ACF Nationals 2013 Discussion

[Cody]

I agree that the science was pretty subpar; Eric has mostly laid out my complaints in his first post.

My biggest complaint about the set, however, is the same as Matt Bollinger's--consistency across categories (especially in the bonuses). It basically felt like each editor had their own vision of Nationals and wrote to that. It was pretty frustrating to lose game(s) based solely on hitting a rough stretch of bonuses. I would've preferred to see the head editor enforce more rigid control.

[The Ununtiable Twine]

My biggest complaint about the set, however, is the same as Matt Bollinger's--consistency across categories (especially in the bonuses). It basically felt like each editor had their own vision of Nationals and wrote to that. It was pretty frustrating to lose game(s) based solely on hitting a rough stretch of bonuses. I would've preferred to see the head editor enforce more rigid control.

This was a rather frustrating thing which caused lots of second guessing on things that we did in fact know.

I enjoyed the tournament for the most part, except for a question here and there, like the Gamow theory question. Unfortunately, I can't say the same of the tiebreaker round we had, not because we lost (which I mean, of course, sucks royally) but because of the dreadful room conditions that we played the match under. I found several of the rooms to be cooler than the others on average, however this particular room was so hot and muggy that it was difficult to concentrate on playing quizbowl. Not only was the room uncomfortable but there were tons of people inside it which made it more of a pain to play the match because so many warm bodies only added to the poor conditions. The next day, the war room seemed just fine for the finals matches, so I'm wondering why we didn't play the tiebreaker in there - it seems like that would have been a better idea. I'm sure this affected both our team and Andrew equally so I'm taking nothing away from him for winning, of course. I would just prefer to be at least moderately comfortable physically when I'm playing any match.

[magin]

My biggest complaint about the set, however, is the same as Matt Bollinger's--consistency across categories (especially in the bonuses). It basically felt like each editor had their own vision of Nationals and wrote to that. It was pretty frustrating to lose game(s) based solely on hitting a rough stretch of bonuses. I would've preferred to see the head editor enforce more rigid control.

As Bruce talked about before, I repeatedly told the other editors what my target difficulty was, and did my best to hold them to it. Clearly I didn't do as good of a job as I wanted to keep some of the non-humanities questions in check, and I apologize.

[Mike Bentley]

Also, now that Eric has brought it up, this reminded me - the web servers tossup wasn't all that great, mostly because it was a list of hip technologies, which isn't really computer science. You can write good tossups on other pieces of software like OSs, compilers, and I'm sure other things, because there is an underlying theoretical sophistication for those pieces of software that isn't really present for web servers (really, the only unifying thing about web servers is that they accept and issue HTTP requests). That said, I'm not sure how people managed to neg the tossup with OSs or web browsers, because neither of those things are even remotely like web servers.

I wrote this question. In terms of the actual execution of the question, I agree that it was subpar and I should have done a better job with it.

To get to the more general point, though, I feel that computer science for a long time has been held to a higher standard than other sciences about what is computer science and what is not. Chemistry questions in particular frequently ask about things scientists actually do which aren't particularly theoretical from my perspective. Tossups on your IR Spectroscopy or bonuses on lab equipment aren't especially theoretical (from my outsider's perspective), but we find room for them in the canon. Similarly, things that computer scientists use in their day-to-day activity can sometimes make decent tossups, and help expand the CS canon from data structures and algorithms bowl. By the way, I think Will Butler classified these things as "soft CS" in his tech tournament, and I had a lot of fun playing many of these questions.

I am not arguing that these questions should be a majority of the distribution. However, I contend that there is room for a question on these type of topics every once in a while provided that they are well executed (this one not so much).

[Excelsior (smack)]

To get to the more general point, though, I feel that computer science for a long time has been held to a higher standard than other sciences about what is computer science and what is not. Chemistry questions in particular frequently ask about things scientists actually do which aren't particularly theoretical from my perspective. Tossups on your IR Spectroscopy or bonuses on lab equipment aren't especially theoretical (from my outsider's perspective), but we find room for them in the canon. Similarly, things that computer scientists use in their day-to-day activity can sometimes make decent tossups, and help expand the CS canon from data structures and algorithms bowl. By the way, I think Will Butler classified these things as "soft CS" in his tech tournament, and I had a lot of fun playing many of these questions.

