Mechanisms

Hey, everybody. It's James here. Back for another quick debating video. And this time I'm going to be going through mechanisms, which is a really important part of debating. And, you know, this video is particularly applicable to the topic. So I'm going to go through probably like year 5 to about year 10 kind of level. But it's important to understand these concepts for every debater.

So I think firstly, I just wanted to clarify a couple of things. When it comes to this big mechanism, word a mechanism is going to be present in almost every policy debate that you have. So it is the thing that operates behind the scenes to get people to act in a particular way. So it's really important to identify the mechanism that's being suggested in the topic, and that's generally pretty open and transparent, particularly from the affirmative side and also to compare one mechanism to another. And I'll be talking to you a little bit about that. This video is going to be about 10 minutes long and I'll go through three different topics and just show you how to identify the mechanism and what you might want to do with it. And I'll also go through just a couple of quick common mechanisms that you might see.

So I said that they're in almost every policy debate and I'm just going to start with one really simple one. If we take, you know, probably the most common policy debate of all time in “That we should ban homework”, which you will see no doubt and you've probably debated it multiple times. You need to kind of have a look at all these different words and then try and find the one that is the mechanism. And this is an important thing to do. And the best way to identify it is to go, what's this topic asking us to actually do or take action with, right? And the type of action that it's asking you to take in this particular debate is a ban, right? So that's the mechanism that the topic itself is asking you to instigate or to put forward for the debate itself.

Now the opposite of that or a different way of going through that might be a mechanism that regulates something. So that's like, we don't ban it, but we put something in play to make sure it's not 100% of the time that we do homework. Now you'll see that in this debate, no one suggests that we do more homework. We don't have to do that. From the negative side, you need to point at the type of regulations that currently exist, right? So when it comes down to it, the affirmative is going, ban is the solution we're looking for, and the negative is going, well, the solution that's currently in place is regulation. We're happy to stand for that.

So you can see that often these mechanisms are opposites of each other. Often they're just comparative solutions that is solving the same problem just in a different type of way. And this is really important because as the debate goes through, it's important to know what you stand for and what your opposition stands for and compare those things throughout the debate itself. And we'll be talking about that more in our other videos. But for this particular one, all you need to do is go, okay, the affirmative is standing for the mechanism of a ban and the negative is standing for any other mechanism that we can use. That could be do more, but it could also be regulate.

Let's have a look at another one that might be pretty common in terms of both primary school and early high school debates. And that looks at the idea of making something voluntary or making something compulsory. Right? So we might have a topic like “That voting should be voluntary.” Voluntary is the mechanism that's being played out in the debate. Obviously in an Australian context, voting is a compulsory thing we do, but from other countries in the world, there are countries with voluntary voting and that is obviously going to show differences in context there as well.

But it's important to realize that, you know, when we're looking at this particular mechanism, we need to go, what makes people go out and want to do something? And if we did make them want to do something and make it voluntary, then like would we get better results? Obviously the opposite here is compulsory, so that might be that we should make school sport compulsory or that we should make, I don't know, participating in the chess team compulsory or English should be compulsory. Right? So that is someone having to say or a team having to say, look, by putting this in place and making sure that everyone does it, we get these benefits as opposed to the mechanism where the opposition is going to talk about, which is like, we're going to do it on a voluntary basis or we're going to encourage people to do it, but we're never going to make it compulsory.

So you can see that, for those people that are not particularly experienced in debating, it might sound like I'm splitting hairs, but these are the really important parts of debate to show where your argument differs from your opposition's argument.

Let's go through another one and that is going to be incentives and disincentive. Now for those playing along at home, an incentive is kind of giving someone something in order to get them to do it or encouraging them to do it. And a disincentive is giving someone, someone something bad in order to tell them not to do something. So the easiest one here is going to be looking at paying people to do stuff versus fining them if they don't do stuff, right?

So you might go, we should pay kids to do community service, right? So that could be like a little a little income, a little side hustle for them, right. Or you could say, we should find kids that don't pick up rubbish on the street, you know? So like, even if it wasn't their rubbish, they should just do it anyway. I think that in a societal perspective we use things like paying people to do things relatively well, but probably not as common as what we do when we fine people.

The important part here is that we're all trying to do the same kind of goal, right? We're all trying to achieve the same kind of outcome, but we're using a different process and a different mechanism to get there. And that's the important part of the debate. So often you'll see that the context is the same. The issue that we're trying to address is the same, but it's how the mechanism functions that makes the teams completely different. In terms of their approach to solving the particular problem.

One last one, I know we did three topics, but the first one was banning homework, so that's not a real thing. Well it is a real debate, but it's not a particularly interesting debate. Let's have a look at something that's a little bit more nuanced and a little bit more specific. So something like “That we should teach primary school kids cooking classes.” Now, the mechanism here is teaching kids like via the method of a class, right? So that's saying let's do it in school.

Now, the negative has a couple of approaches they could take. The first one is just saying no, we shouldn't do that. But they've also got something in their back pocket in their case inherently, which basically says, hmm, where else could we kind of learn these skills if we don't do them in school?

And so the mechanism there is, generally speaking, like learning those things at home, learning them organically, or just learning them in high school where we've got things like cooking classes that already exist. So it's important to compare the mechanism that's being offered by one team to the mechanism that's being offered by another, and then just see if the actual benefits outweigh the detriments.

And you can see there that if you actually put those two things front and centre in all of your arguments, you don't have to talk so much about the benefits of doing these things. In general, you don't need to talk and go over arguments that both teams will agree on like, that It's good for kids to learn how to cook food. No one's going to go like, oh, no, it's not. You know, I don't want my kids to learn how to cook any food whatsoever. But it's important to realise that the mechanism is the thing that's driving the change there and that that is what the debate should really focus on in order to get its outcomes.

So that's me on mechanisms. We've been going for almost 10 minutes. I really hope that you take two things away from this video. The first thing you need to take away from this video is that a mechanism is present in almost every policy debate and you should try and identify it as fast as possible in terms of your preparation, both on the affirmative and on the negative side in order to figure out how you're going to compare and address the problem at hand that both teams are going to deal with. And the issue that we're both going to talk about. The second thing is keep in mind that not all mechanisms are going to be really explicit, particularly from the negative side. And by explicit, I mean sometimes you'll need to have a look at how things function and go what is actually at play that helps us address this right now. And once you identify that, your debates will actually get far better from both sides.

Okay, guys, so I hope you enjoyed my little introduction to mechanisms and I'll speak to you soon. Cheers.