Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

I did both in high school, and I definitely preferred quiz bowl to MUN (I even went to one sponsored by the Harvard group back in the day), although both were fun in different ways.

I suppose I would've cared more about MUN if our advisor cared about telling us how to win instead of just saying you must win.

I am definitely a pro-QB jingoist, but I can understand things like Model UN or Model Congress.

What I don't understand at all is Policy Debate, and the attention lavished on it by certain schools, prominently including my alma mater. As far as I can tell, it's all about who can recite the most facts at an incomprehensible speed.

It makes the most esoteric, stump-the-chump ACF tournament look like it was tailor-made for prime time TV.

It's not even about facts so much in policy as to the amount of "evidence" you can put out there that links whatever your opponent is doing to nuclear war. At least that's how it went in the '80s; perhaps nowadays it's a global epidemic of manufactured virii or something.

I did Congress and liked it, though you usually didn't get to speak as much, so every chance you got was that much more important. Missed going to NFL nats my senior year by one place - participants vote on who goes, and had more of my teammates been there to help me out... grr.

Did LD, too. Which was good unless you had a speech judge. Didn't matter how good your arguments were then if you didn't deliver them in proper fashion.

Boy, I'm dumping on debate quite a bit. It wasn't that bad, overall. I'd rate it better than my HS QB experience only because the latter was so much less organized.

Trying to get back on point, I have two Model UN experiences. One was junior high, got to represent the US. Which meant we got crapped on most of the time (expect when the General Assembly expelled the South African delegation). The other was a planned trip to Harvard's model UN, where we were going to be Vanuatu. That didn't inspire much interest, and we wound up bagging. Probably for the better.

I always liked quiz bowl better because it seemed like the prep you had to do was all things you wanted to learn anyway. That and my high school team always was of the attitude "We'll win with what we know and a practice a week." I have only since discovered that this works if you have a really talented player(s) on your team to begin with.

My favorite HSMUN story involves a team from a Catholic school that was assigned the role of Israel. The students were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, so they sought out a representative from the PLO (this is ca. 1990) and negotiated a peace treaty that gave them full control of the West Bank and Gaza, sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and a land corridor linking the two parts of the Palestinian state while dividing the territory of Israel in two. I think both the Right of Return and a reparations program were included in the final treaty.

The school was penalized for their somewhat unrealistic representation of Israel's interests.

Personally, I think policy debate was awesome. It's true that the scenarios laid out in the debates are almost always unrealistic, but that's actually not very important. Policy debate is just a mental game, and within the rules of the game (one of which is that you argue the worst conceivable outcome of any scenario) it's an extremely skill intensive and interesting contest.

The speed is a huge part of why policy debate is so great. Although it makes it inaccessible to outsiders, it raises the quality of the debate by quite a bit because you can make way more arguments in your 8 minute speeches. The quality of the arguments is still the most important factor, but the speed forces you to think much faster and it makes time management and word economy important skills. Speaking quickly by itself has the effect of making your mind run faster in a way that's hard to understand if you've never done it. (Maybe speed chess is comparable, I don't know.)

I feel compelled to respond to the "incomprehensible" comment - it's only a subset of debaters who are truly incomprehensible. With a little acclimation it's not hard to follow extremely fast speech if it's clear.

Finally, although I've never done quiz bowl, it seems to me that it would mostly have to do with memorization, while debate requires a lot of critical thinking.