2021 Chicago Open: Thanks and General Discussion

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Once again, thank you all for playing 2021 Chicago Open!

There are a ton of people to thank for making this tournament happen - please see the public acknowledgement post. Suffice to say, this set was a ton of work, but luckily there's a ton of awesome people in quizbowl who were willing and able to help make it happen.

I'll follow up with a more specific post on approaches to writing and editing my categories (History, Literature, Arts, Geo/MW/OAc) for this tournament and encourage the other CO team members to do the same. For now, a few large-scale remarks:

Vision and Difficulty

Our general goal for this tournament was to turn up the adventurousness (and, naturally, difficulty to some extent) of the tossups, while keeping bonus difficulty down and in particular ensuring we had both gettable middle parts, non-trivial easy parts, and nothing particularly stupid for a hard part (though there was some zaniness, because a CO without zaniness is laaaaame). Naturally, there was still a decent bit of bonus variation; with easy parts this is more natural, but middle parts ranged from EFT hard parts to hard Regs hard parts, which could have been ameliorated with a finer comb-over. But in general, I think we succeeded at our goals here - bonus conversion was fairly high, despite the attempt to avoid free 10s as much as possible, and powers were widely dispersed across the field despite being challenging to get.

I've talked in the Discord before about the magic of CO - having it be The tournament where That One Thing finally comes up, simply because no other regular set of the season can go nearly as wide or deep and you never know what could possibly be asked. To me, that calls for a challenging tournament that is a clear step up from Nationals both in tossup difficulty and answerline range. We ranked tossups on a difficulty scale from 1 to 5 and put a hard cap on the number of 4s (hard Nats answers) or 5s (CO-only answers) per packet. The tossups were unabashedly hard, and we weren't particularly shy about taking answers that, say, could be a Regionals middle part, but probably wouldn't support a Regionals tossup, i.e. self-portraits in poetry, Saul Alinsky, or "Va, Pensiero" - and in many ways, these answers are every bit as hard as something like Brand or Idriss Deby, neither of which would probably be a Regs middle part. Which is to say, there's many ways to write a hard tossup, and we tried to show as many of them as we could write solid questions on.

I think keeping the bonuses reasonable in particular was crucial to the tournament's success. Snagging a tough tossup to receive a bonus where you get an easy 10 and then flail, that just isn't fun. Middle parts are what are setting teams apart most of the time, with 30s being well-earned pulls, and people should get 0 some times too! On the flip side, a lot of teams that lacked significant coverage in many areas or any top generalists still managed well over 10 PPB, which isn't easy at all! I was very impressed with the quality of play and hoped the set helped bring that out.

Production and Use of Submissions

As this year's tournament featured optional half-packet submission, an option which was added fairly late on, most of the questions (86%) were written by the editors. I personally think the traditional CO mandatory-submission model (perhaps with half-packets in the future) is better; that said, we took advantage of to try to put our best foot forward with editor ideas and incorporate quality submissions. We tried to take advantage of the set's reliance one editor questions to shape the set as much as possible towards the experience talked about above: unabashedly hard and adventurous, with attempts to ensure solid middle-late clues and reasonable bonuses to avoid frustrating play experiences, and a whiff of whimsy across the board.

Points of Improvement

I recommend that future editors ensure that questions in a given set fully written by the weekend before the tournament; we originally planned on this, and it's largely my fault that we didn't. I think this set needed exactly that week of additional tuning, especially in some of the areas that were filled out last-minute (other arts, chemistry, parts of the painting and lit) and some history hard and geography parts which pushed it a bit. There were some minor set issues that resulted from a ton of tweaks were made last-minute, including the repeat bonus content on Plato, an "ADD CLUE" note still in the text, and (most embarassingly) an edit I made on the morning of the tournament where I accidentally deleted a bonus answer. Sincere apologies for that!

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Thanks again for playing and discuss away!

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

I enjoyed the set a fair amount (especially the CS, math and engineering content, which I thought was fantastic throughout - I'm not super qualified to comment on the rest of the osci but it all sounded interesting and well done.) I liked the art a ton as well. Maybe the tournament could have stood to be a bit easier, but I thought the set vision was pretty sound and the majority of the hard answerlines felt reasonable.

