The Quizbowl Resource Center

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I was on the editing team for 2012 and 2013 ACF Nationals. I had absolutely no qualms about replacing submitted questions. Many times, I either totally threw out a submitted question, or I kept the answerline and completely rewrote the tossup. This was only partially inspired by a desire to keep the...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I think the quizbowl community does a lot of weird things because it is the opposite of what quizbowl villains of yore did 10-15 years ago. So for example, when Matt Weiner criticized defenders of bad quizbowl over a decade ago and they could not refute him on the merits, they criticized his tone. T...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Also it's hard for me to have this much sympathy for ACF when most of what you're doing is taking questions that teams wrote and repurposing them.

This is one of the most remarkably ignorant things ever posted on this forum.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I love the old school ACF logo, despite the implications of pederasty.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Honorable mention to "science tossups written by the 2006 University of Michigan team" Michigan was good that year: they played in the finals at ACF Nationals, losing to Texas A&M by not that much. But their lineup of Ryan Westbrook, Matt Lafer, Will Turner, and David Rappaport lacked ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

As you wait, perhaps in vain, for systemic top-down change to come to quizbowl, a possible good use of your time might be to simply send an email to that on again/off again team in your region saying "hey, it was fun seeing you guys at ACF Fall, do you want to come to our tournament next month&...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I think it's just in general that high-caliber universities also have good quiz bowl teams. High achieving students matriculate to schools like Yale, UC Berkeley, UChicago, Columbia, Stanford, etc. which also happen to have established quiz bowl programs. As an old person, I can assure you that thi...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Choosing a college was incredibly easy for me - I was only accepted at one school, rejected literally everywhere else I applied. This was devastating. I spent many years being very bummed about this, it took me maybe a decade to come to terms with it. In retrospect, it was obviously the place I belo...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Separately, I'd love to see ACF evolve into some kind of governing body for college quizbowl, but that's not what ACF is built to do. ACF is PACE with more writing commitments and less professionalism - it's an organization that produces three tournaments a year and (grudgingly) maintains a set of r...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'm inclined to the belief that running a "rogue" tournament against something more established like SCT is its own punishment: people won't go to your event and you will have wasted your time. Further, I refuse to believe that any rogue quizbowl organizations are out there thinking "...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

On top of his contributions to quizbowl generally, he is an incredibly important figure in the history of the Pacific Northwest quizbowl circuit.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Wasn't Andrew Yaphe good at trash? He head-edited multiple trash tournaments.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

So you're lucky that history, in general, is not a topic that quizbowl players like to complain about on the internet. Certainly not the way people complain about science and music. When people do complain, it's often one of the following things (I'll focus on things you can fix): Temporal distribut...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I once invited Rom Masrour to play with my pub trivia team. We got a question that was like "what was the first sports movie to win Best Picture". Rom proceeded to recite, from memory, every Best Picture winner from the first Oscars onward until he got to the correct answer (Rocky, sometim...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I don't remember what tournament or what year this was from, but the answer line was "Bar Mitzvah" and the clues were all about modern Bar Mitzvahs, as traditionally conducted in the 21st century. I think there was even a clue about how decorations often reflect the kid's favorite sports t...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

In 2010 or 2012, if you asked me what the most underrepresented thing in quizbowl was, I would have replied "thought". Or more specifically, thought that does not fall into the narrow, small categories at the bottom of the ACF distribution. I don't think this view would have been particula...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

A classic complaint from back in the day was that close games on packets were the final question was trash were derided for being "decided by trash", despite of course the game actually being determined by the previous 19 tossups just as much as by tossup 20. I don't know if there's even t...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

My personal preference is to be restrained by norms rather than rules. When somebody tells me I can't do something because there is a rule against it, I immediately feel oppressed and inspired to rebel. Being normatively shamed doesn't inspire that same feeling. Perhaps this is a personality or gene...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Just remember: if you want to discourage a particular kind of discussion, you can also use norms or shaming instead of rules. Back in like 2008 or 2009, when I was in the quizbowl IRC every night, there was no formal rule against discussing politics. #politics did not exist yet as a separate channel...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'll second the advice about telling new players things like "nice buzz". It's really amazing how much small compliments can mean to people. In my long quizbowl career, the most off-putting thing I saw was players throwing a hissy fit when they were beaten to tossups by their own teammate....

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I had shoulder-length, poorly-kempt hair for much of my quizbowl career. In retrospect I regret the poorly-kempt part but not the shoulder-length part. Why did I have long hair? Two reasons. (1) When I was a little kid, my dad was very meticulous about keeping my hair short and my fingernails short....

Skepticism and Animal Feed

How many degrees did Nathan Freeburg complete/start? At the time I started playing quizbowl (2004), the scouting report on Nathan Freeburg was that he was unnaturally extending his quizbowl career by going into degree program after degree program.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Nathan Freeburg often played as a one man team. His high neg rate was a result of the fact that he needed to be aggressive to compete with full teams, especially at high levels. I once scorekept a game between Nathan Freeburg and a team that contained Sudheer Potru. Sudheer P was a fascinating figur...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Does this hamper the ability of computers to read and parse questions? If not, I don't see how it possibly matters.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