In general, I agree with you about this. Data-structure-and-algorithm bowl (and complexity theory bowl, too, I guess) can really get to be a drag, and there is a lot to be gained from branching out to look at things like cryptography, programming language theory, and other interesting applications (some of which are already asked about). I think that the real danger, however, is that when you write a question on something like "web servers" or on a programming language, you run the risk of writing what almost amounts to a trash tossup if you aren't careful, and this isn't really a risk that arises in things like chemistry (there isn't really an equivalent of a tossup on "Scala" in terms of lab equipment or techniques, if you get what I mean).

But yeah, Will Butler's inclusion of questions of this kind in the Questions Concerning Technology was, I think, a good thing, and is the sort of thing that can be implemented in regular tournaments too, if done well.

[Ringil]

I would like to request that statements like "I'm pretty sure over half of the religion tossups were on Jewish things" be supported by actual evidence, which you can easily gather yourself from the publicly available packets. This once, I'll do it for you. Here is the entirety of the "religion" category at Nationals, with Jewish content bolded:

Also, this tournament was about as canonical as any ACF Nationals in my memory. I don't know what you mean when you say "canonical" but it doesn't seem to match up with any useful definition of that word that I know.

Sorry, I should have been more specific: Over half of the hardest answer lines in the religion distribution were on Jewish things, which at least the tossup answers agrees with my feelings. It does not seem that this is the greatest thing.

I said that it was not canonical in the sense that there were a lot of questions asking about things that have not really been asked about before. For example, stress/strain curve, annealing etc. I felt like these were in higher proportion while still being convertable than in previous years (say compared to 2011 where everything was super uncanonical, but also pretty much impossible) though this might just be me being more aware of things now than before.

over half the FA on the first day was on jazz

Out of the 25/25 other arts in this tournament, we had 4/4 jazz. I don't think that's unreasonable.

I was totally wrong about this.

However, like I said before, I really did enjoy this tournament a lot.

[kdroge]

Most of my reactions to the set have already been brought up in some form or another, but I'll go ahead and say them anyways.

-Overall, this was a really good set. Lots of interesting ideas, the difficulty was in general right, and a good balance of hard clues on easier things and harder things.

-The subdistibution of FA seemed really off to me. I don't think 4/4 jazz is way too much, for example, but I think I played one architecture question (I believe some came up in rounds we didn't play, but still) and a couple sculpture questions over the course of both days, and I'm not sure if there was any ancient art at all. There appeared to be way more film than than any of those categories as well.

-I'd really liked to have seen tossups where a description is acceptable to mention this (like Swiss Catholics). This was a problem not only in a couple religion tossups but also in history; the tossup on comfort women required that exact term, but the tossup on atomic bomb survivors didn't require Hibakusha. This is a problem because it makes questions difficult to play as one can never know whether to buzz or not because they might need the exact term that one most likely doesn't know.

[historical pun]

-I'd really liked to have seen tossups where a description is acceptable to mention this (like Swiss Catholics). This was a problem not only in a couple religion tossups but also in history; the tossup on comfort women required that exact term, but the tossup on atomic bomb survivors didn't require Hibakusha. This is a problem because it makes questions difficult to play as one can never know whether to buzz or not because they might need the exact term that one most likely doesn't know.

I'm not sure if the comfort women/hibakusha discrepancy is that big a deal. You're far more likely* to come across the precise term "comfort women" when reading about women forced into prostitution by the Japanese during WWII than you are to come across the term "Hibakusha" when reading about survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

*I don't have any evidence on hand for this claim, but I feel like it is true, which is close enough.

[theMoMA]

While that may be true, I do agree with Kurtis's general point, and I think that "description acceptable" should become the next hot trend in quizbowl writing.

[Tees-Exe Line]

Let me start by giving Libo some words of support, not because there was too much Judaism in this tournament (or quizbowl in general), but rather because it's about the wrong things. I'm not sure why "religion as practiced by adherents" is the standard for quizbowl religion, but even so: contrary to what Dan wrote, "spending lots of time in Israel" has literally nothing to do with Judaism as a religion, thank God. Other than the Nachmanides question, the Judaism on offer at this tournament was pretty much a hyper-charged version of quizbowl Judaism in general, which basically consists of stuff we did at Hebrew School--whose curriculum was aimed at reassuring parents that their children wouldn't make fools out of them in synagogue or at some Shabbat dinner. There is much more to the religion than that, as I've thankfully discovered as an adult. It would be nice if quizbowl embraced that. As my team was discussing on the way back, the way quizbowl treats Judaism is equivalent to the case in which the ACF Regionals question on "butter" that led in with the butter lamb that some people make for Easter were a religion question.

