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Q - Triple the Value Proposal Questions
The Debate Committee has put much time into creating the Triple the Value Webpage on Stoa’s main website. Please visit the page and all the links at the bottom: Background, Testimonies, Benefits and FAQ’s. Most questions are answered in those pages. Additionally, a league-wide Webinar was recorded for the membership, that can be accessed through the Stoa Visual Library.
The Debate Committee believes that the benefits to the league will point LD in the right direction for the future.
For a complete discussion of our thinking on this Proposal, please read our explanation at: Triple the Value
1. If Triple the Value passes, is it possible that some competitors will only debate with one of the resolutions, qualify, and then go to NITOC without doing the same amount of work that others will? Does this promote the goal of the "triple the value" idea which is to improve debates and debaters?
This is certainly possible, but this is just as possible right now with a single resolution: some debaters qualify at their first handful of early tournaments and coast the rest of their way to NITOC, while others keep honing their craft until their very final round. The amount of work a student puts into debate would vary from debater to debater under TTV as it has always varied. However, TTV would make coasting through the year more difficult as the ability to be competitive for more than three months at a time would be contingent upon new research and new cases as all LD debaters will be forced to learn how to debate each new resolution in turn. We see this as a positive development for debaters’ education in general and a chief advantage of “Triple the Value.”
2. While the more experienced debaters should do fine with the increased workload, what do you suggest for people that don't have the time or the ability to handle this workload? It seems like this heavy workload in such a small amount of time will discourage and exclude a whole group of people.
If someone has a learning or a workload issue, they could simply choose when in the year they want to debate and study that resolution only. Remember that all of the resolutions are known from the moment the vote is released: you actually have all the resolution options right now. Debaters conceivably could begin working on arguments and cases, and if Discord is any evidence, some are already doing so. How heavy the workload is depends on the debater and how they approach the topic. In addition, if 3-Resolution LD poses a difficulty, TP offers a more concrete form of debate that will stay on a single resolution for the entire year. We do not believe in offering an “easy” form of debate and a “challenging” form of debate in LD and TP respectively. Rather, we believe Stoa should offer two challenging and rich forms of debate in their own right (Parliamentary excepted for the purposes of this comparison).
3. One of the goals with this new idea is to improve the quality of LD debates. However, is it possible that, since we will have such a limited time to learn the resolution topics and the philosophy within them, that this will actually decrease the ability to have good logical and philosophical debates?
Debaters will not have only a limited few months to learn each resolution : a debater could work on all 5 resolution options throughout the summer and then through the months of competition leading up to each roll-over. This is, after all, how Parliamentary debate prep has always worked: practicing a variety of resolutions to prepare for the real resolutions to come. In addition, everyone would know the first resolution for the season as it will always be announced at NITOC.
Another way to maximize the value of your LD research is that philosophy should be able to be applied to a broad range of resolution options, not just to one. Learning a few philosophers’ ideas well will serve you better than skimming over several studies and bits of statistics but not really learning anything with broad argumentative power. Apply a philosopher’s ideas to multiple resolutions to make the most of the time spent on LD: Locke, Hegel, Augustine, Kant, and John Stewart Mill are some examples of widely applicable thinkers useful for this purpose. If you approach 3-Resolution LD in this manner you are less reliant on specific information and more reliant on reason and research that extends across multiple topics. This should produce better debate and provide part of the answer to LD’s current state of stale debate and exhausted meta.