The following two things are real phenomena: (a) Sometimes people don't realize how mean or hostile their comments sound to others, even if they did not intend their comments to be mean or hostile (b) Sometimes in chatrooms where questions are being playtested, people over-criticize a question out o...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Also please no more of the "You are an X who wants to Y" lead-ins. I'm like 99% confident that I invented these (or at least popularized them) in my 2008 Chicago Open History Doubles. A bit of a background on what I was thinking at the time follows below. At the time, I had received feedb...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Good luck! I might crawl out of retirement to play this if there's a site near me.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

People are always going to be able to find something about your questions to criticize. You'll know you're a good writer when the criticism becomes a bunch of subjective nit-picking about specific clues (e.g., "you mentioned the Battle of the Gates of Trajan before the Battle of Pliska, but in ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I would like somebody who was on the Berkeley team in the early to mid 2000's, when it was organized along the lines of the Roman Republic with Consuls and Praetors and such, to come post in this thread.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've also heard of teams that have each player do some research on a topic (think not-too-broad but not just one answerline, such as "Holy Roman Emperors" or "20th century popes" or something like that). Then occasionally at practices, each player presents their research in a sh...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

If your practices are big enough, some teams find it helpful to split into two simultaneous practices--one for the more experienced players to read harder questions, and one for the less experienced players so they actually get a chance to buzz. This is probably the most common solution to your pro...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I got eliminated on question 7 of my first attempt. I have never seen a more needlessly bloated app and I find the host unbearable. However, I'm a sad individual whose primary hobby is taking tests for fun and I'll definitely stick with it.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

How noisy is the app? Do you need to answer questions at a particular time?

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've seen Orthodox Jews simply say "buzz" instead of pressing a buzzer. It's then up to the moderator to figure out if the verbal "buzz" came before or after another player rang in with a buzzer. NAQT rules explicitly allow a player to "signal in an appropriate manner"...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've seen Orthodox Jews simply say "buzz" instead of pressing a buzzer. It's then up to the moderator to figure out if the verbal "buzz" came before or after another player rang in with a buzzer. NAQT rules explicitly allow a player to "signal in an appropriate manner" ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Miriam Nussbaum is super active on Facebook, and Ted Gioia has recently been active on LinkedIn. I saw Nick Clusserath at NHBB middle school nationals in Atlanta in April of 2017. He was wearing the uniform of a high-ranking NHBB official. We sort of awkwardly waved at each other as if to say "...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I literally once saw a school (a very prominent quizbowl school, no less) use the system of "the A team is the first 4 people who signed up, the B team is the next 4 people who signed up, etc" which makes no sense but totally happened. The solution is to require rosters if you're going to ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'm too far removed from the current reality of ACF Fall to offer anything worth saying on those particulars. So instead I will tell two stories from the distant past. First story is from fall of 2004. I played my first ever college quizbowl tournament: ACF Fall 2004. For weeks prior to this, I had ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Current quizbowl players in this thread seem to be painting a picture of a Religion canon that is hyper-focused on primary texts. Is that really the case? So do people no longer write tossups on concepts like "Prayer for the Dead" or "Real Presence", with clues such as what Bible...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I agree that quizbowl fails and has always failed at a clear definition between "religion" and "mythology". The current distinction is arbitrary and I could see, e.g., a devout Hindu finding it offensive in the abstract. However, I am also not sure that this matters in the end. S...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

As a TD or tournament staff member I've certainly been guilty of providing crappy book prizes: books taken from the "free bin" outside the used bookstore (essentially a glorified trash can), old textbooks on esoteric subjects that nobody wanted, realizing that the tournament was starting i...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Since about 2011, the norms of quizbowl have very much been against allowing anything other than a team of people who currently attend the same university playing most college tournaments, except for 1-3 per year that are marked as "open". I believe that, traditionally, an exception is mad...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've been hesitant to post this because it kinda cuts against the spirit of the thread, but I want to share how quizbowl helped me - a lot - during a time when I was dealing with poor mental health. When I was in law school, I was diagnosed with situational depression (now called "Adjustment Di...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

The game "Wits and Wagers" is the one where I've most been able to use my quizbowl knowledge to crush non-quizbowl people the most. It's a trivia game, with the twist that all of the answers are numbers (stuff like "What year was Liberia founded" or "how many feet tall is th...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

The angriest I have ever gotten at a quizbowl tournament was Oxford Open 2011, in the semifinal round. My team was in "we are mathematically guaranteed to win if we don't neg" territory and there was a literature tossup. It was clearly about a character from "The Devil and Daniel Webs...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

"Academic Trivia" should be a good compromise that leaves all semantic extremists unhappy and makes your activity understandable to the general population. If people ask "what's academic trivia?" you can reply "you know, stuff about history, literature, science, art, mytholo...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Marshall Steinbaum and myself are major proponents of the game "Power Grid", in which players compete to build the most efficient power distribution system in Germany.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

All the way back in 2004 when I was a college freshman, I felt exactly the same way. After being a big fish in a small pond in high school, I was suddenly attending UChicago practices where not only were the questions much harder and full of things I had never heard of, but the room routinely contai...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Ike Jose used to be one of my favorite people in quizbowl. I honestly really enjoyed that one Illinois Open he edited that nobody else liked. There was something pure about him, he was this big kid having fun learning things and having fun sharing the things he was passionate about with people who p...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

teams have already heard 20 TUs to differentiate themselves I think this is a very powerful rebuttal to a lot of nitpicks about tiebreakers. Over a pretty decent sample size of questions these two teams have proven to be evenly matched: there's not really a "wrong" outcome so long as the ...

Search found 2189 matches