Here's my list of specific question complaints. I only have time to go over the tossups now; the main complaint about bonuses is the variable difficulty that's been mentioned a great deal already.

Berkeley/Rice

Cult of Reason: I can't believe this question hasn't been more complained about. This amounts to a joke question in ACF Nationals and a mockery of the idea that religion is a quizbowl-worthy subject. Oh, you buzzed on the description of rationalizing iconography with Cult of the Supreme Being? FUCK YOU!! Congratulations--that neg made me feel I'd been played, so mission accomplished I guess.

Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire: So, yeah: not countries, but whatever. This was also filled with predictable clues. Someone drank out of a skull! Fantastic.

Incest: This should have had a prompt for "marriage."

Editors 1

Ottoman Invasion of Italy: So aside from the fact that this question is both very hard to convert and not discernibly pyramidal as written, there were numerous Ottoman invasions of various parts of Italy. I assume this question was about the 1480 attack on Otranto since that's where the martyr bullshit comes from, but the Ottomans raided the Veneto and ran around Sicily and Sardinia many times over many hundred years. There was not a unified "military campaign" called "THE Ottoman Invasion of Italy," so I'm not sure what was going on with this question, even before its problems in execution.

Editors 5

Rhode Island: Since most of this question's content refers to the colonial history of what is now Rhode Island prior to the restoration charter of 1662 that created the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the latter should be acceptable--in fact, the answer "Rhode Island" is arguably incorrect given the clues. In particular, the giveaway is "name this New England colony founded by Roger Williams." Roger Williams founded Providence in 1636 and supported the Narragansett colonies founded by Anne Hutchinson and her associates that were eventually united by the 1662 charter. However, the protest over our answer of "Providence" was rejected without explanation, which decided the match.

Editors 7

Challah: This is a profoundly stupid question, and I'm very happy I didn't have to play it. After using "this object," you recite the Birchat Ha'amazon? Really? "BUZZ: my mouth?" Also, I have no idea why "Ha-motzi" is smack in the middle; if I'd heard this, I probably would have withheld a buzz as I did on the "reading the Torah" question.

London/WUSTL

George Stigler: Stigler did not invent frictional unemployment, contrary to what Wikipedia says. Indeed, Wikipedia's citation for that claim itself refers to earlier work of Hicks and others. I also don't know what Stigler's namesake law is or how it could possibly state that "all demand curves are inelastic," which is ludicrous. The only way I can intuit an intellectual background for that clue is that Stigler's partial-equilibrium model of price dispersion assumes a unit demand function, which is not even close to an empirical claim about "all" demand curves. The only Stigler's Law that I know of is the one ironically named for his son that states that no eponymous laws are named for the right person.

MSU/Ottawa/South Carolina

Taxes: All of the clues in this question are well-chosen, but they are described in confusing ways. I'm not sure what a "homogenous" tax is, but the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem says that there should not be differential commodity tax rates under separability, which is part of the same literature as the Diamond and Mirrlees result referenced later. THAT clue refers to "flexible economies" (??) and says that "these should always allow maintaining output along the production possibilities frontier." I'm not sure what's meant there. Like the rest of the optimal taxation literature, Diamond and Mirrlees is concerned with outlining the constrained-efficient tax regime (i.e., given that taxation has to be distortionary, what regime is the least distortionary?) The whole environment is thus not on the PPF. Also, not all taxes "hurt those with a high propensity to consume," and in models that endogenize the household's problem (like all of the models from optimal taxation referenced in the question), the "propensity to consume" is a function of the tax regime.

Torah reading: I've already complained about this lead-in. On seeing the rest of this question, pyramidality is basically a joke. Did anyone play-test these Judaism questions?

Marin Barleti: Are you serious?

Rutgers/Columbia

Tanzania: Writing questions to prove a point is not acceptable, as I've learned the hard way. It's especially unfortunate to find a residue of this in ACF Nationals.

