On Space Telescopes
Dear Policy Debaters:
The space telescope case makes me sad. Please improve it. To start with, watch this video and memorize all of the science in it:
It’s a beautifully nerdy video with Phil hitting the perfect level of geek-out excitement. Listen to his voice: it is full of hope for the things he wants to do. Phil would totally get perfect speaker points from me.
One thing Phil doesn’t mention is the difference between comets and asteroids, which isn’t much. You should know this as well before saying ignorant things about one, the other, or both of them. Another thing Phil doesn’t mention is the need for space telescopes… which could be a problem for your case. But I think that’s the least of your problems. Here are the greater of your problems:
Big Problem #1: You suck at math. The claim is that “while the risk of extinction is tiny, the infinite damage from extinction means that we have to mitigate the risk.” Here’s what that math looks like.
0.00001% × ∞ = Dead!
But guess what?
0.00000000001% × ∞ = Dead!
That’s what “× ∞” does to a risk measurement: it makes it really damned difficult to solve for. Because — and this goes back to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — anything which is a finite impossibility must also be an infinite improbability. But the flip side of this is that anything less than a finite impossibility must also less than an infinite improbability, so if we multiply it by infinite damage to conclude that we have to solve for it, anything less than utter and complete solvency is a case failure. For example, if an asteroid suddenly coalesced out of a small mess of molecules and ruined our day, or Saturn dropped out of its orbit and into ours and ruined our day, then the affirmative has failed to solve for stuff from space ruining our day. And here’s the thing: the universe exists, so we know — we are living proof — that stranger things have happened. Existence proves itself to be a finite improbability, such that everything else may very well happen. Point is that those equations up there are bad for you, not good for you.
But this isn’t to say that we should do nothing; it just says that we can’t use simple math to justify doing something. The correct way to run this argument is to pull the issue into value territory. The risk is slight but the damage is huge and we know how to mitigate the risk at a cost of… (Why don’t you know how much your plan costs?) This is relevant because we’re increasing Hope and affirming Life, instead of the usual death and devastation that policy debate rounds unleash upon despairing judges: working towards a symbol of ongoing life for the planet is a desirable thing. And then back that up with increased data collection about the solar system and galaxy at large. But neither of these show up in the case because you’re too busy hyping up problem #2.
Big Problem #2: You think we’re doomed anyway. Seriously. Look at your case. How many ways do you claim that a nuclear war is going to start just because people are paranoid and trigger happy? I consistently hear two of them. You know what else the number “two” is? It’s the quantity of nukes that have actually been used in war. They were used by us about 65 years ago. None have actually been used since despite the quantity of policy debate rounds that have occurred. This is because nobody wants to end the world; the world is where we keep our stuff.
But there’s an unspoken impact here: reading between the lines of your case, I know that it doesn’t really matter that a rock may kill us because we’re hell-bent on killing ourselves already. That is what your, frankly, stupid nuke war claim tells us about how you percieve humanity: there’s no point to saving us from a rock because we’ll just find some other excuse to slag ourselves out of existence. Which is at odds with the reality that we’re still alive in, first of all, but secondly — for your case structure — means that you can’t actually solve for “accidental nuclear war” impacts if you’ve only solved one possible excuse for, not cause of, accidental nuclear war.
To put it another way, 0:45 – 0:57:
So here’s a better idea — let’s mitigate the risks of nuke war by pursuing nuclear disarmament and taking the money we were spending on maintaining ludicrous stockpiles of WMDs as shrines to the demons of our worst nature and spend it on ensuring that we can prevent the Rocks of Callous Indifference from coming and ruining our day, eh?
