The Quizbowl Resource Center

Skepticism and Animal Feed

A lot of people in our society shy away from difficult or awkward conversations, even when these conversations are necessary. The fact that people who cannot write the questions they signed up to write find it easier to just not talk to their editor than to email their editor early on and say "...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I think there's a distinction between reaction time (how fast does your finger press the buzzer after your brain decides it is time to buzz) and recall time (how fast does your mouth say "The Dean's December" after your brain determines this is a novel set in Communist Romania). My persona...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

You should be tailoring your resume to the position you are applying for. Figure out what it is that the people reading the resume want from an applicant, and then highlight the way that quizbowl shows you have that. For instance, if it's a job where you will be managing a budget, talk about your ex...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I can never remember which one is DT and which one is ST, so whenever I quote a time I make sure to say "ET" or "Central Time" rather than EST or Central Standard Time. This absolves me of the need to remember whether we are in DT or ST. Plus it saves a word or character.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Anecdotally, seeing "England" in scare quotes made it really easy for me to understand that it was somehow different from the list of promptable answers in front of it.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I never used flashcards. I tried making them once (I think I made actual index card flashcards where the front was an object from Norse myth and the back was the owner of that object) and I found that I found the process of making flashcards to be boring and unpleasant. It was more fun to just read ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Sounds like this could be better accomplished by an individual running their own quizbowl news site, rather than by any of quizbowl's notoriously bureaucratic and slow-running organizations.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

If I were doing this, I'd basically chop up some ACF Fall or SCT questions and insert them among the trivia rounds. Then I'd announce at the end something to the effect of "and a lot of these questions were based on REAL quizbowl questions!" Might help combat the impression that quizbowl i...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

The University of Minnesota used to host a tournament called "Deep Bench". The entire point was to reward the, well, bench strength of quizbowl teams. You had to bring a lot of people (I think 8?) and then there was a round where everyone broke up into singles (teams of 1) doubles (teams o...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've seen captains point to a specific player on the team, to say "YOU buzz in and take this one". This could be another way to determine who buzzes in. I agree with Chris that a lot of the advice in this thread is for like 99th percentile teams seeking to become 99.9th percentile teams. M...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Saying "buzz" instead of setting up a buzzer system is what Harvard did during my time there. It definitely works better than the other no-buzzer alternative, which is people slapping the desk with their hand. Human voices differ from each other more than the sounds our hands make.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I often made mnemonics for things that, for whatever reason, I was unable to make stick. For example, for the life of me I could not recall the order of the major battles of Alexander the Great. I could read about them all I could, but in the end I still messed up the order of Granicus River, Gaugam...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I vaguely recall a story about an incident in the late 90's where there was a tossup about India that was the subject of a protest, and they resolved it by asking a player from another team who was Indian. Was that at CBI Nationals?

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Yeah, quizbowl is certainly a "minor league" into Jeopardy in the way Mike Cheyne articulates above. I'm sure I'm not the only person in this thread who has auditioned for Jeopardy, and they make you list all the people you know who have been on Jeopardy...and yeah I have to list like 20 p...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

The trash tournament Ann B. Davis had the feature where once a game a player could answer a bonus all by themselves and if they got all three parts they earned 60 points, but if they got any part wrong they earned 0 points. I don't think I'm the only specialist who dreamed of one day seeing that in ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

When I began playing college quizbowl in 2004, there were still some wacky bonus formats being used. They were beginning to be phased out then, and we were explicitly told by our elders not to use them and to use the standard three-part bonus instead, but they definitely came up in mACF events, incl...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

In 2006, there was a war between Israel and Lebanon. Matt Weiner sided with Israel. Chris Borglum sided with Lebanon. They argued about it on the internet, and Beirut Borglum told Matt Weiner to put down the giant turkey leg he was holding (Matt Weiner, if you've never seen him, is a very large man)...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Well, the difference between Andy Watkins and Guy Fawkes is that Guy Fawkes was caught before he did anything, right? Parliament did not blow up, the plotters were executed, and disloyal papists all over the country were dragged out of their priest holes and jailed. It's a far more satisfying outcom...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

CBI also must have notified the university of results, because at one point after UChicago's embarrassing 2nd place finish at CBI regionals in 2005, I was meeting with a university administrator on an unrelated matter, and upon learning that I was on the quizbowl team she congratulated me for our 2n...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I'm not the best person to make this thread because my college quizbowl career only briefly overlapped with CBI, but I'll kick it off and perhaps other veteran college quizbowl players can run with it. In ancient times (like the 80's or something), there was a TV game show run by an organization cal...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Watkinsgate is the biggest news story in the history of quizbowl. It was the subject of an article in a newspaper in Nepal, which I'm pretty sure has never happened before or since. As far as people in Nepal are concerned it's the only thing to ever happen in quizbowl. I have long critiqued the cele...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I actually buy into this, with the caveat that, if the answerlines are too hard, then you've created dead tossups in the most consequential matches of your tournament! That's obviously bad. I think this is an "underrated bad". Writers don't live in sufficient fear of creating this outcome...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

If literature is what interests you the most, go ahead and download a bunch of college packets, read them, and look up every lit clue and answerline you haven't heard of. In the fall when you go to your first college practice, figure out what the teams weaknesses are and see if you can specialize in...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Honestly, the most rewarding thing I've done with quizbowl the last ~5 or so years is hanging out on the "Theory" section of this very forum and giving the kids advice on things like what books to read or how to learn myth. Hopefully, the advice is not horrifically off-base, though I can i...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

