Debate.org should use Elo based rating system for leaderboard

Thank you for your argument, Baggins. I will be arguing first in favor of the current system and then for two alternatives: no rating system at all and the Glicko-2 system. All of these are superior to the Elo system. My burden is to make a convincing and well-supported case that at least one of them is superior to the Elo system. Pro’s burden is to show that the Elo system is superior to all of my proposed alternatives.Status Quo: Before I begin to discuss the problems with Elo or the benefits of the alternatives, the idea of what goal a system is trying to accomplish needs to be explored. While Pro never explicitly states his vision of a ranking-system’s goal, I think it’s fair to conclude from his argumentation that he considers a ranking-system’s goal to evaluate and report a competitor’s skill level in a given activity, primarily because this is the goal of the Elo system. My defense of the status quo will discuss why this is not the current goal of debate.org, meaning a ranking-system with that goal will be at odds with the purpose of the website and thus inappropriate for adoption.Debate.org is defined in R1 as “the website http://www.debate.org...; This refers to the website as it currently exists, with its current rules, guidelines, goals, and expectations. It does not refer to an alternative version of the website that’s changed to accommodate either of our visions of what it should be, apart from adopting a new rating system.As it stands, the goal of debate.org is not to allow members to measure their skill as debaters against each other. The reason for debate.org is “to enable a person of any creed, nationality, gender, or sexuality to have a platform to voice their opinions and to share ideas on any topic they choose.” Its mission is “to be the premier website for online debates across thousands of topics.(1)” There is an absence of any language suggesting that ranking or competition is a goal of the site.If matches of debating skill were the point of this website, the allowed debates would be limited to those which require debating skills. Instead, troll debates (2), discussions of pop culture (3), statements of preference regarding games (4), rap battles (5), and joke debates where facetious logic and humor lead to victory (6) are not only allowed, but count towards rankings. In addition, votes are allowed to stand even when voters are explicit that their RFD was because of their preformed opinions of the topic rather than the debating skills of the participants (7).Debate.org is not intended to be a place to accurately determine the strengths of debaters. The two purposes are to be a platform for sharing ideas, and to be as popular as possible. These purposes are apparent in the choices debate.org has made. All of the debate practices linked above are allowed in order to encourage as many people to create as many debates as possible, even when they aren’t really even debates. The current ranking system works towards the goals of the website, as acquiring a high ranking requires long-term membership and frequent visits to the site, much more so than the Elo system would. Given this, debate.org should not adopt the Elo system because it runs contrary to the goals that it has set for itself and should remain with the status quo because it is consistent with those goals.No System:If my opponent argues that some other set of goals should be used instead of debate.org’s, in addition to supporting that, he must contend with the fact that debate.org as it stands provides a venue for a different kind of activity than chess, or sports, or other competitions Elo is used to rank. As Pro’s definition stated, the Elo system is to be used in “calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. (8)” However, debates at debate.org are not games in the sense that chess is a game, and the system does not apply to activities like this.Chess, sports, and other activities rated in Elo systems have objective winners and set rules. This leads to comparative outcomes. The reason you can say that a chess player with a higher Elo rating is better at chess than a player with a low rating is because you know that games of chess with identical rules were played and the winner increased his Elo rating appropriately. However, in debates the better debater may not ‘win’ and at debate.org wins may not represent the same game being played.There is not an objective winner in debates. Instead the outcome is in the hands of other site members. Vote bombs can easily skew the result of a debate. Forfeits may even count as ties if no one votes on them. While this is an issue in all aspects of debate, in collegiate and even high school debate rfds are usually given in person, and there are feedback mechanisms which generally prevent completely biased judges from voting on the topic rather than the debaters. Such judges would not likely be invited back to a high school debate and complaints would be made if they were collegiate coaches.There are very few set rules. Debate.org does not differentiate between a joke contest, a rap battle, or an actual debate. This would be analogous to a Elo system being used in chess that doesn’t differentiate between a chess puzzle, a chess match, and a 4 year old playing ‘horsie’ around the kitchen using the knight.The website simply isn’t the kind of thing that can be rated with an Elo system. An Elo system will not trigger Pro’s advantages because it doesn’t show the same kind of results that it does in other games Pro uses for the basis of his argument. Having no rating system is more accurate, more fair, and thus better than having a rating system used for an inappropriate purpose.Glicko-2:Even if Pro wins that the goals of debate.org should not be used in determine what ranking system to use on debate.org and that the Elo system is applicable in the context of debate, it still isn’t the best system to use.Glicko-2 is a system designed to expand the capabilities of the Elo system and address weaknesses in its mathematical model. The Elo system assumes that its ratings are reliable indicator of player ability, ignoring situations where that is not the case, such as a match between evenly ranked players where one has been playing constantly and the other is returning from a long stretch of not playing. This means the reliability of the first player’s score is greater than the second player’s score. If the second player wins, his score should increase more than the first player’s should decrease, as the win shows that his strength is probably greater than it is currently scored. Conversely, since the first player’s score is already reliably determined, and is playing against an unreliably scored player, losing doesn’t reveal much new information and so the score should be reduced as much.The Glicko system uses the concept of ratings deviation to calculate how reliable a players rating is and how many points should be gained or lost in consideration of that fact, creating a range of possible scores at a given confidence level (9).Glicko-2 then adds the further improvement of a the volatility factor which increases the accuracy of the confidence level further by taking into account erratic performances (10).This rating system would then capture all of Pro’s advantages, as it’s the same type and kind of system, but is more advanced and fixes problems in the Elo system.Conclusion:Vote con because the goals of debate.org to maximize popularity and be a platform for speech are better served by the status quo than a system focused on competitive ability, because rating systems like Elo cannot fairly apply to debates here and we’d be better off with no ratings, or because the Glicko-2 system is a newer, improved system that fixes weaknesses in the Elo system and has all the advantages Pro listed for Elo.Cites in comments.