My main gripes with the tournament were with some pretty skewed subdistributions:

Religion: felt extremely heavy on Christian theology, both to the detriment of other Christianity questions (scriptures, practices, etc.) and pretty much every other religion except maybe Islam. To take an extreme example, I think there were as many (if not more) bonuses cluing Schleiermacher as there were questions on Buddhism or Judaism total that we played. I don't know if this is a packetization issue wrt the three packets we haven't played yet, but even if all 3 of those were on non-Christian major religions I'd still say the balance was pretty egregious. Even besides the major focus on Christianity I felt like a lot of religion (e.g. the tu on the constitution of Medina) didn't engage with ways religion is practiced in modern times, but that might be a bit of a biased viewpoint. That being said, I thought the questions that did break the aforementioned mold were fantastic - the Bhagavad Gita As It Is was a really cool tossup idea e.g.

Philosophy: Felt like there was very very little modern / contemporary analytic content and most of the q's focused on continental phil. I suppose it makes sense that I'd end up on this side of the argument eventually, but I thought that the skew was really big and only furthered by the fact that phil was <1/1 with the extra space being taken up with "soft thought" (which tends to feel a lot more like continental philosophy? subjectively at least).

Literature: This is much more subjective, but I thought the lit could have used more meat and potatoes type deep cuts of canon literature and focused common links. A lot of the lit I remember hearing was on "hard things," and while I enjoyed the topic selection as it appeared this did stand out to me. The tossup on "The Prarie" which led in with seemingly vital plot details about the book, for instance, felt like space that could have been used to explore more widely read Fenimore Cooper books (oxymoronic?) or other books of the era. Again, definitely my most subjective critique.

Anyways, going back to how much I loved CS - this set's CS was fantastic and an excellent model for any other hard sets. The subcategory choices were great, the way the questions were asked was great, the answerlines were great choices, and the questions did a great job giving context.

[VSCOelasticity]

I enjoyed the set a fair amount (especially the CS, math and engineering content, which I thought was fantastic throughout - I'm not super qualified to comment on the rest of the osci but it all sounded interesting and well done.)

Anyways, going back to how much I loved CS - this set's CS was fantastic and an excellent model for any other hard sets. The subcategory choices were great, the way the questions were asked was great, the answerlines were great choices, and the questions did a great job giving context.

Thank you!

I'll have a bit to say about how I approached writing and editing my contributions to the set later. But first, Penn Bowl!

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I enjoyed this tournament!! I very much liked the history, especially the "Walstoncore" tossups like "wampum" and "terraces," which I thought were quite well-executed. Many of the answers chosen were quite daring, to the extent that if I had seen them without playing the questions, I would have been worried that they would play poorly. As they played out in the tournament, though, I instead usually found myself thinking: "Huh, that's a cool new angle to ask about that topic!" I came away from the event awed by how much more I have to learn about any number of areas, which to me is what CO should be about.

I would concur with Vishwa a little that the lit could have used more questions on commonly-read texts. "The Killers," a tossup which would fit that criterion, was one of my favorite questions in the set. That said, I also loved hearing the Elsa Morante question, which I'm told was meant to be one of the hardest in the tournament.

I think my biggest technical criticism of the set would actually be the bonus difficulty. The hard parts often felt like questions we could never get in a million years, even in areas where we had knowledge; after the first couple rounds, I settled into expecting that the hard part to most bonuses would be on a guy we'd never heard of, not strongly scaffolded to anything we did know. This way of writing bonuses is more acceptable at CO than any other tournament, but I still think it would have been more enjoyable if we felt like we had more of a fighting chance on most of the third parts.

I'm aware, of course, that many people had that same experience playing 2021 ACF Nationals. There were a few reasons why the bonuses for that tournament played out harder than I expected - difficulty readjusting to 5-second timing rules, which I got to experience for myself this past weekend; shifts in the canon away from some older literature, which turned out to be challenging for the field; plain old miscalibration on my part - but besides those, I think there were some psychological biases I ran into that could be countered. Specifically, I think I underestimated how often, and how recently, a topic had to come up to be "too easy" for a middle/hard part. Frequently, I would worry a bonus part was too easy, and then an excellent team would actually miss it.

