Debate.org should use Elo based rating system for leaderboard

I thank Baggins for finishing the debate. I’ll shortly move to countering his rebuttals, but first I want to address his opening complaints.First, he never ties these complaints to a reason to vote for him, so a vote should not be given on this basis.Second, as Con there is nothing wrong with advancing multiple arguments. It’s part of the Pro/Con balance of advantages. Pro gets to pick the topic and take as much time to prepare as he wishes prior to posting his initial argument. Con has the burden to negate, to show that there is at least one argument that defeats Pro’s. To limit Con to affirming a single proposition is to take away fair ground for Con in favor of Pro.Third, the instigator has control over the technical format aspects of debate. If he didn’t want an 8000 character debate, he could have picked a shorter format.As I move to Pro’s rebuttals, note that he has not strengthened or expanded on his own arguments, so if his rebuttals fail to counter any of my arguments, mine are the only arguments left in play and this would necessitate a Con vote.Status Quo:I will address Pro ’s rebuttals by his numbering system in this section.1. Pro responds to my description of the goals of debate.org as a target for what a rating system is trying to accomplish by pointing out that he is asking for a change in an existing feature and not the addition of a new feature.This does not address the point, meaning that debate.org’s goals of creating a popular site that serves as a platform for different views remain unchallenged as the metric for judging different ranking systems.2. Pro acknowledges that troll debates and inconsistent voting are areas of concern, but gives no reason to disregard them. He also argues that joke debates require skill and are taken seriously, but neither of these arguments oppose that skill telling jokes is not the same as skill debating and thus is inappropriate to include in an Elo ranking system which is supposed to be measuring the outcome of the same kinds of games. This also shows that the purpose of debate.org is not to measure competitors’ debate skills, but to encourage people to take part in as many ‘debates’ as possible regardless of kind.3. Pro challenges my contention that high rankings on debate.org require many visits to the site as part of debate.org’s goal to increase its popularity through encouraging long term membership.However, in 3a, Pro acknowledges that the number of wins is the basis of ranking. You can’t win if you don’t play, so this doesn’t counter my argument. In fact it strengthens it, because one of Pro’s advantages to an Elo system is that less debates are required for a high rank, making the status quo more aligned with debate.org’s goals.In 3b and 3c, Pro alludes to measures that do not accurately measure skill not being adequate motivation for the best debaters. However, Pro has not made an argument about motivation nor tied how motivation for the best debaters fits into the goals of debate.org or why you should vote on it.Pro also claims I’ve conceded all his arguments by not countering them. This leads me to believe Pro has not understood my arguments. If his ranking system is worse than the status quo by the unchallenged metric of debate.org’s goals, his arguments are countered because his advantages are irrelevant in context. If his system cannot measure debates because they are too different compared to chess and sports, then none of his advantages apply because his system doesn’t activate and his arguments are countered. If the Glicko-2 system captures all of his advantages and provides further benefits, his arguments are countered.To close the status quo section, Pro never countered debate.org’s goals as a valid metric, or advanced a coherent argument why an Elo system fits those goals better than the status quo. Thus extend my R2 arguments on this as a reason for a Con vote.No system:Here, all of Pro’s arguments come down to a claim that if we have no ranking system we should also do away with the concept of win/loss and leave the site for the trolls. However, he doesn’t make an argument why that’s the case or why trolls would take over, just assertions. I’m not saying you can’t win a joke contest or a rap battle, but since debate.org produces results from them identical to actual debates, using a ranking system like Elo to measure debate skill that requires contests of the same nature doesn’t work. It’s not win/lose that’s the problem, it’s the ranking.Pro also seems to have missed that my argument was “no system is better than a bad system.” Pro pointed out that debates end in win/lose/tie and better debaters are more likely to win debates, but he didn’t address my arguments why that isn’t enough for an Elo system to work.Elo requires the games it measures to have an objective result and be the same kinds of games measured, and the bulk of the R2 No System argument was spent showing this. Pro does not dispute or challenge this contention and thus my argument stands.Elo does not apply here, Pro gets none of his advantages, and the rankings would be inaccurate and misleading, hence worse than no system.Glicko-2First, I don’t see how the topcoder references impact the arguments in play and will not address them.Second, Pro misreads the link he uses to claim Glicko-2 is a variant of Elo and claim that Pro should get to count Glicko-2 as part of his argument.The Glicko-2 system did start as a response to weaknesses in Elo systems, but that doesn’t make it a variant. Pro is relying on a quote from the Glicko-2 creator that says that, though a coincidental and so undesigned method, if his system is used in a certain way, it can create a special instance where parameters and input result in a duplication of the Elo system. The Glicko-2 system is different. The Glicko-2 system is not a variant. But the Glicko-2 system is flexible enough that given the right conditions it will look and act like the Elo system even though most of the time it won't.This was Pro’s only rebuttal to the Glicko-2 system. He did not dispute that it is better than an Elo system, so the Glicko-2 system captures all his advantages, adds value, and wins a Con vote.Conclusion:I thank Pro for providing an interesting debate and making me learn something more about ranking systems.As his rebuttals did not counter my R2 arguments, the voting choices remain the same: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.