Structuring Arguments - Advanced Training Debate Workshop: Week 2

0:03 awesome hi everyone uh welcome to the second week of advanced training so i'll be running this workshop and then but lucy will be around in case you have any questions or in case uh we have a second room that needs a judge for this bar so um this week we're going to be covering something called linear flow and it's something that i recently discovered um that made me quite good at things that i'm i think i'm quite good at which are matter jumping and having really strong robust internal argument structure so loads of people even those who are experienced with debating do not know what linear flow is and it's something quite unnoticed when we make arguments but it makes a world of difference when the judge is crediting your

0:49 analysis or when you're trying to find out what's missing from making really really persuasive argumentation so i think that i discovered a new way of phrasing what linear flow is or internal argument structure so hopefully a lot of you even if you've been debating for years will benefit from it so if i can click to the next slide ah here it is so a lot of you are able to make really basic arguments uh but lots of you are are also similarly when i was first starting out missing a lot of uh a lot of things and when trying to hit the higher brackets of speaker points so like um here are a couple of reasons why people often suck at making arguments number one lots of significant portions are missing so maybe it looks like impact sometimes people miss framing sometimes people

1:34 miss really crucial logical links that they didn't know they needed to prove um and this is always really difficult to try to get people to fix because you just don't know what you're missing until after the fact when the judge tells you that's why you took the third or the fourth um so i'm gonna like internal argument structure is not only good for identifying like oh of like it's not only good for a judge trying to follow your arguments but it's really good at internally checking what parts you're missing before you even speak so we'll see that later on second part of why people suck at making arguments um it's sometimes really unclear where a point is going so loads of people um will sometimes say really smart things or they'll say like really true things but um like as a judge when i'm listening i just don't know where the point is

2:21 going i have no idea whether or not it links the emotion i don't know what the impact of the point is going to be so basically like i just like i just tune out when someone is making a point but i do not know the direction that this point is going to go and so they end up wasting a lot of time because they don't signal to me why this point like why the statement they're making is even important in the context of the debate third reason why people suck at making arguments lots like similarly lots of time is wasted talking about meaningless details so a lot of the times it's unclear where our point is growing maybe it's because it's actually not going anywhere so a lot of time people add details that are just not necessary to making a point persuasive or strategic in the the context of the debate so loads of people just like for example

3:08 give me pieces of framing that just don't go towards making their point impactful or making that point more persuasive sometimes people give me logical links that completely not crucial to making up to proving that point is true fourthly sometimes uh argument is super hard to follow so sometimes like that jumping from all over the place first like they tell me maybe like they tell me like the impact then they tell me like the analysis that leads to the impact but then they tell me the problem after they like the problem they're trying to solve after they've told me the solution to that problem so it's really hard for a judge to follow your argumentation if it doesn't have a natural flow to it so all of this can be really avoided by becoming disciplined in how your argument is presented or internally structured and i'm going to call this having a

3:54 clear clean linear flow and what do i mean by linear flow so what is linear flow linear flow basically is how your argument gets from the beginning to the end so it seems a little bit like tongue-in-cheek when i say this and i'll try to explain a little bit more further on and use analogy so all of you can understand what i mean um linear for linear flow to work every step along the way from getting from point a to point b is necessary every step is getting you closer to the end point of that argument and you don't make any unnecessary detours or diversions so typically even though the flow will look different for any for each debate in each case typically it resembles this first you tell me the problem that you're trying to solve or you show me

4:39 the framing of what the current world looks like so for example if it's something like this house uh this house uh wants to implement gender quotas for corporate boards you tell me the framing or the problem that you face in status quo so just like look right now a lot of women face a glass ceiling and trying to go up into the upper stratas or the upper echelons of corporations because of this they're underrepresented in the most powerful positions in many of these businesses and remain a socio-economic underclass so that's a problem in the framing that we see in the world today then you show me why the problem arises so you identify like why that why is it that the problem is there so you can say just like i people have internal biases about what you know powerful business people look like and these tend to not be

