Slides of text-only presentation for Synapse Synopsis in San Francisco about how to have fun with/against arguments.

1. Fun with Arguments
Edmund Zagorin

2. Ingredients
• 3 people
• A device that can measure time

3. Wait…3 people?

4. Yes.
• Anatol Rapaport, the game theorist famed for his negotiation
tactics in Cold War arms control notes a difference between
“fights,” “games,” and “debates”
• “Fights” involve two or more contestants and require that a
winner establish victory by force
• “Games” involve two or more contestants and require that a
winner establish victory by achievement within a prior set of
rules
• “Debates” involve two or more contestants and require that a
winner be established by a third party or observing audience

5. And yes, you can have an
argument between two people
It just usually isn’t really all that fun.

6. Then you’ll want the audience
to select a “resolution”
• The resolution should be a normative (“should”) statement
rather than a descriptive (“is”) statement. While there are
arguments to be had about descriptive statements, their
conditions are usually only resolvable by appeals to
observation or hypothesis testing
• Resolutions should be controversial and interesting to the
audience. Since this debate is “for the sake of argument”,
participants will take sides decided by coin flip — not
according to personal/emotional investment
• For example: The United States should create a
Universal Basic Income of $35,000 for all US citizens.

7. Then, create a structure
• The person who is defending the resolution is called
affirmative or “aff”, the person negating the
resolution is called negative or “neg”
• The aff speaks first, let’s say for three minutes,
answers thirty seconds of questions, then the neg
gets two minutes of prep time, then the neg speaks
for three minutes and answers thirty seconds of
questions, then the aff gets two minutes of prep
time and speaks for two minutes, then the neg gets
two minutes of prep and speaks for two minutes

8. How the Audience Decides
• Did both participants answer each other’s
arguments?
• Did both participants establish that their
arguments mattered?
• Did participants engage in direct clash, or win a
turn?

9. Wait… What?
So to answer this, we’ll need to know a
little bit about how arguments work.
• A resolution is typically supported by advantages that are
made significant through a value statement.
• For example: “Advantage 1: Economy: Without UBI,
automation will cause mass unemployment that will
devastate the economy. This is true because more than
70% of the workforce is susceptible to automation,
especially as AI grows. Because 60% of US economic
growth depends on consumer spending, mass
unemployment could collapse the economy.”
• This shows the three parts of an argument: a claim, a
warrant, and data.

10. So how do I negate?
• There’s a handy three-point argument method for
defensive negation: 1. deny linkage claim using data 2.
identify alternate causalities to the outcome 3. argue that
the impact/value isn’t significant
• “1. Most jobs are not susceptible to automation because the
labor market is elastic — that’s why mass unemployment
did not happen during the Industrial Revolution. 2. There
are many reasons the economy is screwed, like global
warming and unregulated financial bubbles 3. If 2008 didn’t
collapse the economy, then AI automation won’t do that
much damage — the economy is resilient”

11. So does the negative win the debate
if they win those 3 arguments?
• Nope! Because those are all “defensive claims”,
they are reasons why UBI might not be that
helpful at resolving a significant impact
(economic collapse) but not a reason why UBI is
*bad*
• To win the debate, the negative needs offense,
which means they need to construct a
DISADVANTAGE to weigh against the aff’s
ADVANTAGE

12. So what would that look
like?
• First the negative establishes a brink, e.g. The US
is in massive amounts of foreign debt and cannot
borrow any more
• Then a link: UBI would cost a ton of $$$, causing
the US to either a default on Chinese loans or a
mass cut in social services — crossing the brink
• Then an impact: Borrowing money would cause
further T-Bill devaluation, crushing the economy.
Cutting social services would immiserate millions

13. So wait, what’s the difference
between offense & defense again?
• A defensive claim says WRONG to an affirmative
claim — it is typically an argument against the
accuracy of a claim (e.g. what they said is
WRONG)
• An offensive claim says BAD to the aff’s
resolution as a whole — it is typically an
argument that the aff plan results in a negative
consequence that outweighs the benefits (e.g.
what they advocate for is BAD)

14. But wtf is “direct clash” or a
“turn”?
• “Direct clash” refers to when one opponent answer’s exact
warrant for a claim, rather than answering the claim with a
counter-warrant, e.g. “AI automation crushes the economy
because mass unemployment” would have direct clash
with the defensive negation “AI automation increases
employment” — if you answer the warrant, you have
already answered the claim
• “Turn” refers to when one opponent establishes offense
via a DISADVANTAGE that accesses the aff’s impact —
e.g. devaluation of T-Bills crushes the economy, thereby
making the potentially positive effects of UBI meaningless

15. What about when both sides are winning
parallel offense (“turns”) and neither side is
winning any defense?
• You mean when both sides win that the other
side crushes the economy?
• Yeah.
• That’s when cost-benefit analysis comes in,
primarily using relative comparisons based on
magnitude, timeframe and relative risk

16. Oh yeah?
• Yeah. That’s what the last speech is for.
• Really?
• Yeah. The first speeches are for making arguments.
The last speeches are for comparing their significance.
• So you shouldn’t make brand new DISADVANTAGES in
the last negative speech
• Truth. It’s generally frowned upon to make arguments in
the last speech that your opponent is unable to rebut.

17. So that’s it, huh?
• Pretty much. I mean, it’s more complicated but
that’s the general structure.

18. What’s the best thing you
learn from arguing?
• How to listen. In order to answer a person’s
arguments sequentially and respond to their
warrants, you have to listen and take notes.
• You also learn what it means to win an
argument, and why winning any single argument
actually matters very little

19. But I thought that was the
whole point…??
• No, the point is to say why what you said
mattered. And you have to do so comparatively
• The people who are the best at this are able to
make very few claims and have lots of warrants
and examples that illustrate this

20. Why is that true?
• Because the structure of human persuasion is very
malleable, and follows roughly our ability to
remember what we have heard in a conversation
• We are not recorders — we don’t remember the
whole thing, just snippets that our brains can use to
store a sense/shadow of what happened
• That’s why, across cultures and styles of argument,
there’s only one consistent marker of persuasion:
REPETITION REPETITION REPETITION

21. But so what are the parts of
an argument?
• “Claim” - the part of an argument