First of all, let me say how jealous I am that writers and editors today have this wonderful data, which in my day was the province of pie-in-the-sky futurists. Truly quizbowl keeps getting better and better and it's fun to watch this happening from the retirement home. Second of all, I want to talk...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Kelly McKenzie was already just a legend when I started playing college quizbowl all the way back in 2004, but somebody told me that he popularized the idea of using the bonus prompt to introduce additional clues. E.g., saying "This President signed the Black Tariff. For ten points each, name t...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Wanted to bump this thread to make two recs for Eastern European history: God's Playground, Volume 1 by Norman Davies. . This is a history of Poland from its beginning to the partitions in 1792. It's famous outside of quizbowl and the author is super famous. I have actually not read it, but one of m...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I found the Kojiki very dense and unreadable. For everything that was quizbowl-relevant, there were 10 things that will never come up in quizbowl. I recommend finding summations of the most popular and famous stories from Japanese myth in secondary sources. Japanese culture is very popular and there...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Somebody who pays attention to their college classes will do alright in quizbowl, but you would be lying to your attendees if you told them that quizbowl was just a test about what you learned in school. Nobody can take enough classes to become a good quizbowl player from classes alone. Quizbowl pla...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

This may sound obvious, but I think "preparing to buzz" plays a big role in helping you to buzz faster. For example, when you are first starting to play, the game seems to be moving fast. You hear a bunch of clues you don't know, then a clue you do know out of nowhere, BAM BOOM ZOWIE, and...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

You're going to get more bang for your buck if you give high level, systemic feedback to a question writer or editor. If you tell a question writer "your middle clues were too hard, here is some advice on how to write good middle clues", that is something they can apply to every question t...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Long, long ago, I was the TD of a very hard tournament. A new team, that had never played a tournament before, signed up to play it. I was excited to see them field a team and welcomed them to this tournament. They got absolutely killed, including a loss to a below-average player who was playing sol...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Re: the Morocco thing If I were writing a tossup on Morocco and wished to use clues on medieval dynasties that roughly originated in Morocco, I would probably begin the tossup with "One dynasty that originated in this modern-day country won the battle of so-and-so", followed by stuff like ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

You may be very interested in the debate we recently had on the Theory board, where some of these same issues were discussed

viewtopic.php?f=117&t=21597

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Discussion of whether we can narrow down quizbowl skill to one statistic is completely ignoring the problem Jakob has raised in this thread. We don't want 100 ppg high school superstars or experienced collegiate players platying in novice tournaments, and if we have to use multiple criteria to dete...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

In chess, it is my understanding that there are tournaments, say, for players with Elo of 1000-1500, 1500-1700, etc. Know how strong the people playing your tournament are. Chess has reduced "how good a player is" to a simple number, and made this number trivially easy to look up in an au...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Wait, why is it bad that the giveaway is accessible? Dead tossups are bad for quizbowl. If you don't like somebody answering a Milwaukee Brewers tossup because they got it off geography rather than sports knowledge, your remedy is to learn more about sports so you can beat them to it on the sports c...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I've always treated Commonwealth countries as part of "World" for the traditional American / European / World split in a 4/4 History distribution, including Canada. That seems to me to be the most literal interpretation of what those words mean. I am also inclined to think of these subdist...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I find it difficult to disagree with esteemed community member Mike Cheyne on this. It seems obvious that existing ACF rules were designed to solve problems that simply don't exist in Colorado, and ACF would be justified in waiving this rule there. I suppose there's still the argument some people ma...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Let he who has not thrown a pen...or notebook, or buzzer, or desk...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

NHBB runs events in pretty much all of the places mentioned in this thread, don't they? Of course, NHBB has probably literally millions of times more money than any other organization promoting or organizing quizbowl-type activities.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

You say you're in 8th grade: so if you keep playing quizbowl in high school and college, your teammates will change several times. Areas that might be very well covered by one of your middle school teammates today might turn out to be weak areas for your future teams. I started my college quizbowl c...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Fred Morlan seems to have brought NASAT back from the brink.

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I think the transparent part of that tossup isn’t just the “being set to music” stuff but the pronoun “these biblical texts” itself. Very few things other than the psalms fit that pronoun at all (maybe the gospels I guess?) so the question can easily be frauded in power. I hate to pile onto a high ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Doing the right thing in the wrong way is, unfortunately, something that a corporation (or government, or other formally organized entity) can get in trouble for. Note that NAQT has already suspended Matt Bruce from going to its tournaments, even in a non team facing role. I don't think you need a b...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Is there any internal difference between termination of membership and resignation within NAQT? I know that there some sort of profit-sharing given to NAQT members at the end of each year's cycle. Would resignation divest a member? Or does it work like stock in that a resigned member could still pr...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

There are two hypotheses for why Matt Bruce remains an NAQT member at the moment. The first hypothesis is that NAQT does not care or understand why these blog posts are a problem. The second hypothesis is that NAQT intends to remove Matt Bruce but can't do it at instant speed - perhaps they need to ...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

So you're running a mirror of Cambridge Open in Cambridge, MA but calling it the Boston Open?

Skepticism and Animal Feed

I have never read any of those books. I suspect that, given their length and their target audience, they will not have the level of detail to give you information that will consistently come up in the first lines of tossups about US Presidents. That does not mean they're not worth your time. I suspe...

Skepticism and Animal Feed

Good luck beating cancer and kudos for being brave enough to post openly about this. Everyone who beats cancer automatically becomes one of my heroes my life.

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