5:24 women for example or you say like uh lots of um you know like lots of you know these networks and promotions are based on old boys clubs that women just aren't privy to so you identify why that problem arises then you show me how this motion makes that problem better or worse um then you show me why it matters that this change has occurred so for example like if you're showing to me like ah now like women will be super empowered in the workplace they now break that glass ceiling and this means the impact of that is that women maybe achieve higher incomes maybe these women in these corporate boards will start making policies that more favorable to women in the workplace empowering other women lower down the corporate ladder and then you show me the weighing at the end so you show me like this is the most important impact that in the debate because of xyz reasons

6:10 um so many of you especially if you like movies or especially if you like tv series understand that this actually really follows um what our brains naturally tend towards so typically in a movie really good pacing is really necessary so what you need is a setup and then you need a conflict and then you need a resolution and then you need an ending right so this is the same thing so the problem in framing is set up and the conflict that you aim to solve and then the rest of your speech is about how you resolve that conflict or you just think maybe that conflict gets even worse right and then you show me the conclusion which is like the impact in the wedding so note just like in a movie bad pacing can ruin everything and maybe not leave enough time for a resolut a good resolution or a good ending the same thing is true for an argument

6:55 so spending way too much time in the setup or in the in characterizing conflict means that you have no time trying to resolve that conflict or trying to conclude it to a satisfactory end so all of you need to be really careful in how you internally allocate time to each of these points so going further i try to unders explain why it is that this this flow is the flow that most people follow so you can't just like rearrange things and have it be just as persuasive a lot of the times so first you need to tell me um so like often you cannot make an argument unless like a judge knows why you're making it right so just a lot of times when you're trying to fix a problem you need to first tell me what that problem is so and then next when you're analyzing why that problem arises it

7:42 helps you set up the next stage so i'm like telling me like oh the reason why women are often underrepresented in their most powerful economic positions is through like internal soft sexism or soft sex culture in workplaces or just like old boys networks that sets you up really cleanly for the next stage which is to show me why the problem changes to be better or worse so all your analysis can be targeted at those at those root issues that you just identified in the prior part you're showing me like okay this motion solves the old voice network so this motion solves like the the internal soft sexist culture incorporations and so it makes it seem like your argumentation is all really targeted to the roots of the problem that you just characterized

8:27 and so it by by doing that your analysis seems super watertight to the judge and it seems also super unique and like the definitive delta in the debate so it's not like it's the necessary thing in order to solve the problem and no other solution is going to be satisfactory because you show how that motion targets the very root problems of that motion um and so uh then like of course like the ending like your argument doesn't mean anything unless you tell me what the changes result in and why that matters um so for example like this house would institute sim taxes um so your the problem that you set up is just like look loads of syntaxes ex like loads of people are smoking and drinking alcohol um to the extent that it's detrimental for their health and lots of these people tend to be like

9:13 socio-economically vulnerable people um and then you can say like the problem the reason why the problem arises is because of state failure um the state has failed these people in terms of like they tend to face a lot of economic pressure that gives them a lot of stress in their lives and the only means through which they can cope with it is through like things like like addictive like like addictive substances like alcohol or other unhealthy life practices and the state has disallowed them from accessing any other stress relieving mechanism like for example this allowed them for maybe going to the gym having access to therapy etc and so that's the problem that we have and then the reason why this motion now solves that is that we as the government we nudge them in the more correct direction so a lot of these people

9:59 go for these solutions because they're comparatively cheaper than going to things like therapy go like like eating healthy food et cetera by making these like smoking and drinking alcohol more expensive we target that economic incentive to indulge in things like harmful things like alcohol and cigarettes the impact is like they get better health outcomes and then you can do the wing afterwards does that make sense to people please pipe up if you have no idea what i'm talking about or if you want me to re-emphasize a point so this leads me on to the next part of matter dumping so um loads of people who have who have seen me speak kind of like i guess like i i think that i can get through lots of material pretty efficiently and one of the reasons why i can do that is because i do something called tiering

