Laziness in Debate

Cruz Castillo | 4 min read

Debate is supposed to be a test of intellectual ideas, where we learn, and compete to see who’s the best. One would think in such an activity, that winning would be linear in comparison to work put in, but sometimes, lazy debating just wins. Whether it be with poor evidence quality or styles that avoid clash, laziness seeps into the activity in a way that kinda compromises the entire point of it. 

One of the most blatant examples, and most commonly seen, is egregious evidence quality. Debaters get away with an incredible amount of leeway when it comes to straight-up lying about what their evidence is actually saying. This is less about clever cutting of an article that still aligns with the article’s intent while sounding prettier/being more efficient, and more about things like conveniently shrinking a few paragraphs that disagree with your entire argument, overhyping your author’s qualifications, a lot of these pieces of evidence collapse under scrutiny. But, in PF, disclosure practices are worse and there’s less prep time, which contributes to an activity saturated with evidence that’s miscut and doesn’t really get punished as it would in other types of debate. Poor evidence quality is antithetical towards the skills debate is attempting to create. While it may be easy to just cut the first article you see, there's a truly near infinite amount of evidence out there, and a really high chance that what you’re looking for exists in a much better form that isn’t as bad. The research skills that finding good evidence creates is exactly what debate is attempting to do, to create exportable skills that are useful in our lives in the future, and the proliferation of poor evidence quality is antithetical to it. 

Clash avoidance is another example of laziness in debate that prevents rich and in-depth debates. Debate’s structure admittedly does contribute to this, by encouraging people to go for arguments that are conceded to evaluate the round as fairly as possible. One consequence of this is the encouragement of reading more arguments, ie. more off case positions, more contentions, more responses, etc. By necessity, these arguments are less developed than a longer counterpart. There are positives, since technically you need to do more research and more work out of round to be able to read more positions, but there’s a tradeoff within the in-round laziness. One way to recognize this is in the weighing debate, where arguments hit each other head on. Often, the smartest arguments are made here, because debaters are forced to consider how their arguments interact in a world where others, even if their argument is conceded. 

Laziness in debate isn’t just about bad habits or a few choices in round/out of it; it’s a mindset. If the goal is only to rack up ballots rather than to refine one’s skills and knowledge, it’s easy to cut corners. But winning through shortcuts isn’t what debate is meant for. The best debaters aren’t just those who win rounds—they’re the ones who come out of the activity sharper, more informed, and better at engaging with the world. 

At the end of the day, debate is only as good as the effort put into it.