentimes they are within school boards oftentimes schools specifically cater to words parents like who are likely to like

37:34 cause outrage means they're likely to be the ones who shape the curriculum and how it's taught this means any arguments which are about like specifically liberalizing the curriculum or like why they will teach sex better etc are likely to be mitigated in the sense of what the people who actually have control over and like who carry all of the incentive structures second uh specifically why oftentimes sex education is something that is de-prioritized in school so as in there are limited things in terms of time and resources which means anything that government wants to say is specifically taught well or better because you're bringing in specifically new things within this it means and still working within that restrained time and budget and like also multiplied by like the previous characterization of like likely backlash means that you are limited and what you're able to teach

38:20 and the depth you're able to go into so it's likely to be worse than anything the government says um and i think uh third thing was specifically classroom setting so i said you're likely to see this in like an immature way as in like typically the way that sex ed happens is like like lots of jokes and like a likely immaturity uh or that there's the alternative depending on like what like the year group etc or like the mindset is to avoid anything that is essentially sexual because it seems like weird or disgusting or etc etc both of these mean that the way you engage with the content is likely not to be in like good faith or like is likely to be distracted which means all the content that you are receiving is likely to be confused or or a floor quality yeah no um i think that's perfect yeah um so

39:05 when we were in this debate like we were an op um we were basically saying very similar things uh we were pointing out quite often like also the teacher will probably be very uncomfortable insofar as in any other settings something that would be so quite explicitly sexual would probably be something that you were just comfortable doing um or similarly even for the kids would probably be like quite weird to see um so very often those those sort of characterizations can be incredibly useful in in in describing how helpful the policy will be it's like know that both of those characterization is very good and imagine if the opposite side didn't characterize it at all you are very very easily just claiming your impacts for yourself just by the fact that you are the one who describes the classroom setting or you are the one who describes

39:51 like how the curriculum um so i think hopefully everyone kind of got the gist about how the characterizations are structured through the exercise um hopefully that was helpful we will see also in a debate if you are able to then um employ yourselves i will just note um in terms of the spar debate afterwards i'm just gonna check right now how we are looking up with sign ups um yeah so seeing right now i think that we would be on perfect numbers if there were three more people who would sign up so um if you did not do that yet and you would be able to speak um it would be very very useful if you did it because then we can have nice two full rooms um and that would be fun so no one has to speak by themselves

40:38 um yeah so if you sign up please sign up now because i think i have like two last slides so we will be wrapping in is there any mdu merchandise for sale uh yeah no i don't know uh yeah we would have to like we would pick some iron speakers but uh yeah would be would be great if that didn't have to happen so if there's three more people oh we have one more uh okay i see that then we need just two more people great if two more people find themselves signing up they will be brilliant i would have you would have my internal gratitude cool um lastly on the practical contents

41:24 in terms of rebutting so um i think the first thing that it's mostly it's a lot of people don't know how to report characterization but they just don't think about that they should do it and they don't even spot that what the other team is doing is characterization in the first place so make sure given that now we've run through where to employ characterizations how they are structured etc etc make sure that you are paying attention to other teams characterization and you do not just concede things because they sound intuitive um so make sure you listen to that fluffy intro and you are thinking are they actually um are they i think let's discuss the chat um are they actually are they actually

42:10 making making just a fluffy intro or are they uh trying to put some point already through etc etc so make sure you're always paying attention um the one thing i would note is that you should be trying to question characterizations even if they sound intuitive to you you should always think of is there something i can characterize uh even though it's maybe less intuitive but one tip if you are going to like do counter characterization of something that is less intuitive that what they are claiming be real about it so i think i think that like i very often do like when it comes to those characterizations is just say look this is going to sound less intuitive but i'm going to be giving you one two three structural reasons know that i didn't give you any

42:56 uh so just like really clearly pointing out to a judge you might find this non-intuitive but you still have to give it to me given that i'm actually proving it um because otherwise if you sometimes if you don't do it the judge can just get away with by just saying like ah like i found the other one like more plausible and then you it's hard but now you they can't say it and so far as you already set yourself it's not intuitive they actually have to explain why they found a characterization but beyond just like it's less intuitive to me so make sure you do this especially if you know your chair and you kind of know their biases um like for example um we've been in debates recently where we had to debate whether we had two community characterizations where the other side was saying something like people are very used to capitalism and people kind of buy into capitalism and

43:42 like it as a system where we had to claim that most people are really skeptical and they would buy into like more capital anti-capitalist or like critical narratives of it and especially if we knew that the chair might be like more on the centrist side we very often did specifically that so we said look this might sound non-intuitive to you but there are three structural reasons we're going to give you as opposed to then as to why people are actually really skeptical of capitalism right now so you will have to give it to us just on that basis so in those yeah in those cases make sure you are pointing this out make sure you are paying attention to the other teams when they characterize given that now that you know when other things are characterized i think how do you structure your battle i think first just expose the characterization

44:28 as i said the power often lays in the idea of objectivity sometimes the judge doesn't even notice that the that the team is characterizing you want to point it out you want to say that they didn't just like state an objective troop of an actor they trying to paint it certain way point it out afterwards just question it in the same way as you would question mechanisms know that like good teams will do the justification for characterizations and you can ask yourself is this justification actually logical does it make sense would it apply to all cases or are they just making it up for a very limited number so if that is if if if there are gaps you can point them out and in the same way as you would rebut an argument you can question a characterization after you do it and you make that characterization

