#debate tips

• The important thing isn’t winning; the important thing is not losing.

• Don’t aim to be right; aim to make sure the other person isn’t, and prove it.

• Don’t argue if you think it will affect you emotionally. Only get into debates when you know you won’t give a damn what they say, no matter how insulting they get.

• Focus on facts, not possibilities.

△➞ ://0006 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲

My biggest pet peeve is when someone begins to laugh at your position during a debate.

There's nothing funny about watching someone operate with a broken mental model of reality. It's actually sad - like watching someone navigate with a broken compass.

When someone starts laughing at your argument, they've already decided your mental model is worthless and your understanding is fundamentally stupid. They stop addressing your actual points and shift into performing ridicule. The message is clear: "I don't respect you enough to engage seriously." How can you have productive communication with someone who's essentially saying you're not worth the effort? It's not effective at all - it just kills any chance of understanding.

This gets worse in public forums. When there's an audience watching, people may feel even more compelled to mock. It's likely they're performing for whoever they think will agree with them, trying to rally their tribe and marginalize your perspective.

Why do they do this? It's simple. They're running your ideas through their consensus filter - their model of what they believe everyone knows to be true. But the bigger issue is that genuinely considering new ideas is physically exhausting. It takes real effort - cortisol, stress hormones, mental strain - to consider that what you think or believe might be wrong. So some people just give up. They don't have the mental energy for that. Maybe they're already stretched thin managing kids, careers, mortgages, aging parents - their cognitive resources are maxed out just keeping life together.

Sometimes what you're presenting requires them to overhaul their entire understanding of reality. That's overwhelming, I get it. But I can't stand someone disrespecting me with an "LOL" and no longer considering what I'm saying. Just stop talking to me if that's how it's going to be.

I imagine it like a soft— subconscious voice tells them they already know the truth and you're the stupid one. But it's never been about stupidity or being right or wrong. It's about discussing. Scientists estimate the human brain performs the CMOS computational equivalent of about 1 exaflop. When two people discuss, that's 2 exaflops working on a problem. Get 50 people genuinely engaging? That's 50 exaflops. We shouldn't limit ourselves to our individual processing power when we could be combining minds to actually understand reality. But mockery is exactly that limitation - a primitive monkey-mind tool that signals "don't climb the ladder" instead of explaining why the ladder might be dangerous.

It's a sad world when we stay in our little ponds, afraid of larger forums. We default to protecting the models we already have. It feels better than sitting with uncertainty you can't mentally or emotionally solve, than rebuilding your understanding, than admitting you might have been wrong about something fundamental.

But if you were truly confident in your understanding, why would you need to perform ridicule? It's fragile beliefs that need protection through mockery.

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

Do you care about your ranks in this tournament? Because this will fundamentally change what you should do

If you don’t care about your ranks:

PO. If you don’t know how to PO, have someone teach you and learn quickly. This helps both if you care and don’t care. (I’ll post a guide for PO-ing later)

Crystal. Crystalling is when you summarize all the arguements in a round and argue why your side overall wins the debate. You need to have really good flow and really good fluency/good bs-ing skills because you CANNOT prepare a crystal in advance

Hope and pray a teammate won’t be in your chamber and steal their speech

Possibly, don’t speak on a bill. If it’ll do you better to give no speech than a bad speech (depends on your definition of bad), then don’t speak. It sucks, but if you’re like me, it’s because you’re burnt out

If you care about your ranks:

PO. Same as what I said before- and a lot of judges rank POs very highly. Just make sure what you know what you’re doing, and try to have a gavel beforehand, otherwise you look very unprepared

Try and get speeches from other people. It’s embarrassing, I know, but if they’re not in your chamber then it’s up for grabs if you ask me

Crystal. I’m putting this at the bottom, because as I said- it’s hard even if you take good flow, because you need to have good fluency & improv skills. If you can pull one off, go for it. Crystal your every speech, but for someone who’s not, I’d recommend to try something else

Stay up late & wake up early. I lied, this is the bottom, because IMO, to preform well, you need good sleep, and I can’t recommend this in good faith. But if you can’t PO, crystal, or get speeches from other people, you don’t really have any other choice. And I’ll be honest, it sucks. If you need help with researching, send me a dm and your timeframe and I’ll see what I can do if I see it in time. Just… take care of yourself.

Although making a comparison in debate can be very useful, you run the risk of getting stuck in a loop of discussing how the specifics of your comparison work and don’t work and getting caught in a completely different debate about whether or not your comparison is a fair one.