It might have played out better if I had worried less about topics having come up before while writing and editing the bonuses. I think the old Minnesota Opens, plus CMST/Fall Open more recently, are good examples of a more enjoyable style of bonus writing.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I think the criticism of hard parts is totally fair - in lit, I replaced 3-4 lit bonuses on hard authors shortly before the tournament, but realistically a couple more and maybe a tossup or two needed to go in favor of a few more safe, solid cuts at easy answers. The history also needed a few out-there bonus parts trimmed, or other bonus parts that didn't run away from the canon so aggressively. And for visual arts in particular, a few more meat and potatoes visual tossups and bonuses were needed - in my ideal CO there'd probably be at least one more question like "Klimt." I think in lit a lot of this stemmed from my limitations as a lit editor, which I'll discuss in a later post.

[1.82]

On the whole I enjoyed this set. I can't speak to science at all, but in general my team was able to compete on every bonus, which did a lot to make the tournament a pleasurable experience. On the categories where I can buzz, I thought that the ideas were good and the cluing was interesting; in particular, there weren't many questions that were just slogs through endless proper names, which can often be an issue with high-level tossups on history or the like. I also felt pleased about the way that my knowledge of human geography was rewarded.

There were a couple issues that diminished my enjoyment of the set which were unrelated to questions of set philosophy or the like:

1. The set was clearly lacking polish. This was clear from the handful of cases where there were missing clues or answerlines, but in a few cases there were tossups that really could have used some kind of note to player but didn't have any, and then on the other hand the note that a specific answer was required for the code-switching tossup confused everyone in my room into thinking that some much more specific term was required.
2. The amount of Japan content in the editors' packets was oppressive, especially since some of that content seemed impossible (the tossup on Nikko, for instance). Looking through the set, it looks like rather than one writer going wild, this was the product of several writers coming up with more questions on Japan than they needed to.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

The amount of Japan content in the editors' packets was oppressive, especially since some of that content seemed impossible (the tossup on Nikko, for instance). Looking through the set, it looks like rather than one writer going wild, this was the product of several writers coming up with more questions on Japan than they needed to.

I for one welcome more non-Nikko content

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The set definitely needed a week of polish and it's mostly my fault that it didn't get this.

Re:Japan - in the packets played, I count two literature, two history (counting Andamans), one myth/legends, and one geography tossup on Japan, and you can arguably count the Hiroshima tossup but that's solidly under US literature subdistro wise. I think the number of bonuses was similar.

I get that we have three known weebs who were significant contributors to this tourney, but I rarely see such comments about France, Germany, etc - countries which are more familiar to the audience, but with similar wide berths of literary and historical output and which are well represented in tournaments, including this one. I wonder if this is due to some of the harder answer lines being Japan content - Mitsuhide, Nikko, and Edogawa Ranpo are hard topics from three different writers that don't see a ton of play, and perhaps could generate the feeling of yore of "what's the next hard Japanese thing we are mining."

[1.82]

Re:Japan - in the packets played, I count two literature, two history (counting Andamans), one myth/legends, and one geography tossup on Japan, and you can arguably count the Hiroshima tossup but that's solidly under US literature subdistro wise. I think the number of bonuses was similar.

I get that we have three known weebs who were significant contributors to this tourney, but I rarely see such comments about France, Germany, etc - countries which are more familiar to the audience, but with similar wide berths of literary and historical output and which are well represented in tournaments, including this one. I wonder if this is due to some of the harder answer lines being Japan content - Mitsuhide, Nikko, and Edogawa Ranpo are hard topics from three different writers that don't see a ton of play, and perhaps could generate the feeling of yore of "what's the next hard Japanese thing we are mining."

I agree that the really hard questions being disproportionately Japanese contributed to this sense. The other factor that was significant was how many of the questions were bunched together: out of the six editors' packets we heard, Editors 1 through 3 put together had four tossups on Japan, Editors 5 had a bonus on Japan, and Editors 4 had the tossup on Christopher Alexander, which was not itself about Japan but whose clues in power were mostly about Japan. I definitely did not think that there were issues with the amount of Japanese content in the morning.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

OK, some more editorial thoughts now:

General

This tournament would have been a lot better if I hadn't written as much for it / edited so many categories and spent more time head editing, tuning things across the board, etc. It probably would have been better if we brought in another editor, but a lot of players were involved in other projects and I wanted this tournament to be playable by as many people as possible. So, I mainly aimed for just doing a competent job in most of the areas I subject edited and producing a playable tournament which met our difficulty and vision goals. And, well, that was still just over my head - over 300 questions and several set read-throughs later and there's still so much more to tweak and many improvements to be made.