45:13 sound less plausible you can provide your counter characterization and then weigh it up so you give the alternative one for example in what we just did in the exercise you could question the stuff that gov said about that classroom setting and then you outline your own version of how you think the classroom setting would look like and then you weigh it up so you can wait up for example by um whether we think that your characterization would happen in larger number of cases because often like both characterization might be true it is for some people for some people not you want to make clear that your applies to bigger group or you can point out that you just give many more structural reasons for it was there a much more certain similar thing so you want to weigh it up but also

45:58 after you do this make sure you also kind of engage with the best case anyway so this is a principle that you also probably do with arguments but make sure that even if you come to characterize them and you manage to explain to judge why your characterization is better you still say even in that world we would still win because xyz uh but again make clear to judge that that's what you're doing that you say like we are not conceding it but just in case even if in that best case this is it don't don't confuse the judge and make it sound as if you are conceding um so those are probably the first four steps expose it question it count the characterize and weigh it up and lastly do still do some engagement with that best case cool okay so that's all for the

46:45 practical concerns any questions at this point before i go for the last light before i do that i'm just going to check with the sign ups again okay uh still missing two people but we'll we'll figure it out hopefully cool um sometimes of characterization as a winning strategy so how it actually can strategically benefit you uh just beyond what we've already said so just to reiterate i think this was what i was saying the entire session it just helps you a lot with way ups it allows you to make your arguments more relevant other sides less plausible allows you to make it make yourself just buy simple way ups that you would

47:30 normally employ uh win by that but also um you can employ it as a for example a winning strategy from closing so example of that is for example if you are co you can say something or do something like oh just posit it that there's an actor x that would act in y way which would be bad but what you added is you characterized why actually that actor x is likely to act that way in majority of cases so the so that impact is actually dependent on your characterization because you are the one who is who is pointing out why is it likely that the actor would be acting in this way or for example og explained why this would create more voter engagement we from cg are going to explain this is crucial to happen right now in the

48:16 context of country x so that's for example with like the kazakhstan example had we been cg and og only like set the argument by describing the context we could have made it sound so much more relevant and then the mechanism again kind of depends on you so this is a good way how you can do basically not given any arguments from closing just characterizing but making everyone dependent or openly dependent on that um i think sometimes it is uh this may be slightly hopefully still confusing but it might be a bit advanced tip um you sometimes want to over credit the opposite bench to pretend that your characterization is the most important point so for example um if you're opening posits that actor x will be acting in y way and that would be bad and no one

49:01 really rebuts it uh it sounds kinda less relevant that you are proving even more while they are likely to act this way through the characterization so you might want to point out something like you might want to say um you know our opening set x that's kind of plausible but look the opposite side responded with why that's also really plausible so like you really really now need our characterization to kind of break the deadlock and adjudicate this even if maybe like the response wasn't as plausible just pretend that it really was so like you're like you are breaking the big dead look and you are like the savior who's just like finally happily judicated so hopefully that makes sense i think that's sometimes a kind of helpful um way to to to get away with with making your characterization sound like the most important thing in the debate

49:48 um and i think lastly um it sometimes allows you through very simple characterizations kind of out frame the entire debate apart from yourself um so i don't know if you are familiar uh probably if you are someone who debates a lot you probably know for example zagreb udc 2014 final if not i recommend watching that because it's an example of how uh characterizations of framing can can kind of win you a debate um so the emotion was um something along the lines that is house believes that the feminist movement should oppose interventions that claim to further women's rights and the entire debate was obviously incredible speakers debating about why it would be why the internet what interventions are really bad for women

50:34 or why interventions are actually quite good for women and it's good to have the accountability uh for them or not then closing opposition stands up and says look um and characterizes the feminist movement and says that no one actually listens and cares about what the feminist movement says so no matter if feminist women opposes or or supports this it doesn't change anything interventions are going to happen no one cares so the only difference is the only difference in the debate is how this actually affects the perception of the feminist movement uh based on like what narrative they are running so then the probably less impact arguments became the only relevant ones because of that characterization of how strong the feminist movement is that the closing opposition team gave um so that's a good example i recommend

51:20 watching it if you want to see our similarly uh i was a recent debate i think it was that astana open the one before euros there was a motion this house would incentivize people to work from home um and the debate uh we saw was an example of the opening half kind of going back and forth um talking about in which settings are people more productive to are more productive from work more productive if they are at home um so in closing opposition can just stand up and say look we think different people and different personalities some of them probably like working by themselves some of them probably like to work in groups uh some of them have annoying kids some of them have really nice environments to be in

52:06 probably depends person on person probably there's also an incentive from the companies to solve these problems either way so this is completely symmetrical um what we're going to do in closing up we're going to be talking about something different that's not dependent on this we're going to talk about like macro economic impacts this has for example why the fact that when people stay at home they are less likely to like shop in businesses and for example like the districts where most companies are located now you no longer have that sort of spending that has massive macroeconomic impacts or people are like less likely to travel et cetera making you again like the only relevant team kind of characterizing just through doing the characterization about why how people work and how people like

52:52 engage with working conditions and why it's broadly symmetrical what are different kind of actors again outframing the top so um this is another tactic that you can use so yeah um so again just to sum it up um both you can use it both in way ups as a closing strategy or you can use it to kind of completely wipe up um um everyone everyone else from the debate in terms of the old framing cool so that is all for the workshop um so i'm gonna stop my screen share right now and i think i