Lying in Parli

Has anyone had experiences of team bold-face lying about facts in parli? Skip (thanks Dre) recently wrote a paper about this and I was wondering if anyone in the trenches ever ran into this?

I've misreprested facts before, but never intentionally. I think one time there was some confusion about the inherency of a particular case we ran. Turns out that both sides were wrong in the debate, but I still felt bad about it.

jEd

Actually, it was Skip who wrote the paper...I got a copy emailed to me if anyone wants it.

I've never lied, but Dena did a couple times when she freaked out. She really hated not knowing the answer to a POI. The funniest time was octos at Northridge in 2000 when Chris Gail from CSULB gets up and asks her, "Exactly how many partial-birth abortions have there been?" Dena pauses, then says confidently, "There are three million partial-birth abortions in the status quo." I almost died. The funny part was she didn't say YEARLY or anything...so that could have meant anything. Chris actually gave us more credit than we deserved, and said in the MO "No, she has it mixed up, there are 3 million total abortions a year- I know, I just did an Extemp on this." Still, afterwards I begged her to please not make up numbers!
I've accidentally said wrong things in rounds, but when it sounds like they really know better than me, I won't stick to a bad fact. It's usually better to explain why hey, that didn't really matter anyway
As for other teams lying in the round...hell yeah, I have plenty of experiences of that! I'll refrain for now, though, because 1)I always told my teammates not to talk shit about other teams that lied because they probably didn't do it intentionally, so I should live up to my words and 2)I don't want to start the bitchfest, but if it does, I'll be the first in

Andrea

Yes, I have seen people outright lie in Parli, and I have seen them get caught. And I am talking about prominent teams.

I, like Chris Banks, have a fit when people lie in-round. In fact, one time was someone from his team. The judge scolded her for it.

I have seen Skip scold people too, but I have also seen PLNU people lie, unfortunately.

I hate lying. That is the lowest. But no, I don't hate Dena.

I had a student who used to lie during practice rounds. He'd admit it afterwards. Made me feel safe sending him out to represent me at tournaments. He wasn't around long.

RJM

Lying is something pretty common to NCFA as well. At NCFA Champs, we had a round where the team, after the round, told us that they weren't sure whether or not their case was even true. We picked up the ballot anyways, but it was still kinda depressing (and infuriating) to have to listen to someone tell you they baskically lied in a round.
I guess it's just a pretty rampant problem in parli...it's not a good technique, especially when you have an intelligent critic in the back of the room. Oh well, I guess it'll continue until something concrete can be done to stop it...
~alfredo
UOP Debate

On only one occasion have I ever found myself genuinely angry during a round. It was a very important match (read=elim round) at CCCFA last month and we ran a case undoing Bush's steel tariff's.

The LO gets up there and makes the response that we have no solvency because there is no inherent barrier to plan. The Opp basically maintained throughout the round that the steel tariffs DO NOT EXIST. Gov made them up. (They didn't have shit on case, so this was likely their best option, but unethical as all hell.) I almost lost my cool. I've had people attack my cases pretty hard before, but never had anyone called them fictional.

Anyway, I don't think lying is the real issue in Parli. It's knowing when/how to call your opponent's bluff that counts, because everybody will misconstrue facts or stretch things at some point, if only for the sake of debate.

-S

PS - We picked up the aforementioned round, so it's not too big a deal, but it makes you wonder about the kind of stuff that goes on out there....

Lying seems to work better in parli simply because teams are so concentrated on formulating their own arguments that they fail to think about 'facts' presented on the other side.

For example, I use a tape of a pretty good parli round as an excercise in my Critical Reasoning courses. In that round, opp throws out a statistic that links to a huge DA. That statistic was never questioned in round... or by any debater who has watched the video... but the first thing that came up in the post-speech discussion with my students was the validity of the statistic. Whether or not the statistic was accurate or not, the suprising thing is that nobody challenged it.

If you wonder why lying works in parli, think about what you simply buy and try to respond to..... if you never challenge the statistic many judges won't vote there.

Patty

Yep and then there was the judge who said in his oral that if you don't know the proper facts to just make something up to refute your opponents, I thought i would die when i heard that one...

That is isane... at that point, why even put words in that make sense... all you do is:

On their #1, A, "blah blah blah blah..."
On their B, "blah blah blah..."

Keep track of that judge...

Patty

while i deplore lying in a round i have been a victim of it once or twice and have also had a partner or two who have done it as well( they were shown the door later). my view on this is simple: there is no place for it in our community..cross apply all of those bad foe parli args you have ever heard and that sums it up for me.
peace,
ken

Has anyone else (other than Dre) read Skip's paper?

Love,
-Dan

I have it and have read part of it. Were you curious about anything in particular?

The difficult part as a judge is separating lying from simple ignorance. Given the deplorable state of knowledge in the community about current events and philosophy (the two defined topic areas for NPDA debate) and, for that matter, the rules, it is hard to determine in an actual round if someone is intentionally lying or not.

But, as it said in my philosophy, ethics is very important to me. If I become convinced that a team is lying deliberately, I'm inclined to vote on it. I also deem it to be lying when a team makes a habit of misrepresenting the state of the flow -- i.e. claiming arguments were dropped that really were not dropped.

I got pretty upset, for example, when Alaska claimed in finals that Utah had dropped the criterion (when Utah had in reality talked about little else).

