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Debate and Punish

	Both of these authors seem to be largely in agreement; 
"blatantly" distorted evidence isn't very good, and we should punish all 
transgressors through either community censure or in-round humiliation.  
Before the CEDA community begins to deliver these spankings, however, it 
might be worthwhile to consider the marginalia...
	Examples of marginal or possibly decontextualized evidence, might 
include:
	1. evidence from an author that recants in a later book or article 
("the house divided against itself"), or writes something later to 
clarify her intent.  I remember once calling John Rawls and explaining 
the various interpretations of his book within debate.  He was aghast.
	2. link evidence whose authors would never advocate the entire 
scenario (e.g. evidence from Forbes advocating a flat tax is used as a 
link to an anti-growth position)
	3. the author expresses decided ambivalence
	4. an article is genuinely unclear about which way it concludes, 
although a close scrutiny reveals that one form of conclusion is, in 
fact, more likely, and a team is reading the evidence the wrong way (this 
is particularly probable on foreign policy topics, when some articles 
might be badly translated from another language)
	5. highlighting out qualifiers such as "maybe," "sort of," etc.
        6. highlighting out implicit qualifiers.  For example, one item 
within a long list might be highlighted to make a card seem more specific 
than it actually is. Thus:
	"This statement applies to China, Israel, Mexico, and various 
other countries throughout the globe." BECOMES
	"This statement applies to...Mexico..."

	We can all agree that gross violations of ethics aren't very 
nice.  The implications of some sort of "punishment paradigm" should, 
IMO, be assessed in the context of possibly marginal cases, and the 
effects punishment might have on the well-intentioned.  Should there be 
different "levels" of punishment based on the severity of the offense?  
Should there be more stringent measures against repeat offenders?  I 

think these questions should be worked out before the CEDA community 
begins to enact vigilante justice upon its own.

Cordially,
Michael Antonucci
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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