History

I think these questions were pretty much in line with what I've written and edited in the past. The one additional step I took for this tournament was trying to bring in a wider ranger of cultural history, "pop history," and more ambitious answerlines - things I had learned over the years expanding beyond reading history books, playing games, learning the canon, etc. that I thought could be entertaining and informative for a wide audience. So I threw in things like the Almagest (science history!), color line (with some late clues from baseball history), Saul Alinsky, the Chi-Rho symbol (with clues from artifacts and the Book of Kells), or the somewhat silly question on mules that pulled from a bunch of different areas of Roman history - all trying to pluck out different areas where people engage with the subject of history as a whole.

I generally dislike clues that require remembering minor details and generically-named occurrences and tried to minimize those in favor of clues that took a specific cut on an answer (i.e. the Mafia in World War 2 or the Spanish Philippines) or ones that would help a knowledgeable player hone in more quickly on what was going on with a challenging answer - making things clear that we're in the Late Qing era for the Beiyang tossup, dropping some reasonably well-known Zionists in the Uganda Scheme tossup, etc. Sometimes maybe a clue or two could have been held back, but I think it's generally better to make it reasonably clear when you're going for a hard answer and there's still a few plausible answerlines players could choose from.

Finally, a quick touch on the "Walstoncore" as Matt put it - I basically tried to do what I did for Age of Empires in these areas and just dig up a bunch of topics where material culture provides our biggest clues into the past, where we have limited writing or other records. But having these all just be pure archaeology is going to be narrow and inaccessible, so I tried to pick topics (except perhaps the submission on Gobekli Tepe) where you could worm in clues that'd help people buzz from context, i.e. Oxyrhyncus where you can talk about a wide range of finds that have importance in literature, religion, etc. and the Altai Mountains tossup, which used late clues from historical linguistics. The wampum and terrace tossups also exemplified this approach. Cultural and material history get pretty tricky to write - finding unique clues in particular isn't always easy, and you've got to use meaty sentences to anchor things to unique facts and give the player lots of context - but I hope this set helped lay a bold path forward for how such questions can be written across a full history distribution.

If there's a part of this set that's most dear to me, it's probably the history - it's the subject where I probably have the widest breadth, where there's always so much more to ask, and where I've wanted to push the canon the most. I'm overjoyed to hear people liked these questions.

Literature

My main goal here was doing a competent job and producing questions that were easy to listen to and buzz on if you knew things. I am, generously, the third or fourth-best literature player among the people who were part of the set from its early days, and when I took over my goal was just to make a diverse set of questions people didn't hate playing. I'm not nearly as well-versed in the literature canon as many others who have handled CO lit before and I think this showed - I relied heavily on editorial instincts and research reading literary reviews, critical essays, etc. to get an idea of what's important and might make a good CO question on a topic that I hadn't seen come up too much in recent tournaments, but would be accessible to the audience. I also tried to make sure a wide range of eras were represented in the literature, including some older topics which are often disfavored in contemporary tournaments. Finally, a ton of different folks kicked in literature questions - Ike, Itamar, Jack, Caroline, Joseph Krol, and even Matt Jackson made contributions here and helped greatly broaden the set's perspective.

My approach probably produced couple too many hard author questions and a bit of excess lean on "lesser known things by easy authors" - the Brand tossup, for example, came out of reading up on Ibsen's career and learning about how Brand made a fairly big impact on intellectual culture of the era, particularly youth discussing the play's philosophical implications. A more versed writer might have figured out how to work those themes in more elegantly - I went with the safe option of just writing a Brand tossup with some carefully researched clues. And yeah, that was hard. With a lot of lit approaches like this, you got a lot of hard lit questions that were often tough to power. This was probably made worse by consistently under-estimating answer difficulty - I classed things like epithalamion and The Way We Live Now as <3> i.e. par-for-the-course Nats answers, but they were quite hard for the audience.

Anyways, hopefully people enjoyed these questions regardless. I did have a great time writing a few questions in particular on longer-form stuff I enjoyed reading - Neuromancer, Behemoth, A Tale of Love and Darkness, etc. as well as the poetry, where I think I did a better job consciously incorporating easier material since I'd read more of it.

