I'm a former national debate champion and I've been building SuperDebate, adult competitive debate clubs and tournaments. We just ran a workshop in Roatan before a live championship.
This clip is about impact, which is honestly the most overlooked part of making an argument. Most people can make a claim and back it up with some evidence. But if you don't tell people why it matters, in concrete terms, you lose. A small argument with a huge impact can beat a strong argument with a weak one, because judges and audiences weight what they feel. "This leads to X" hits harder than "this is bad."
The other thing people miss is that your opponent doesn't have to beat your evidence. They just have to break the link between your evidence and your impact. If they can show your evidence doesn't actually lead to the scenario you described, your whole argument falls apart even if the facts are right.
There are millions of people who debated in school and have nothing as adults. No clubs, no leagues, no tournaments. We're building that. Local debate clubs that feed into real championships.
Think you're bad at arguing? You're probably just missing a structure.
In this workshop, SuperDebate founder John Connor breaks down the three core pillars that will put you in the top 1% of debaters.
What if the solution to America's education crisis has been around since the founding fathers?
In this episode of the Super Debate Podcast, I sit down with John Hines, national champion debate coach, NSF-funded researcher, and CEO of DebaterHub, to talk about why debate needs to return to the center of education, and what happens if it doesn't.
You might need something like salience ranking. And you don't need a heavy modern transformer model to do it. You can get by with yesterday's algorithms. This is LexRank. I think it's interesting because it uses graph-based centrality ranking, in a similar way that PageRank did.
Edit: Or create sentence embeddings, and cluster them or rank their distance against an input sentence, or something.
At Helpwith.co we're focussing on facilitating something that seems very simple and obvious, but is often very difficult to achieve: One person teaching another person what they know.
We believe that peer-to-peer, community driven, education is one of the best ways that our small team can meaningfully impact the world.
The more effectively we can disseminate meaningful information, while also building connections between people, the easier it becomes to solve every other world problem.
Always looking for more collaborators, so feel free to email me: John@helpwith.co
Our peer education marketplace www.helpwith.co is powered by Stripe. Want to help us get a 50k investment from Stripe? It'll allow us to ad a lot of users to for you guys.
Yeah, that's definitely the right question. Part of our argument is that people are overly cynical concerning the fact that finding the answer to such questions is an active, iterative process, rather than a stroke of individual genius.
Technically, HelpWith is in over 100 cities, but we're focussing primarily on the Pacific Northwest. This is largely because cities like Portland are already more amenable to the type of ethos that makes the success of such a sharing economy platform possible.
We're building a successful, community-based model, then we plan on scaling.
I think we'll see a variety of solutions appifying different aspects of education that work best, while minimizing bureaucracy and barriers to entry. MOOCs are a clear progression from the university system, but it's also increasingly clear that a human element is needed in personal education.
This clip is about impact, which is honestly the most overlooked part of making an argument. Most people can make a claim and back it up with some evidence. But if you don't tell people why it matters, in concrete terms, you lose. A small argument with a huge impact can beat a strong argument with a weak one, because judges and audiences weight what they feel. "This leads to X" hits harder than "this is bad."
The other thing people miss is that your opponent doesn't have to beat your evidence. They just have to break the link between your evidence and your impact. If they can show your evidence doesn't actually lead to the scenario you described, your whole argument falls apart even if the facts are right.
There are millions of people who debated in school and have nothing as adults. No clubs, no leagues, no tournaments. We're building that. Local debate clubs that feed into real championships.
superdebate.org