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title: Tony's comments on debate

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# Tony's comments on debate

### Disclaimer
I ended up spending a lot of time on this. Both because I believed our participants deserved some feedback, as well as I enjoyed doing it.

Overall I think both teams did pretty good work preparing for the debate. I can definitely come up with some additional arguments/angles, but that's just because I can spend as much time as I want during the weekend, and type them out slowly piece by piece.

I do feel like there are some room for improvements regarding debate techniques, some of them will be covered in detail below, but to summarize:
- show more confidence, speak louder, grab the audiences' attention.
- identify your strong arguments, use them to challenge the other team, and most importantly, emphasize them in the closing statement.
- plan more arguments, make your arguments relatable by filling in concrete details, fill your opening statments/closing statements up with a lot of arguments until you can no longer squeeze anything in.

### Some comments on participants
- Connor:
    - I think Connor did pretty well overall, hard to come up with anything generic that is helpful
    - in opening statements, personally I did not like the `with less work hour, people are not only happier off work, but also happier at work` part. It is inconsistent with pro team's debate strategy, and did not get expanded later, it feels like a small piece of argument that eventually got lost, these arguments usually do not bring much value and could get ignored. 
    - In opening statements, I liked the `30% of R&D in the US comes from outside of work hour` part.
    - During the debate, Connor&Bobby decided to argue about `less work hour does not necessarily mean pay cut`, personally I think a better strategy is to keep this argument short and don't commit too much into it. Maybe switch to arguing `slight pay cut is less significant than more free time, when evaluating overall happiness`, which is also consistent with all survey results that have been mentioned.

- Bobby:
    - I think bobby could benefit from speaking louder and standing up while speaking. It shows audiences more confidence, shows them how serious this is. It could help people concentrate on the presentation.
    - I liked the `work to live but not live to work` part, although things like this usually don't prove anything, they catches audiences pretty well.
    - Personally I think Bobby's closing statement part can be improved a bit. Bobby stated `money is not everything`, which is not very effective if con team already did a very good job emphasizing the importance of money. Bobby also argued `we could have worked harder to do the same amount of work in less time`, which is not very intuitive, and may not appeal to audiences very well.

- Siwei:
    - Siwei sometimes leave a bit too much space around his arguments/conclusions, with statements like `for work-life balance, I think 40 hours is already enough, I don't know how you justify your arguments`. When arguments are not compact enough, or when conclusions are not structured into very strong statements, it is hard for audiences to relate/agree.
    - Siwei opened his opening statements with `without 40 hour work week, this debate won't happen`. It sounded as if Siwei just wanted to make a joke, which is not very good. It is better to summarize this into some concise arguments afterwards: `work brings people together which is a good thing, you don't want to squeeze work time too hard and lose the good thing`. Make the points clear, don't leave the deduction work to the audiences, because usually audiences are already overwhelmed. After all, you are prepared but the audiences are not.
    - the `less work time aggregates inequality` part is pretty good, I think this can be made into a even stronger argument if Siwei expands on it a bit more.

- Vanessa
    - I think Vanessa did very well in the counter opening statment. the `OECD study shows no corralation between work hour/happiness` part is very strong. The part where Vanessa mentioned the `4 indices for happiness` is also pretty strong, though could have been expanded further.
    - During free debate, I liked the part where Vanessa mentioned `Canada government is in deficit almost every year`. It hels make their arguments a lot strong.
    - In the closing statement. the comparison among `"salary for happiness", "salary for wellness" and "Canadian average salary"` is very good, though this point could have been brought up earlier (because it's a very good point).
    - In the closing statement, Vanessa probably spent too much time on summarizing `less work hour => less income/GDP => worse happiness in the long run`. I think it would've worked better if Vanessa took notes on strong arguments the con team made throughout the debate, and spend some more time emphasizing on them. 
    - Vanessa also argued `immigrants would put heavy burden on Canada's social infrastructure`, which is not a very strong argument by itself, because immigrants can also help with the infrastructure. This can certainly be expanded into a stronger argument though.


### Specific feedbacks
1, Make your arguments rich. Generic arguments are usually not convincing enough, even if you pair them with statistics/surveys. We need something more specific to relate better with the audience. The more you come up with, the stronger case you have.
- for example, when con team is arguing around "less work hour will impede Canada infrastructure development over time", they can say things like:
    - example 1: "with 40 hour work week, we already need ~5 years to build an apartment building, englinton street has been under construction for years and average road condition across the entire GTA is barely satisfactory. People makes jokes saying there are only two seasons in Canada, naming winter and construction. Overall it is just hard to imagine what will happen if work hour is reduced to 25 hours per week" 
    - example 2: "arguably the fastest growing country in the past ten years is China, the country where 996 is a standard among most companies. For example, the CEO of Chinese ecom giant Alibaba has openly supported 996 on multiple occasions, and 996 is definitely a common case within the company. We don't support sacrificing people's free time, but we need to acknowlege the importance of work time."
    - example 3: "Canada is currently in great shortage of medical personnels, if we reduce the work hour even further, we would have patients waiting for years until getting proper treatment."
    - example 4: "pro team can argue that people will also do work in their free time, but let's admit it, when people are free to do whatever they want, most people would just end up chilling and enjoying their life."

2, Debating techniques are important as well, stand up and speak loud, make sure people can feel how confident you are.
- Definately avoid ending arguments with "so I don't how you justify that" or "you have to also think about that". They are very weak during the debate. Debate is not a discussion, everything you say need to be very convincing and easy to follow, you cannot rely on audiences to reflect on what you said, because they could be distracted very easily.

3, What is a good indication for "I have done enough preparation"?
- Say if you are preparing for opening statement, you might have found like 20 things that you want to talk about, and because of the time limit you feel like you can only keep 5. Then after rephrasing everything you managed to present 10 things nicely within 4 minutes.
- this is also the point where you start to evaluate each argument and develop a detailed debate strategy.
- On the other hand, if you find yourself spending an entire minute on a very simple argument, chances are you could use more preparation.

4, Pay more attention to free debate
- it's pretty hard to prepare for free debate, because it's hard to predict what's going to happen
- one thing is to do the predictions as much as possible. Think about what your opponent has to say, do research as if you were on the other team.
- one other thing is to save a few strong arguments and only bring them up in free debate.

5, Pay more attention to closing statment
- before closing statment, find out where you have an upper hand, and bring them up again during the closing statement.
- spend less time on arguments that are more like 50-50.

6, Twick the debate topic definitions where appropirate
- For example, knowing that pro team would bring up a lot of surveys/experiments, con team can re-define "happiness" to invalidate those results.
    - for a person who has been happily living in a small villiage for his whole life, it is fair for the person to say that he is happy, but if you as a policy maker, knowing that you could have put more infrastructure resources into the villiage, could have given the person the choice to go to university, go to big city, explore the world around him, we cannot simply agree that he is happy enough
    - Essentially, relate happiness more tightly with money/success/social progress/technology progress, and do not agree to use survey/experiment results which are subjective to participants