VCU/Michigan

The Sun: I am curious what the clue about an editorial purportedly written by Stalin comes from. The Sun was first published in 1963. Since I thought that clue was a weird way of referring to the Zinoviev Letter, I buzzed with "Daily Mail." Did the Sun create some sort of joke editorial on Stalin's behalf for a later candidate? Needless to say, that's not the greatest idea for a lead-in.

I'm very sorry I didn't get to play the Yale packet, which is probably my favorite in the set.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Editors 7

Challah: This is a profoundly stupid question, and I'm very happy I didn't have to play it. After using "this object," you recite the Birchat Ha'amazon? Really? "BUZZ: my mouth?" Also, I have no idea why "Ha-motzi" is smack in the middle; if I'd heard this, I probably would have withheld a buzz as I did on the "reading the Torah" question.

Yeah, at minimum the fourth sentence in this question refers a lot more ambiguously to any "food," or to any kind of "bread".

[1992 in spaceflight]

So as Bruce and Jonathan have said, I contributed some questions to this tournament. I would love any commentary on the questions I submitted in a PM or email.

I wrote:
Danae (Finals 2)
Georgia (VCu-Michigan; This was originally an Indian Removal tossup that was edited to Georgia).
Also some random literature that I can't seem to find in the packets online. I'll update this once I know where these lit questions ended up.

[Matt Weiner]

This was a problem not only in a couple religion tossups but also in history; the tossup on comfort women required that exact term, but the tossup on atomic bomb survivors didn't require Hibakusha.

"Comfort women" is the term that is used (though the protest on this was denied on simple factual grounds--the answer given of "Korean prostitutes" was wrong because most of the question to that point was about a specific person who was not Korean). "Hibakusha" is just a Japanese word that means "atomic bomb survivors"; English translations are always acceptable.

I don't know why Michigan as a team consistently has problems with this, but: when things have a name, that is the name you need to give. When they don't, you don't. Knowing whether something has a name is part of having knowledge about that thing, and sometimes when you don't have complete knowledge about a thing you don't get questions on it, which is how quizbowl works. I don't think increased use of pre-question flags that tell you what kind of answer we are looking for will solve this, for two reasons. One is that questions which don't tell you what kind of answer we are looking for OR use clues that make it impossible to give a right answer in a different category are bad questions and should not be written, and this is going to become an excuse to write ambiguous questions if we start doing it. The second is that saying "general description acceptable" or "specific term required" would not change anything about either of those questions you mentioned--"Hibakusha" IS a general description, just one that is in Japanese, and "Swiss Catholics" IS the specific term used for Swiss Catholics, so it can actually be misleading to say that one is a "term" and the other a "description" when it's just as true to say the reverse. You're not adding anything for people who don't already know what the answer is and you're opening the door to a lot of problems, so I oppose this idea.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Cult of Reason: I can't believe this question hasn't been more complained about. This amounts to a joke question in ACF Nationals and a mockery of the idea that religion is a quizbowl-worthy subject. Oh, you buzzed on the description of rationalizing iconography with Cult of the Supreme Being? FUCK YOU!! Congratulations--that neg made me feel I'd been played, so mission accomplished I guess.

This tossup originally began life as a question on the Cult of the Supreme Being, and then I determined that there weren't enough good clues for that and switched it to a tossup on the Cult of Reason. As such, I'm now fairly familiar with both cults, and I'm quite sure that every specific clue I've mentioned uniquely identifies the Cult of Reason.

But yes, there were multiple "religions" in revolutionary France that did somewhat similar things, so if you buzz in with essentially a guess you have a 50/50 shot of pulling in a neg 5.

Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire: So, yeah: not countries, but whatever. This was also filled with predictable clues. Someone drank out of a skull! Fantastic.

This began life as a "these two polities" question and I decided to change it to countries to make it less clunky-sounding. Apologies to anyone this confused.

Ottoman Invasion of Italy: So aside from the fact that this question is both very hard to convert and not discernibly pyramidal as written, there were numerous Ottoman invasions of various parts of Italy. I assume this question was about the 1480 attack on Otranto since that's where the martyr bullshit comes from, but the Ottomans raided the Veneto and ran around Sicily and Sardinia many times over many hundred years. There was not a unified "military campaign" called "THE Ottoman Invasion of Italy," so I'm not sure what was going on with this question, even before its problems in execution.

