The debaters are given the topics that will be covered, except they don’t know what side of the debate they will be assigned to argue until the day of the contest. The winner is the person or the team that makes their case most convincingly to the judges. The goal is not to find out what is objectively true about anything. Instead, the entire system trains you to argue—either side of any subject. The rules also presuppose that all topics of debate have only two sides to them. Not three. Not five. Not a continuum. Learning of this, as a budding scientist, I could think of nothing more
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