alt Hacker News> high school debate used to be an extracurricular thing students could do for fun.
High school debate has been ruthless for a long time, even before AI. There has been a rise in the use of techniques designed to abuse the rules and derail arguments for several years. In some regions, debates have become more about teams leveraging the rules and technicalities against their opponents than organically trying to debate a subject.
It sucks that the fun is being sucked out of debate, but I guess a silver lining is that the abuse of these tactics helps everyone understand that winning debates isn't about being correct, it's about being a good debater. And a similar principle can be applied to the application of law and public policy as well.