Arts

Painting/Sculpture - As with literature, I aimed at competence, though I'm a bit more experienced with painting questions. I think this tournament's visual arts leaned too "new style" in terms of relying a lot on art history and criticism and less on pure visual clues and as noted, I'd have like to have at least 1/1 more questions in the vein of "Klimt." Mostly I just wanted a range of eras and answer difficulties, with a few boundary-pushing questions like the sculptures at Delphi and codices as art objects, for example. You can also thank Ike for that tossup on Balthazar having black skin, that was a crazy fun edit he made to an Adoration tossup I wrote early on.

Classical/Opera - Similarly, I just wanted a wide range of clue approaches, eras, and answer difficulties. The score clues really needed a once-over here, since I screwed up several notes, but it seemed like most of them managed to be buzzable. I did try to deliberately shift the music a bit from the last couple of COs and bring in a few minor, but notable composers who I enjoy, such as Leopold Godowsky and Reinhold Gliere, or take a few "never really done before" cuts such as piano quartets, but mostly I tried to be fairly conservative. I definitely overshot hard part difficulty here several times.

Other Arts - This is probably the category I edited that I was least cut out for in terms of knowledge base. There were many great submissions here and I think a large range of topics was represented - Ike deserves the lion's share of credit for filling this out, but I'd also like to recognize Brad for their innovative nail art tossup and Jon for his (shape of) USA tossup. A few of the film and film-adjacent questions we added / changed last minute came out very experimental and perhaps rough (such as the golden hour tossup, some of the set design clues added to the volcano tossup), and the very hard bonus on Zapata Westerns. Again, the set just needed more polish.

Social Science

Social science spilled way out of its allotted 1/1 at this tournament, creeping into history, parts of religion/myth, and the "other" categories - as I think it should be. I aimed wide as opposed to deep, wanting to avoid writing too many questions on hard thinkers or super-niche concepts, and instead aiming a lot of tossups at answers that have interdisciplinary relevance. These definitely consciously pushed it in several areas - state formation and path dependence, for example, are answers that have relevance in economics, political science, and general studies of organizational dynamics. Taking this sort of tack was meant to produce a novel, challenging experience that complemented more standard-fare tossups like alpha in finance, PTSD, code switching (possibly written too easy), or public opinion. Perhaps there could have been one or two more core econ/psych questions but I'm happy with how this area of the set worked out.

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That's it for now; I'll try to post some thoughts on Geo/CE/Other Academic later.

[Father of the Ragdoll]

My main gripes with the tournament were with some pretty skewed subdistributions:

Religion: felt extremely heavy on Christian theology, both to the detriment of other Christianity questions (scriptures, practices, etc.) and pretty much every other religion except maybe Islam. To take an extreme example, I think there were as many (if not more) bonuses cluing Schleiermacher as there were questions on Buddhism or Judaism total that we played. I don't know if this is a packetization issue wrt the three packets we haven't played yet, but even if all 3 of those were on non-Christian major religions I'd still say the balance was pretty egregious. Even besides the major focus on Christianity I felt like a lot of religion (e.g. the tu on the constitution of Medina) didn't engage with ways religion is practiced in modern times, but that might be a bit of a biased viewpoint. That being said, I thought the questions that did break the aforementioned mold were fantastic - the Bhagavad Gita As It Is was a really cool tossup idea e.g.

Philosophy: Felt like there was very very little modern / contemporary analytic content and most of the q's focused on continental phil. I suppose it makes sense that I'd end up on this side of the argument eventually, but I thought that the skew was really big and only furthered by the fact that phil was <1/1 with the extra space being taken up with "soft thought" (which tends to feel a lot more like continental philosophy? subjectively at least).

I will try to have a more comprehensive review of my parts of the set but since it's pretty likely I don't have the time to do that later I do want to post a few things here related to these (very reasonable) critiques as well as some general thought processes I had while writing and editing.

First and foremost, I apologize for really dropping the ball on packetization. This resulted in the Christian theology being frontloaded pretty badly. I do want to note that religion "proper" only made up .5/.5 of the set, so some skewing was nigh inevitable. For the tossups, I think I avoided this too badly (aside from some bad packetizing) but I think the overrepresentation of Christianity in particular and theology more generally in bonuses was detrimental to the religion distro, especially since the misc belief bonuses skewed more theology than I had first thought they would, giving an even larger count of theology stuff instead of practice.

I do believe that this was somewhat ameliorated by Will's inclusion of religion-adjacent content in the other distros (for example the Constitution of Medina tossup in history) but I definitely did not do a good enough job packetizing or planning out the answerlines and I apologize to anyone whose experience was worsened because of that.

For philosophy, I was made the phil editor fairly late in the game and from the get go came from a place of wanting to respect and carry out the work that had already been done by Ike. This resulted in a distro that was less analytic/contemporary than I would have personally have crafted but it was important to me and the other editors to respect the work that had already been put in. Even with this, the "pure" analytic phil represented roughly 1/3 of the stuff played with a few other questions being fairly adjacent to analytic content. I typically aim closer to 1/2 depending on the set's difficulty but I don't think is an unreasonably small amount.

I do want to push back a bit on the notion that phil was less than 1/1 of the set however. I've already staked my claim that non-western philosophy, history of philosophy, and continental philosophy have an equal claim to being in the phil distribution as contemporary analytic content. Beyond that, however, I am not sure where this so-called "soft" thought was taking up phil space. The only things in the phil distro that I can see as possibly fitting that description are The True Believer, Ethiopia, and Cavendish tossups, and maybe the hard part of the Hacking bonus but none of those seem to fit the description of reducing the phil to less than 1/1. Every clear example of "soft" thought was relegated to another slot (Fourier and Jefferson in oac, Einstein in misc belief, Alinsky in history, humanism in other ac, philosophers in history bonus in history).

Aside from those two categories, I also edited and wrote most of the psychology and legends distro (with some great contributions from Will and Ike). I set out from the start to make the myth engaging and fresh at a high difficulty without resorting to using obscure fragments or traditions that almost no one has interacted with and I think I by and large succeeded. Secondary to this, I also wanted to reward people who have read and engaged with the primary texts and while I may not have been as successful with that I am very happy with how the legends category came out on the whole. In particular, I was very happy with the Little John, Seal of Solomon (coded as misc belief), Uluru, Anzu Bird, and Minamoto tossups and the river abandonment and Book of Thoth bonus, which I believe exemplified getting fresh clues, connections, and topics on things that people will likely have engaged with. I also greatly appreciated Will's Stentor bonus and Nisus and Euryalus tossup for providing some good deep cut content on what is often seen as an overmined mythos.

For psychology, I don't think I approached it with a particular agenda aside from wanting to represent the things that I engaged with in the classroom and field both as a psych undergrad and a social work masters. This included a conscious effort to include high impact researchers with little quiz bowl exposure such as Ann Masten and John Berry. I hope I succeeded in this regard and am curious to hear how those questions (and all the other ones in my slots) played for people.

[Ike]

I think the Japanese-flavor of some of the questions is a matter of perspective. For example, when I wrote the Alexander tossup, I didn't go out thinking that I had to push in a bunch of Japanese related content, it just turns out that because of Japan's position in the world of architecture -- producing the relative majority of Pritzker Winners for example, they as a country were more conducive to test out Alexander's ideas. Thus the tossup came out as mentioning some of his works for Japanese clients, even though his techniques and methodology and theory are decidedly non-Japanese (which to me constitutes the core of the tossup.) Similarly, no Japanese person who I've talked to has actually read Murakami (with the exception of one half-Japanese person who was introduced to him through her bf at the time), and the angle the question on the Beatles took was definitely about how this Western group made an ostensibly Asian writer even more Western.

The Nikko tossup was decidedly Japanese. It also didn't need to happen. It was supposed to be mostly a Japanese arts tossup concerning the tombs of the Tokugawas, but it came out a bit more non-ideal.

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

I do want to push back a bit on the notion that phil was less than 1/1 of the set however. I've already staked my claim that non-western philosophy, history of philosophy, and continental philosophy have an equal claim to being in the phil distribution as contemporary analytic content. Beyond that, however, I am not sure where this so-called "soft" thought was taking up phil space. The only things in the phil distro that I can see as possibly fitting that description are The True Believer, Ethiopia, and Cavendish tossups, and maybe the hard part of the Hacking bonus but none of those seem to fit the description of reducing the phil to less than 1/1. Every clear example of "soft" thought was relegated to another slot (Fourier and Jefferson in oac, Einstein in misc belief, Alinsky in history, humanism in other ac, philosophers in history bonus in history).

