Blog

How Buildacase ranks debaters

Methodology notes on the rating system: speaker ratings, Massey vs Plackett-Luce, shrinkage, and what we still get wrong.

Notes on how the leaderboard is computed: the two underlying ratings, why we picked Massey over Plackett-Luce on this dataset, what Bayesian shrinkage does for low-tab debaters, and the parts of the model that still need work.

Provincializing debating

Why "economic development is good" isn't a fact, and what that means for everything else.

Competitive debate treats a narrow set of Western ideas as common sense. GDP growth is good. Liberal institutions work. Objectivity is possible. This article asks where those defaults came from, why they persist, and what debaters lose by never questioning them.

Hi. Long time no see.

Everything is new. Everything you loved is still here.

Four years ago I disappeared. I went to law school, stopped debating, and went quiet. The whole time, I was rebuilding this thing from scratch. Here's what happened.

The death of the average reasonable voter

The judging standard everyone uses and nobody can define.

The average reasonable voter has been the default judging standard in competitive debate for decades. It was always vague. Now, in an era of polarization and fractured electorates, it's incoherent. It's time to say what the standard has always actually been.

10 argument patterns that show up in every debate round

The same 10 argument structures show up everywhere. Once you see them, you can't unsee them.

After judging hundreds of rounds, I kept seeing the same reasoning patterns across completely different topics. Here are the 10 that matter.

5 Things You Can Do to Be Happy in a Debate Partnership

Your debate partner is the person who sees you at your worst. Here's how to not ruin it.

Most partnership problems aren't about skill — they're about expectations nobody bothered to set. Five things that actually helped me.

Prioritizing arguments during prep time

You have six ideas and time for two. How to figure out which two.

More arguments doesn't mean a better case. Sometimes one deep point beats five shallow ones. Here's how to figure out which to keep.