10:46 my analysis so what does tiering mean so tiering essentially means that you give multiple levels of something so i'm going to show you loads of examples of how you can tear your arguments so they seem super robust but why should you give multiple levels of arguments so if you give multiple levels of argumentation that i'll show you later it's much harder for the opponent to rebut everything that you say um so if you're a first speaker and you give like a bunch of different mechanisms or a bunch of different impacts or a bunch of different actors um that all lead to some change in the status quo like maybe your your opponent um if they're good maybe rebut two out of the three then you'll then you're like second speaker can come up not only but the other person who just came up but said like look they

11:32 obviously didn't take down every everything and because we still have this one mechanism standing we obviously at least make the world a better place um etc um also it's much more like you make also much more comprehensive cases that seem to cover different dimensions of the problem um so loads of problems and status quo unsurprisingly have many different routes or many different reasons as to why they occur and so seemingly acknowledging that and showing how you change all those different dimensions makes your case seem really really comprehensive to judge and even more persuasive also if you're an opening half so if you're an ogo super hard to extend or something like that um in a meaningful way if you just give a super comprehensive case

12:18 also like the same reason as to why loads of problems arise due to a multitude of reasons the actors involved also respond in a multitude of ways so it's also important to cover as much as possible in order to be persuasive um be careful like i'm saying this to you now but try not to do this immediately like try don't try to like deal with 10 actors all of a sudden just because you hear this presentation take it slowly maybe like if you've only been analyzing one actor in a debate before analyze two uh don't bite off more than you can chew because often what peop i've seen people do is that they try to handle everything and they just end up analyzing pretty superficially so how do you do this effectively there are loads of way to tears analysis so this is one of them

13:03 um this this means giving lots of different mechanisms to solve a problem so what problems lit mostly look like this right you have a problem it could arise because of a multitude of reasons so you know you have root one of the problem you have root two of a problem you have root three um and the way you can show that you comprehensively solve this problem or you comprehensively show how the motion makes it worse is that you take each root of the problem and you show how that changes each root changes so if we're going back to like um uh there'll be like examples later but i'll show you examples later but like and then the next way you can see your analysis is that maybe a problem that says one route that you can identify you show me how

13:51 that one root of the problem changes in a multitude of ways so this becomes really evident later on when i give you examples so this one is for example multiple roots to a problem so here's a problem to identify in the motion this house would legalize all drugs uh you can say like drug cartels are a really big problem in mexico or like a really big problem in lots of latin america um they murder people they often funnel their drug profits into really bad things like human trafficking they often do things like regulations or intimidate local people that's a really big problem so trying to identify why this arises probably has a lot of reasons so maybe one of them is like ah they probably can recruit a lot of really vulnerable young men to be part of their drug network and once these young men for example are drug mules they'll get they'll get

14:38 caught they get put in jail um where they become more hardened criminals the second reason why this is a really big problem is often these drug cartels need to be violent they often need to do face-offs to the police they often need to murder people in order for them not to squeal or comply with the police and because of that just there's just a lot of violence involved with the drug business and third reason as to why drug cartels are a problem they use that money from drugs to funnel lots of really bad things like for example they they fund things like forced prostitution human trafficking rigging elections and all these are being thought so there's loads of reasons why drug cartels are really strong and this is how you can change each food so you can tell me like ah

15:23 like actually by legalizing all drugs drug meals are never put in prison they never become hardened criminals and they can never be recruited um to do worse things than drug muelling right so you know like drug cartels can no longer recruit from prisons so that route is solved they can say like ah because we legalize all drugs like you just don't need to have face offs with the police you don't need to hire security to smuggle drugs anymore and so just a violence entailed in trafficking drugs just goes way down less people die because of the drug trade third reason like people like because you legalize drugs probably people would rather buy drugs from like the government-run pharmacy down the street rather than a shady drug dealer that is associated with a drug cartel and because of this drug cartels now get less money