Big Problem #3: Playing on fear prevents calling disadvantages as fearful and backward-thinking as they are. Really, the one thing I get from the negative as off-case is consistently “Spending money will kill us and we’ll all die.” And that should be easy to turn, except that the affirmative is banking on “Rocks hitting us will kill us and we’ll all die, but even just seeing rocks will kill us and we’ll all die.” But here’s the the thing: if you fix the first two big problems and stop telling me about how we’re all going to die and instead tell me about how we’re all going to live, then you can break that spending disadvantage by calling it “ridiculously cynical claim against the human spirit and playing into the hands of the people who would try to hold humanity’s future hostage with their fake fiat money.” Bonus points if you’re able to sound properly enraged that anybody would try to hold humanity’s future hostage, especially with something as flimsy as fake fiat money. And then you pull out your Politics of Fear critique and beat your opponents into submission with it.
This will work because many of your judges — the parents, grandparents, teachers, and occasional volunteer (o hai!) — would rather hear you talking about how you’ve got interesting plans backing your hope for the future than how you’ve managed to embody twice their cynicism at half their age.
Note the risk on the Politics of Fear critique is that if your opponent can sever their terminal impacts and instead play up Advantages! (which is what I’m trying to get you to do here) and leave you continuing to ramble on about fear, well… you’ll be the one stuck talking about fear and biting your own Politics of Fear critique. Other than that, it’s the only critique I’ve seen that does a good job of telling me why I shouldn’t want to vote for That Other Position.
Special Bonus Heidigger Counter: There’s a negative critique that says that technology doesn’t make us better people (true), so we shouldn’t vote for the affirmative (false). The stronger variation of this references Heidigger, but frankly it all sounds like Rousseau’s simpering whining to me.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus observed — as our opponents have keenly demonstrated — that we get in the habit of breathing before we get in the habit of thinking. The 2500 or so, according to UN estimates, people who were born while my opponent was decrying the evils of technology increase the population of over 7 billion people in the world today. None of them want to starve because there aren’t enough all-natural, hand-picked crops to feed everybody. Or die of some wholly preventable microbial infection. Or freeze to death in the cold of winter. Solving for these things, allowing ourselves to breathe easier, is the purpose of technology. It’s only when think-tankers and ivory-tower intellectuals like (the Nazi) Heidigger and Rousseau get better at thinking than they do at breathing do they think that what humanity really needs to do is work on breathing harder. You want to know the first thing that would happen if we, as a species, accepted our opponents’ anti-technological screed? About 90% of the world’s population would die early, painful, and stupid deaths. And you know what else? We’re intellectuals here which means what we’re actively practicing getting better at is thinking, not breathing. Which means we’d almost certainly be in the 90% who die early, painful and stupid deaths.
I suspect that the actual problem the intellectuals face is that they stop knowing how to advance up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. They don’t have the opportunity to understand, as Daniel Pink documented in his book Drive, that having a purpose, pursued autonomously, while working towards mastery, is the path to self-actualization. It’s a fair point that Pink wrote that after they died, but Goethe wrote similar in Faust: “Then may delight and distress, And worry and success, Alternately follow, as best they can: Restless activity proves the man!” And Goethe nails this: technology is what allows humans to trade in their problems of today for fresher and more interesting problems of tomorrow. Saying “Oh, we don’t want tomorrow’s problems” may be an interesting mental exercise, but the rejection of technology would mean that we’re trading in today’s problems for yesterday’s problems, even though our civilization as it is today only exists because we solved yesterday’s problems and moved on.
So I say let’s reject the early, stupid and painful deaths our opponents want us to have and instead embrace reality as it is today — 7 billion people and all — and at least try to make it better.
It is worth noting that Goethe’s Faust ends with Faust doing some terraforming so that people have more land to live on, not so much for the benefit of the people as because he’s irked by the ocean’s come-uppance. He dies before he is satisfied that his work is done, but by having been occupied at working towards his vision of the future, angels come and steal his soul from Mephistopheles. If you want to understand Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, I think Faust is a pretty stunningly good read.
But if you TLDR’d Faust or this whole post, please at least check these clips of Dr. Who to get clued in to what’s totally missing from policy debate today: