2019 Fall Open General Discussion

[aseem.keyal]

Thanks to everyone for playing the set! Here's a brief breakdown of who worked on what:

Literature: Itamar, with contributions from Nick and Jason
History: Kenji, Jason, and Itamar, with contributions from me
Science: Jonathen and me, with contributions from Samir, Itamar, Nick, and Eddie
Fine Arts: Itamar, Eddie, and myself, with contributions from Jack and Jason
Belief: Jason, Itamar, and Eddie, with contributions from me
Thought: Jason, me, Jack, with contributions from Itamar, Eddie, and Kenji
Geo/CE/Other Ac: Kenji, with contributions from Jonathen, me, Eddie, and Jason

Itamar and the other editors will probably have more to say, but feel free to post general feedback and impressions of the set here.

[VSCOelasticity]

I hope everyone enjoyed playing the science! I didn't have much of an overarching vision for the set, but I tried to keep most of the answerlines pretty tame while still challenging the top players with the early clues. The power rate on science was decent (quick average across categories is ~26%), with a strong conversion rate (average is ~92%), so I think the science in this set reached the difficulty I was going for.

The only other thing I have to add is that I made a concerted effort to take a lot of my early clues/hard parts of bonuses from textbooks, online lecture notes, or review papers by prominent scientists in their field. After reviewing the stats, I was impressed by many buzzes/conversions on these types of clues today!

This is my first time writing and editing at this level (outside of contributing physics questions at Lederberg), so I would love to receive some feedback!

[Make sure your seatbelt is fastened]

Thank you so much for playing our set! I hope you had as much fun as we did writing it.

I'd like to start off by thanking everyone involved: Aseem Keyal, Jason Golfinos, Jonathen Settle, Kenji Shimizu, Klaus Llwynog, Jack Mehr, Samir Khan and Nick Collins. Beyond their ample writing and editing contributions, Aseem, Jonathen, Kenji and Klaus were invaluable when it came to packetizing and adding pronunciation guides. In addition, we wouldn't be able to spoil you with advanced statistics if it wasn't for Aseem, who worked tirelessly in the days leading up to the tournament to ensure that everything was in order.

I don't have much philosophizing to do, beyond the usual: we tried our best to write questions that felt fresh and exciting without being oppressive. I hope we at least somewhat succeeded.

We'd love any feedback you might have so we can improve the set for future mirrors!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Not a ton of comments other than what I've relayed to the editors in private, but I found this set's history, literature, and mythology questions in particular consistently interesting, fresh, and enjoyable. In particular, I think this tournament is one of many to prove the point that well-done mythology deserves a carved out place in hard tournaments, though I continue to welcome decisions to experiment with the distribution.

It was also good to see the trend of strong and interesting geography and current events questions in high level quizbowl - props to Kenji for his consistently excellent work here which highlighted important social and political issues from around today's world.

[Deepika Goes From Ranbir To Ranveer]

I enjoyed this tournament a lot, thanks to all of the writers! I think the question quality was uniformly good, and most answer lines were well-chosen. A very fun set!

I thought some of the more creative literature answerlines might have belonged more in a side-event, but they were still great questions.

Minor criticism is that I don't think any Indian literature or history was in a tossup, save for the Gitanjali clue in the tossup on "children". There wasn't much, if any, in bonuses either (Pataliputra and Abhignyanashakuntalam come to mind). I might be forgetting stuff, of course.

[gerbilownage]

I enjoyed this tournament greatly and appreciated the conscientious clue selection, such as the high density of names and events and low number of vague clues. This was quite the formidable first tournament to come back to after two years away from quizbowl, but I think the editors did an excellent job of making it a "fair" high-difficulty tournament instead of an arbitrary one. Also I appreciated the significant number of modern poetry tossups/bonuses and I hope post-1960s poetry becomes more of a feature of college tournaments!

[csheep]

I enjoyed the lit and music. I thought the answerline selection was good and the cluing had creative/novel ways to go deeper into core canonical topics while retaining accessibility. Good tournament, would recommend.

[vinteuil]

I liked this set overall. Billy Busse said something like "lots of cool ideas, and more of them worked than didn't"—I think that was true across the board. The infusion of underasked topics like archaeology was refreshing.

There were some inconsistencies. Some of the hard parts (literature in particular? e.g. Invention of Morel) were "quite gettable," while a number verged on "whyyyy" (John Knowles Paine) or "oooof" (science had a bunch of these). Some, e.g. Apollonius+Flaccus or Tepoztlán seemed to be excessive when there were obvious ways of improving conversion while still hitting on an important topic that QB hasn't gotten to yet (i.e. just Flaccus and Redfield).

Bonus parts often gave a "not-quite-easy" description (or one not nailed down by concrete easy facts) followed by some harder, "off-center" fact (e.g. Whitehead). Be careful about this: if a player is unsure and then hears about some fact that doesn't sound quiiite like the answer they have in mind, they're more likely to say something else out of confusion. Best to put the easiest facts last, at the very least.

Other questions were on a very general phenomenon (e.g. "circulation") without making it clear that the answerline wasn't going to be something more specific. Maybe add a warning, maybe change the wording, maybe consider a different answerline; you just want to avoid players feeling like "that's all they wanted??????"

Some questions were extremely transparent (e.g. EPR paradox). This in particular afflicted the current events, where the geographical context and context clues like "people seem not to like this thing" was often enough to guess the correct answer.

Finally, difficulty: I don't think this set was "too hard" in the abstract, but I'm not sure how many sets need to have much harder tossups, especially in the hardest categories (e.g. history). Clues that had been early at PIANO and CO were coming up out of power—that seems excessive.

That's a lot of criticism! I should conclude by saying that I think each of those flaws was relatively minor or limited in scope; to reiterate, I liked this set and I thought it was pretty darn good on the whole.

[jinah]

I enjoyed this tournament a lot and thought it was great, and will echo previous praise for its “creative” answerlines. I thought in particular “interest rate and inflation” was a great idea, probably one of my favorite econ ideas I’ve seen.

My primary ongoing issues were that the lit I thought had an excessive number of city, country, time period, or event-based answerlines - none of them egregious on their own, but kind of tiring in the aggregate and something that seemed to bias the lit toward lit players who also have strong history or geo knowledge. I also thought there were a few “creative” answerlines that suffered a bit from misleading or confusing pronouns; the dephosphorylation tossup, the AIDS epidemic, and the hands in lit tossup come to mind as some questions where my teammates knew some of the clues in question but were confused or misled by the pronoun, in very close games at that (“what specific event in the AIDS crisis is this asking for? What object is he holding in his hand?”).

EDIT: One more thing - at the Virginia site at least, moderators often seemed to have difficulty ruling on whether some answers were acceptable, promptable, or flat out wrong. Especially at an open, where the more experienced players are likely to be playing, I think it would be advisable to look at your answerlines carefully to make sure that they’re a) not so long as to take too long to scan, b) fleshed out, and c) clearly worded. I haven’t looked comprehensively at the packets, but for a specific example, the answerline on “actual existence” or “existence in our world” included a note to accept “obvious equivalents.” I think it’s hard for the vast majority of people to know what is an “obvious equivalent” to this answerline. In our room the moderator hesitantly accepted an answer on something like “coexistence” or “coextension,” with nothing about actuality or “this/our world” until we asked for the actual (ha) answerline to be read.

[Eddie]

There were some inconsistencies. Some of the hard parts (literature in particular? e.g. Invention of Morel) were "quite gettable," while a number verged on "whyyyy" (John Knowles Paine)...

Yeah, I was hesitant about the Paine bonus part to begin with, and the statistics from the mirror on 16 November 2019 confirmed my suspicion. The following change has been made:

[10] This eldest and foremost composer of the Boston Six wrote a Mass in D minor and a programmatic Symphony No. 2 in A major titled In Spring.
ANSWER: John Knowles Paine

[10] John Knowles Paine, the eldest of the Boston Six, used this key to write his Symphony No. 2, In Spring. This is also the key of the piano piece “To a Wild Rose” by Edward MacDowell, another of the Six.
ANSWER: A major [do NOT accept “A minor” or “A-sharp” or “A-flat”]

Furthermore, the order of the second and third bonus parts has been changed, to avoid using the word "symphony" shortly before the appearance of the answer "symphony".

[Banana Stand]

There were some inconsistencies. Some of the hard parts (literature in particular? e.g. Invention of Morel) were "quite gettable," while a number verged on "whyyyy" (John Knowles Paine) or "oooof" (science had a bunch of these). Some, e.g. Apollonius+Flaccus or Tepoztlán seemed to be excessive when there were obvious ways of improving conversion while still hitting on an important topic that QB hasn't gotten to yet (i.e. just Flaccus and Redfield).

Bonus parts often gave a "not-quite-easy" description (or one not nailed down by concrete easy facts) followed by some harder, "off-center" fact (e.g. Whitehead). Be careful about this: if a player is unsure and then hears about some fact that doesn't sound quiiite like the answer they have in mind, they're more likely to say something else out of confusion. Best to put the easiest facts last, at the very least.

My bad on Morel. When I playtested it, I thought it was too hard and thought people knew very little about its plot so I wanted to soften it, but it came out too easy.

As for Whitehead, while I think your general philosophy is true, in this case I thought the information was relevant. a) if you don’t know who did process philosophy, I have no qualms with you getting the answer wrong and b) the last sentence illustrates that we’re talking about a scientist who also does work as a mathematician/scientist, which I think is very relevant and not “off-center” in the case of Whitehead. I can’t think of anyone who would be thinking of Whitehead and then hear that he did something physics related and go “oh no, it can’t be that guy who wrote Principia Mathematica”.

[Mike Bentley]

Overall liked this set a lot. It could have perhaps benefited from a tad less "creativity" in the tossup answer lines but that was a pretty minor quibble. I did have this happen to me on a bonus part on the JFK assassination in art:

Bonus parts often gave a "not-quite-easy" description (or one not nailed down by concrete easy facts) followed by some harder, "off-center" fact (e.g. Whitehead). Be careful about this: if a player is unsure and then hears about some fact that doesn't sound quiiite like the answer they have in mind, they're more likely to say something else out of confusion. Best to put the easiest facts last, at the very least.

The early clues were pointing me in that direction but then there was some clue added on at the end about an artist living in Chadd's Ford. Trying to figure out where this was going with the Wyeth reference in 5 seconds made it too hard to go back and consider the weight of the evidence in early clues.

[VSCOelasticity]

There were some inconsistencies. Some of the hard parts (literature in particular? e.g. Invention of Morel) were "quite gettable," while a number verged on "whyyyy" (John Knowles Paine) or "oooof" (science had a bunch of these). Some, e.g. Apollonius+Flaccus or Tepoztlán seemed to be excessive when there were obvious ways of improving conversion while still hitting on an important topic that QB hasn't gotten to yet (i.e. just Flaccus and Redfield).

Other questions were on a very general phenomenon (e.g. "circulation") without making it clear that the answerline wasn't going to be something more specific. Maybe add a warning, maybe change the wording, maybe consider a different answerline; you just want to avoid players feeling like "that's all they wanted??????"

Some questions were extremely transparent (e.g. EPR paradox). This in particular afflicted the current events, where the geographical context and context clues like "people seem not to like this thing" was often enough to guess the correct answer.

That's a lot of criticism! I should conclude by saying that I think each of those flaws was relatively minor or limited in scope; to reiterate, I liked this set and I thought it was pretty darn good on the whole.

I apologize about the number of "oooof"s on science hard parts, especially as it seems that happened more with my bonuses than the other science writers. I tried to balance the hard parts between deeper cuts on more canonical qb things (stuff like primer dimers), but I think that at the end of the day there was too much extra-canonical stuff (selective laser melting, canalization, LL grammars to name a few). Some "reach" hard parts are good, but there were too many.

I think the criticism of circulation is valid, and the answerline selection could have been better there. I don't think a warning would really work, as an instruction like "we want a general process" would be kind of weird. I could change the first few pronouns to "this general process", though. Admittedly, I'm not going to rewrite this on an adjusted answerline because I simply don't have the time at this point in the semester. I will keep this in mind for future questions, and hope it was not too frustrating!

Re: EPR, I kinda agree. That question started as a description acceptable TU on the EPR paper, which I think is much less transparent because it doesn't require the "this thought experiment" pronoun, but is significantly harder. However, there were only 2 powers on EPR. I'm not sure that invalidates your point on transparency, as people could be witholding buzzes thinking like "it can't just be THAT", but maybe it's not extremely transparent?

Thank you for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the set on the whole :)

[Eddie]

EDIT: One more thing - at the Virginia site at least, moderators often seemed to have difficulty ruling on whether some answers were acceptable, promptable, or flat out wrong. Especially at an open, where the more experienced players are likely to be playing, I think it would be advisable to look at your answerlines carefully to make sure that they’re a) not so long as to take too long to scan, b) fleshed out, and c) clearly worded. I haven’t looked comprehensively at the packets, but for a specific example, the answerline on “actual existence” or “existence in our world” included a note to accept “obvious equivalents.” I think it’s hard for the vast majority of people to know what is an “obvious equivalent” to this answerline. In our room the moderator hesitantly accepted an answer on something like “coexistence” or “coextension,” with nothing about actuality or “this/our world” until we asked for the actual (ha) answerline to be read.

This is a very good point. Would the following answer line be an adequate elaboration?

NSWER: actual existence [or existence in our world; prompt on answers about existence that do not specify actual existence or our world]

[Mike Bentley]

As a non-science player, I noticed a lot of answer lines that seemed to be a specific, relatively easy property in an applied domain. For instance, the tossup on viscosity in lava flows. I thought these were pretty interesting, although I'd be curious to hear from actual science players on this topic. It's also quite possible I wasn't paying attention at previous tournaments and this isn't necessarily a new trend.

[touchpack]

As a non-science player, I noticed a lot of answer lines that seemed to be a specific, relatively easy property in an applied domain. For instance, the tossup on viscosity in lava flows. I thought these were pretty interesting, although I'd be curious to hear from actual science players on this topic. It's also quite possible I wasn't paying attention at previous tournaments and this isn't necessarily a new trend.

Yeah, while this isn't an entirely new trend (writers have been doing stuff like this since at least the mid 2010s), this tournament really turned the number of themed tossups up to 11. (off the top of my head: kinetic energy in DFT, Monte Carlo methods in physics, inter-particle collisions in plasmas, DNA replication in bacteria/viruses, the ionization step of mass spectrometers, etc.) I think this kind of tossup is really good at probing material that scientists actually study/care about and thus makes for a very good question, as long as the theme doesn't create an imbalanced difficulty curve or a fraudable question. The science in this tournament was largely very successful and enjoyable to play because the writers constructed their themed tossups very well to avoid these pitfalls.

[ErikC]

I really enjoyed this tournament, and it's my favourite pre-nats tournament so far. I found the history to be fresh and challenging without being overly opaque or difficult. While this is just my perception, it seemed like a more accessible experience for newer players then past nats-minus tournaments.

The questions about the culture surrounding the subjects, like the art books or publisher bonuses, were something I've heard only a little in the past but seem worth exploring further. Even if some of them end up being too hard at first, I do think there's a large amount of underexplored material for questions to clue outside the works themselves - classical music questions already ask about recordings and conductors.

Similarly, I also like how the tossups on Ethics and Locke make the connections that older thinkers have with the present very explicit. Many of these clues are outside the works, and instead reward a wider knowledge of how a philosopher's work fits in to the bigger scheme of things; this isn't a new innovation at all, but I want to endorse it anyways.

Also, the "Other" questions were really interesting and occasionally zany (tossing up baseball cards the obvious standout). This added some levity to the tournament without relying on humour that often doesn't land. The geo was good, of course.

The only thing I wasn't really a fan was the enviromental science/ecology content. To me, it seemed either really hard (just ecosystem services would have been fine as an answer imo, though perhaps PES is easier in the U.S.) or surprisingly broad (as Mr. Reed mentioned, the circulation question was hard to pinpoint).

I would love for the Fall Open to become a regular event, especially if it's as good as this every year.

[theMoMA]

I thought this was a fun, well-written tournament that did a nice job of hitting an appropriate "open" difficulty level without going overboard. The science did seem a bit more difficult than the other categories, to my non-scientist mind, but the non-science categories seemed well balanced. All in all, I thought it was a fun, fair, and well-controlled open tournament that was one of the more interesting events I've played in recent years.

I thought there were perhaps a couple more tossups on geographic locations (cities, countries, islands) in various humanities categories than I might have liked. Some of these questions were interesting, and produced a nice feeling of recognition, "ah, that's what's going on, cool," when the answer became clear, but others seemed more like several tangentially related clues heaped together. Not that every question has to be "thematic"--just that I had a harder time understanding the reason to write the question on, say, New Orleans than I did on some of the cleverer tossups on geographic locations.

My personal preference would be for there to be fewer questions about literary or historical geography, even "thematic" ones, and instead that writers striving toward some kind of unity and answer-line simplicity find more compelling themes to organize around. As I said perhaps more sharply in a recent discussion, I can think of a lot more interesting organizing principles for most material than the geographic location in which something happened to have occurred. That said, I thought this set largely did a nice job holding players' interest on questions that asked for islands, cities, etc.; it was obvious that most of these questions were full of meaty, interesting, carefully selected clues that were fun to listen to. I guess my point is that there's more than one kind of question that focuses these kinds of judiciously chosen clues into a streamlined tossup, and I'd be interested to see how future tournaments can focus that material in ways that go beyond the various cities and islands of the world (as this tournament often did).

[naan/steak-holding toll]

As much as it probably benefits me to have more geographic questions on literature, I do think Andrew's right about a few of the geographic lit tossups being excessive. The New Orleans question immediately comes to mind, as does the tossup on Trinidad cluing Miguel Street - not that it's super hard to know that Miguel Street is in Port of Spain, but I'm sure why Miguel Street couldn't be tossed up at this level, and this is adding an unnecessary layer of difficulty to make the question more accessible.

On the other hand, I strongly support having more historical geography - I think quizbowl often has relied far too much on understanding minutiae of events at the expense of having a grasp of the big picture and such questions are good ways to test this.

[Red Panda Cub]

As much as it probably benefits me to have more geographic questions on literature, I do think Andrew's right about a few of the geographic lit tossups being excessive. The New Orleans question immediately comes to mind, as does the tossup on Trinidad cluing Miguel Street - not that it's super hard to know that Miguel Street is in Port of Spain, but I'm sure why Miguel Street couldn't be tossed up at this level, and this is adding an unnecessary layer of difficulty to make the question more accessible.

I agree with the criticism in principle, but think this question is fine. I feel like the route in here is knowing (the very well known thing, certainly more well known than the title of Miguel Street) that Naipaul is from Trinidad.

[Make sure your seatbelt is fastened]

As much as it probably benefits me to have more geographic questions on literature, I do think Andrew's right about a few of the geographic lit tossups being excessive. The New Orleans question immediately comes to mind, as does the tossup on Trinidad cluing Miguel Street - not that it's super hard to know that Miguel Street is in Port of Spain, but I'm sure why Miguel Street couldn't be tossed up at this level, and this is adding an unnecessary layer of difficulty to make the question more accessible.

I agree with the criticism in principle, but think this question is fine. I feel like the route in here is knowing (the very well known thing, certainly more well known than the title of Miguel Street) that Naipaul is from Trinidad.

This was my intention.