"I got pretty upset, for example, when Alaska claimed in finals that Utah had dropped the criterion (when Utah had in reality talked about little else)."

Jason,

When did Alaska claim that Utah had dropped the criterion? I thought the MG acknowledged the criterion debate by cross-applying his off-case answers back to the criterion and the PMR simply said that the MO's drops in the definitional debate effectively wiped out the criterion debate (which was true).

I only ask because the implication of your comment is that Alaska was purposefully misleading about the state of the flow.

RJM

It happened in PMR, not MG.

Of course, the fact is that I can't KNOW it was intentional. That's the whole point. There is no way to KNOW whether falsehoods about the state of the world or the state of the flow are intentional. Nonetheless, it does seem to be a growing pattern in my perception to claim "drops" that aren't really there, presumably in the hopes that the judge is a bad flow. It definitely seems to happen more in rounds where I am flowing in my head....

Amy, I was curious in general because the paper is precisely about this topic. I was wondering if it provided any insight that could aid this discussion (since I haven't had a chance to read it yet).

Jason brings up a great point, ignorance vs. lying. Evidence could solve both problems, but I am not in favor of making this evidence based debate.

I often find myself disputing some facts provided by the gov, but they are hard to refute without opposing evidence. (I often critique sources or methodology, but people often spew statistics and numbers without saying their source). For example, "1/3 of all women are raped by the time they are 18." Yes, rape is a serious issue, but this number sounds ABSURD. The only "1/3" number I am familiar with is that 1/3 of all woman are the victims of _attempted_ sexual assault sometime _throughout_ their lives. That is a BIG difference.

-Dan

I agree, the problem with all of this is that intent is indeterminate. The other problem is that a judge is not always correct. This makes any penal action from the judge due to incorrect facts problematic.
Like Sally I have had a judge instruct me to lie and I have a difficult time remembering when I've been more furious.

Keith

Due to the impossibility of actually checking that-which-claims-to-be-evidence during the round, evidence is not necessarily a cure for lying. I knew a debater not long ago who routinely invented cards and, as near as we could find, evidence for a whole case. He was never caught because we could not prove the negative -- that the evidence did not exist. You could challenge him after-the-fact on every web reference and book and he would always claim that they must have moved the site or that you must not have found the right library.

Additionally, evidence is not immune from power-tagging, etc, to remove it from its context.

Finally, at best evidence only works to delineate FACTS but at the price of introducing a new reliance on evidence for OPINION testimony that becomes a replacement for or an excuse to devalue the debaters' OWN analysis. That price is too high, IMHO, as it results in a parli that is just a weak CEDA clone an the loss of the valuable accessibility that currently characterizes the event.

The day NPDA parli has evidence is the day that a new parli league winds up being established. Some people are in NPDA parli precisely BECAUSE it avoids the high-speed, cards-only patterns of evidence-based debate.

[Tisias]

BUMPidy BUMP

[pocket]

it's inevitable that factual errors will be made. so intent to misrepresent the facts seems irrelevant to me. that's why i've always coached my teams to lie if it will help them win. i mean, winning clearly outweighs ethical issues, right?

[bradtatorship]

I think factual errors are worse than lying. If you know youre lying then you know what the truth is. If you are making factual errors then youre just undereducated. Right Jon?

[pocket]

i couldn't have said it better. ha! i am such a dork.

[Pattybar]

Are y'all trying to be funny, or is this what you really think???

Patty

[Lacker]

My partner and I dropped at Hatfields to a team who lied about financial aid mishap re Afghanistan. They said the article published that day had the OPPOSITE conclusion that it actually did. We said the US corrected an oversight so plan was status quo. We dropped 2-1.

A

[pocket]

patty-

i thought i WAS being funny (not just trying to be). perhaps i entertain myself more than i do other people. so it goes.

best,

jon

[army CPT]

lying in debate...never...lol

[keithschnak]

I lost a round to a debater that claimed the six way talks were not real. If I remember correctly, he even called me a liar and said that I made them up.

The judge said that the factual debate was a wash, so he had to throw it out (which effectively meant throwing out our entire DA).

So no, no problems with lying at all.

[army CPT]

i remember a day when parli was more about being persuassive than ev cards...hmm ounds like we are migrating back to policy debate. lying has an ugly head here in parli land cause we "don't" use cards..yet we do. I have ran into the occasional liar and have lost because of a lie. But on more than one occasion we overcame the lie by just being better debators.

[Powers]

It sounds like the easiest way to resolves lies in round is via an ethics/fact challenge. If you are confident of your information, bet the round on it and have both teams go look up the information with the judge (this presents a small problem for tournaments without internet access). Whoever is correct wins, irregardless of other arguments. Thus there is a punative deterrent, both via a ballot and reputational harm, to intentionally mistating information. Of course, this requires judge willingness to go look up information, which I found lacking on at least one occassion. Also, it requires some method to determine what the true fact is (namely do we read the ACLU or the Justice Departments information regarding the Patriot Act). At the very least, if the other team refuses to agree to the terms of the challenge, then the critic ought to ignore their factual claims on a credibility level. This seems fairer than deciding the factual claim debate is a wash, and looking elsewhere, which functionally rewards intentional and unintential misrepresentation of information.

[army CPT]

whatever happened to debate equals fun? do we really need to win at all costs?