16:08 from drugs that they can funnel into things like human trafficking um and so do you see like how i've identified different roots of the problem and the way i've made my case really comprehensive is to show how that motion changes each root of the problem to make it significantly better cool so i hope that's clear another way you can do this now this is like this one problem that i identified that i showed changes in a multitude of ways with the motion so i identify one problem so too few women are represented in the upper echelons of business this is this house would adopt gender quarter policies and corporate senior management so i identified the problem lots too few women in that are powerful business people um

16:55 and then i identified one group to the problem probably it's because like women are discriminated in hiring policies they often face like hostile work environments so ie just like the root of the problem is sexism uh sexism that's basically incredibly entrenched right um and now because i've identified one root of the problem i can show how the motion can change that one root of the problem so like maybe like because more women are just put into senior corporate corporate decision-making boards they can now pass for example policy women in senior positions are likely going to pass policies that make workplaces less hostile to the presence of women so this benefits women from lower down the ranks as well so for example like you know like more women will get paid maternity leave you know they're more able to ascend in

17:41 the workplace because there are just policies that support them so more women are likely going to be promoted second way that this solves this the root of the problem like maybe because when like men and women both become more normalized working with and under women in senior positions so if your boss just looks like a woman or like the head honcho is a woman over time you just become much more used to that fact um and you become less hostile or resistant to for example when a woman gets promoted or maybe if you become a manager one day you just say like hey my boss when i was 20 was a woman she did a good job let me hire this woman or let me let me promote this woman since i'm now a manager right so that's another way that you can change sexism third way you can change sexism optics so like more women for example

18:27 when they have a role model in a really high achieving place or they have well they're like in a really high achieving place they now have role models and they know that a place is allocated to them um so they're much more likely to strive for promotion they're more likely to put themselves out there um leaning in essentially and because they're much more active in pursuing promotions pursuing raises because they now know it's possible to actually succeed like this also changes how women actively try to pursue those opportunities make it more likely that women succeed so do you see how like i identified one root problem but then there are loads of different ways how that root problem can be solved by the motion so trying to identify loads of different ways how a single problem can change is really like key to

19:12 making your case uh as robust as possible cool another way you can do this is you can choose to target different actors so this is the motion this house would restrict eu development aid to member states with anti-democratic party practices um so here's the problem uh too many states in the eu like hungary poland bulgaria romania are violating eu principles of political rights you know the rigging elections stacking judiciary this is just not good um and the reason why this has happened is because populist strong men who have been elected which choose to restrict political freedoms and they arrest journalists they stack judiciary and so on so you can choose to say like okay trying to analyze what then changes in

19:57 this debate you can look at different actors involved so we can say like okay people within those countries right people within hungary or poland or bulgaria um you can say just like oh when you take away development aid from these from these places you can say just like people within those countries who no longer get as much money going towards local infrastructure or make creating jobs they just have more resentment towards these strong men for taking away their material wealth so if they ever have an election again um they probably will vote the strong man out or maybe they just take to the streets and just oust this strong man meaning that um anti-democratic practices become far less likely or you can look at you know another actor the strong men themselves you can say like ah you know now they can like strong men themselves know that

20:44 they can't just do all these terrible things without facing consequences and then eventually facing backlash from their voter base they just are less likely going to do this in the terrible excess of doing it in now right and then finally you can just look at borderline countries countries that are kinda doing anti-democratic stuff but are not as severe so for example greece kinda it's kind of becoming a little bit bad uh but not quite to the extent of poland bulgaria or romania you can say that like oh countries like greece they probably also get better they observe poland and bulgaria being punished and so local people know the consequences are swayed away from populism because this looks like it could be their future um so by identifying different actors you can also see how the problem is made better so the

21:30 last one is different incentives so this one is just like how different um like what people are motivated by so maybe people are motivated by the policy that is around them that supports them people are motivated by the norms that they exist in people are motivated by the optical things they observe like for example like women in higher positions this one is i just identified different actors um in the debate and seeing how they all change cool now different context uh this is to protect yourself from being extended upon so for example this house believes that it is an interest of dominant organized religions for that leaders to declare more progressive interpretations of traditional dogma so maybe like you loosen uh how how stringent you are on like dietary practices or like the