To be clear I didn't have any answerlines in particular in mind when I made that comment, and I certainly don't disagree that the categories you mentioned belong in philosophy - I was going off of the published distro, which alloted 1/1 to "Philosophy + Soft Thought." If the decision was later made to recategorize those q's into other distros you can ignore that point in my original post, my apologies

[VSCOelasticity]

I really don't have too much to say about my editing "philosophy," but here goes.

My biggest concern leading up to the tournament was difficulty control. I know the physics and other science played quite hard, but I earnestly tried to make the medium parts and middle clues reasonable at this level. I'm not sure quite how I did, especially given that I've only played like 2 COs, and one was when I was not at all prepared for the difficulty level. I also cut a lot of lead-ins to fit in more buzzable clues (s/o to playtesters for their help here!). In this vein, I tried to make the majority of hard tossup answer lines, stuff like the non-linear Schroedinger equation, GANs, Pacific decadal oscillation, singleton, genome assembly, and more goodies in the last three packets, on non-canonical things that seem underasked rather than minutiae of canonical things (though I did include tossups like Berry phase and the van der Pol oscillator for variety).

I very much enjoyed writing the engineering/"applied" other science. My favorite questions here include molds / CNC machining / extrusion, gears (I was baffled that the only hits for "gears" as an answer line on aseemsDB are "Gears of War" questions and a 2021 NSC bonus!!), scheduling (in operations management/industrial engineering), and reinforced concrete. I see this as a continuation of a trend exemplified by such recent sets as IKEA and NASAT, and I hope sets continue to include these types of questions.

Also, this set only had 13/13 physics over 17/17 (with the other 4/4 being astronomy). Specifically, the played packets have 11/11 physics. I haven't heard anyone discuss that, and I was wondering how that felt in-game.

Thank you to Krol and Ike for submitting questions to fill needs towards the end of set production. Thank you to all the playtesters, especially Ani and Tim who provided excellent feedback on questions in my categories (even on the Friday before the tournament!). I would also like to thank all of the teams who submitted packets to help make CO a larger collaboration, with special thank you for very quality submissions in my categories from Weiner/Keyal/Harvey/Keyal, Eltinge/Gurram/Wang, and Lawrence/Boyd/Smith/Winikow. Lastly, thank you to everyone who played my questions! I hope you enjoyed (at least one of) them.

[cwasims]

It was obviously quite a different experience playing the CO tossups in the ladder format today than the usual in-person tournament, but I really enjoyed playing these questions. I'd especially like to commend the science editors for writing questions that I, who have not taken a non-math non-stats science course since high school, was occasionally able to answer and find somewhat interesting.

In categories I'm more familiar with, I thought the music was really well sub-distributed with a nice mix of harder "CO-only" answer lines and some deeper cuts about more famous composers. Although it is likely an artifact of me being relatively better-versed with the subject, I found the early clues sometimes leaned slightly on the easy side, especially in the Bach Chaconne, Godowsky, and Janissary tossups. The Nietzsche as music critic tossup was a fun idea even if I spent most of the question trying in vain to confirm my initial guess of Eduard Hanslick.

I wasn't as keen on the philosophy - the main problem didn't necessarily seem to be a lack of analytic per se (although that was an issue) but just that too many of the answer lines were very difficult/obscure and on topics that you would be pretty unlikely to encounter in an actual philosophy course. I thought that folding in "soft thought" with philosophy was a totally fine idea, especially if it allows the social science distribution to be a bit more focused on important empirical and theoretical work. I appreciated the fairly interdisciplinary nature of a lot of the social science questions, which also had my favourite question of the set, on the Marginal Revolution.

I thought the reduced religion/myth content in this set in favour of more modern world and geography was definitely the right choice - I have mentioned this somewhat more informally in the past, but I do really think religion is over-represented as a topic in QB and myth has well-known issues regarding the narrow canon that exists. Although I wasn't able to get tons of the MW/geo content while playing in the same room as Kenji the entire time, there were a lot of great ideas in this distribution and I appreciated the shift away from pure "current events".