2016 MLK: General Discussion

[Auroni]

This thread is for big-picture discussions; discussions of individual questions or posts about easily fixable errors should be made in the appropriate threads.

I hope everyone had a great experience playing this set -- we sure enjoyed writing and editing it. Will Nediger, Brian McPeak, Kenji Golimlim, Siddhant Dogra, Justin Millman, Noah Chen, guest contributor Cody Voight, and I pitched in questions for the set, and Will, Brian, Kenji, Sid, and I edited them. The category breakdown for editing went as follows:

Literature: Will (American and Euro), Auroni (British and World)
History: Sid (American), Kenji (Euro and British/Euro), Auroni (World)
Science: Auroni (Bio), Sid (Chem), Brian (Physics and Other)
RMP: All of us (Religion), Sid (Myth), Will (Phil)
Arts: Will (Visual), Auroni (Auditory)
SS: Will, with Econ assistance from Brian
Geo/CE/Other: Kenji

Thoughts: I was happy with the way the set turned out, but there were a couple of clear problems. One was bonus difficulty variability -- while we hit the mark with providing true easy parts to not alienate newer and less experienced teams, we were pretty liberal with our middle parts and sometimes went crazy with our hard parts. Also, it was difficult to standardize bonus difficulty across categories. The strength of the set was mostly in the tossups, which I thought were clue-dense, fresh, and creative. However, in some cases, we probably piled on a number of difficult clues and compressed the middle to easy clue area.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Auroni's basically spot-on in his assessment that this tournament's strength was in its tossups, which had a lot of interesting ideas. A lot of the times they weren't exactly consistent in difficulty, but this was for the most part ignorable since it rarely felt jarring. In retrospect, it reminded me a lot of MFT, a tournament I enjoyed a lot - I similarly had a great time playing this set. The bonuses were, as Auroni says, very inconsistent and frequently had third parts that were frankly near-impossible - during games, Jordan and I often looked at each other baffled over what was going on in some of the history bonuses.

The history questions were good. In particular, Kenji once again demonstrated an excellent ability to choose interesting, unique, and difficulty-appropriate I will, however, resurrect a comment I made in the VCU Open 2015 discussion:

...I wanted to highlight a trend that I think has become way too prominent in quizbowl history writing which I think this tournament was a pretty extreme example of. Put simply, quizbowl world history focuses way too much on the 19th and 20th centuries, far in excess of what it should.

Kenji wasn't the world history editor for this set, so it would obviously be inappropriate to criticize him again like I did in that thread. It was, though, rather disappointing that this question set exhibited a very similar mistake to another (otherwise quite good) set put about by a couple of the same writers a few months ago (though the geographical distribution seemed much improved). These were the "world" history tossups in the twelve packets I played, with 20th century content highlighted:

Mobutu Sese-Seko, Hammurabi, self-immolation, Tang dynasty, 2010 Haiti earthquake, Lebanon, Australia (a tossup on people from a majority-European descent Commonwealth country in the Mediterranean in World War II - some "world history"!), Mossad (a second 20th century Middle East tossup), Oda Nobunaga, Deng Xiaoping, Ottoman viziers, Tupac Amaru (full of 20th century Tupamaro clues, so that counts for half).

Again, I'll make no secret of the fact that I know non-20th century world history better than than 20th century world history and that this colors my opinion, but again, this is clearly not a good distribution and wouldn't be considered acceptable in European history, for example. I haven't counted but I wouldn't be surprised if there were as many (or more) 20th century world tossups than 20th century US history tossups, and the United States has only existed since the late 18th century!

The arts, philosophy, and social science were great and well-executed. I liked the religion, too, but I do think it made used of common links without a particular "theme" a bit to excess.

I'm not super-qualified to comment on the science, but I think a lot of the easy parts were needlessly unforgiving, particularly for teams who might know some basic science concepts like what an identity matrix is, but may be confused by something like the following if they haven't heard of identity maps (whereas they probably wouldn't be confused if you asked for "this adjective"):

[10] If a category has an object A, it will have this map for which A is the target and the source. For the category of matrices, it can be represented by a Kronecker delta or by a matrix with ones on the diagonal.
ANSWER: identity map or matrix or morphism

[sonstige]

I concur with the inventiveness of the answerlines, and that y'all managed to build solid, pyramidal questions on these topics. As I said in my email this morning to Roxanne, kudos to Michigan for pulling that off.

Without going back to the set directly to see exactly how many times it came up, it felt like "Odysseus" was a word heard many times throughout the day. Also, someone at my site seemed to take issue with the Njord question (he claimed there was an error in it, but wasn't too specific as to what he thought it was). Maybe it's worth taking a look at this to check.

Overall, while my site's teams weren't crushing the questions, they were *mostly* all getting picked up at the end. So I appreciate that you managed to provide challenging TUs with accessible answerlines. I personally don't have too many issues with the set (yes, bonuses seemed to have skewed a bit hard at times....but I imagine that's difficult to control, especially with this set being played at different sites with different field strengths). My only real criticism is that I would have liked to have received the set earlier than 2:30 AM the morning of the tournament. I know things happen, and I'm appreciative that the set was polished and generally error free, but it would have been fantastic to have had the set Friday afternoon.

[Auroni]

Without going back to the set directly to see exactly how many times it came up, it felt like "Odysseus" was a word heard many times throughout the day.

The Homeric epics are foundational texts in Western mythology, literature, and culture, and so there were 3 questions [tossup on Odysseus from the Iliad, tossup on Penelope from the Odyssey, bonus on Odysseus from the Odyssey] on them that were completely non-overlapping in a way that is totally fine. Generally, it is an accepted and encouraged practice in quizbowl to draw from hugely important topic areas like "the classics" and "Shakespeare" multiple times as long as the content doesn't overlap.

[sonstige]

I'm not refuting the significance of Homeric epics, if that's how my comment is being interpreted (heck, one of my degrees is in classical studies, after all!). All I was noting was that some of our site's players pointed out that they felt "Odysseus" was used enough times to become noticeable, even if the usage was in different, non-overlapping contexts.

If this was done deliberately, fine. My comment was mostly to be informative in the event that this was an accidental (albeit trivial) nuance of the set.

[Jem Casey]

I'll belatedly note that this was a really good set. On a similarly brief and nonconstructive note, I agree that the bonuses, particularly the lit ones, were often pretty rough.

[Victor Prieto]

Thoughts: I was happy with the way the set turned out, but there were a couple of clear problems. One was bonus difficulty variability -- while we hit the mark with providing true easy parts to not alienate newer and less experienced teams, we were pretty liberal with our middle parts and sometimes went crazy with our hard parts. Also, it was difficult to standardize bonus difficulty across categories. The strength of the set was mostly in the tossups, which I thought were clue-dense, fresh, and creative. However, in some cases, we probably piled on a number of difficult clues and compressed the middle to easy clue area.

To quote Obi-Wan, your insight serves you well. There were some bonuses that were really, really severe, and I don't think that has been said by other people enough.

Kudos to Sid for chemistry, which was very solid.

I was kind of in a zombified state for most of yesterday though, so I can't really render much opinion on anything else.

p.s. it's a bit weird that tossups on Turnbull and Australia were in the same packet.

[Auroni]

To anyone seeing this after playing the Northeast mirror: due to a miscommunication, the earliest version of the packets was sent out instead of the most recent version with suggested fixes. We're sorry about that. Many issues that you might post about may have been addressed already, so just check before doing so.