22:16 acceptability of contraception or same-sex relationships um and so if you're on opening government you can say like look there are two just too many people leaving organized religion and that's because dominant organized religions are just too strict on the summer dogma and it drives lots of moderates away um you can look at like religion exists all over the world so it's probably really good to analyze how different countries or different contexts it exists in is affected by this motion so you can just say like in a developed world you're going to drive the most devoted way because now like if you are in america or in the uk and you're super super religious when you're when the pope or when like um when like um a really big influential muslim figure just comes out and says like actually

23:02 it's okay to do anything now it's okay to be incredibly liberal with all of our religious practices now your your like religious beliefs just seem too similar to the secular context that you grew up in right it's too similar to the secular society that you exist in so why are you staying this religion it has no comparative difference to the society that exists around you so you as a the most devoted person are probably going to leave or you're going to be driven away because there's just no comparative value that your religion is adding anymore so that's the developed world not a developing world right um you can say just like look what passes as um like what passes as like really radical in in europe or in the west actually is characterized as pretty moderate in a lot of parts of the developing world

23:48 and so it's likely that if you accept all of these like liberalisms in in in religion this just becomes way too progressive for even mainstream society to accept and you're just going to drive loads of moderates away because they're just put off that's way too different from their social political beliefs um and then yeah so like you seem like really comprehensive and you there's no way you can be out framed if you look at different contexts um yep and there are like this is the final slide um so tiering analysis is you can see that's done in loads of different ways and i gave you a list of examples of how it can be done um this this is not like the endo and be all there's loads of other ways you can tear in analysis for example second order impacts so lots of impacts have secondary impacts um so for example

24:36 if it's something like racial quotas in universities um sure you have a very initial impact of just like hey more minorities now get into university but also just like the secondary impacts of that which is that you know like when you have like minority minorities going to university and graduating their children statistically are shown to be more willing to go to university if their parents have so a lot a big problem is is that loads of minorities or underrepresented people don't go to university because they feel like university is not for them or is not for people like them um now that when you have like more like families that are from underrepresented backgrounds going to university you no longer have that idea that it's not for you because your parents went to university and just more likely you're going to go to university because it's what your parents did so it

25:23 seems like a safer option um so that's a secondary impact um so you can tear your analysis such that you give like one really easily provable impact that just seems so intuitive and obvious they can just branch off into many secondary impacts and just analyze that those happen um just like i did right there um and then the last rate i'll tell you how to tear your utility analysis is the short term and long term so you can also think about how emotion operates over lots of different time scales so for example the motion may be about forcing media companies to have more minority representation you can just say like yeah sure just like like surely like now like the short term is that you just have a lot more a lot more minorities on television that's really good because like you know people like

26:08 to see themselves reflected on television but you know in the long term that's where it really matters long term you have children growing up watching these television programs and they see minorities in a diverse set of roles in all of society and because of this they feel like they could be a lawyer they feel like they can be a doctor they feel like they can be an actress even when um social stigma often traditionally tells them they can't be those things um and so any questions whatsoever this is super complicated stuff i don't expect you to do this perfectly straight away but anytime you're making an argument and you find yourself only having like one mechanism um try to think about all the things i told you try to see like what people are motivated by different incentives different actors involved in emotion different contexts

26:55 um maybe like one problem has multiple reasons as to why it arises and you can look at how you this motion addresses every one of those roots um yeah so just like don't be completely put off by it this is a thing that you become naturalized to as you do more and more debate so if you're confused don't feel put off it's something that comes to practice um but yeah so i thought this was just a really good way of articulating how i matter dumb and how i have really strong linear flow and hopefully this is useful to most of you um any questions if not um i'll be checking the chat as well maybe that's a good idea if not i'm going to start stop recording

27:40 and we can start the debate awesome