What pyramidicity problems do you have here? Yes, all of the clues were about the Ottoman Invasion of Otranto, and if you had buzzed in and said that at any point in the tossup you would have received 10 points. There were a lot of alternate answers that included specific parts of Italy that the Ottomans invaded in that campaign.

Rhode Island: Since most of this question's content refers to the colonial history of what is now Rhode Island prior to the restoration charter of 1662 that created the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the latter should be acceptable--in fact, the answer "Rhode Island" is arguably incorrect given the clues. In particular, the giveaway is "name this New England colony founded by Roger Williams." Roger Williams founded Providence in 1636 and supported the Narragansett colonies founded by Anne Hutchinson and her associates that were eventually united by the 1662 charter. However, the protest over our answer of "Providence" was rejected without explanation, which decided the match.

This protest didn't make it to me (perhaps Magin, who wrote the question, decided it?) - I'd have been inclined to give it to you.

Tanzania: Writing questions to prove a point is not acceptable, as I've learned the hard way. It's especially unfortunate to find a residue of this in ACF Nationals.

Do you have an issue with the substance of this question?

[grapesmoker]

Although I'm not responsible for any of the questions you're complaining about, Marshall, and they may indeed have some problems, it sounds to me like you're essentially accusing ACF of trolling the quizbowl community. I hate to use the term "good faith" for its obvious problematic associations within our little corner of the world, but that doesn't really sound to me like a good faith argument; no one in this editing team, or any other ACF editing team that I know of, has written questions for ACF with the intent to spite or troll someone. Some of those questions may not have been the best ideas, but I don't really appreciate insinuations that we're making a mockery out of something or doing it to screw you over.

[Sam]

[*] Tanzania (all mine. Columbia submitted a tossup on “Marxist Geography”, along with a warning telling me that if I replaced it with a tossup on Tanzania I was ignoring what academic geographers actually did. I took it as a challenge)

A good choice!

Why is this a good choice?

EDIT: If the question was irredeemably bad or Bruce didn't think it would get converted, replacing it seems fine; I haven't seen the submitted question so I can't remark on whether or not Bruce made the correct editorial decision. However, it seems ill-advised to write questions based solely on what Michael Arnold (or whoever wrote the question) dares you to do in a side comment.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

EDIT: If the question was irredeemably bad or Bruce didn't think it would get converted, replacing it seems fine; I haven't seen the submitted question so I can't remark on whether or not Bruce made the correct editorial decision. However, it seems ill-advised to write questions based solely on what Michael Arnold (or whoever wrote the question) dares you to do in a side comment.

I don't understand this: what does it matter why I chose a particular answer, so long as the question is good?

[Tees-Exe Line]

Cult of Reason: I can't believe this question hasn't been more complained about. This amounts to a joke question in ACF Nationals and a mockery of the idea that religion is a quizbowl-worthy subject. Oh, you buzzed on the description of rationalizing iconography with Cult of the Supreme Being? FUCK YOU!! Congratulations--that neg made me feel I'd been played, so mission accomplished I guess.

This tossup originally began life as a question on the Cult of the Supreme Being, and then I determined that there weren't enough good clues for that and switched it to a tossup on the Cult of Reason. As such, I'm now fairly familiar with both cults, and I'm quite sure that every specific clue I've mentioned uniquely identifies the Cult of Reason.

But yes, there were multiple "religions" in revolutionary France that did somewhat similar things, so if you buzz in with essentially a guess you have a 50/50 shot of pulling in a neg 5.

Well yes, that's one of the reasons why it's a bad question. Another one is that whether either of these things was ever actually practiced is very much in question, which should be a warning to those who profess that religion questions ought to be about what is practiced. Thanks to quizbowl, I know there's something called the Cult of the Supreme Being that's treated like a religion so we have one more minor religion to throw into the mix for minor religion bowl. Did this question play as planned in any room?

I found an online version of the edited volume The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, whose ninth chapter (by Ferenc Feher, the editor of the volume) is entitled "The Cult of the Supreme Being and the Limits of the Secularization of the Political." The author's argument is that the Cult of the Supreme Being took shape as it did to suit Robespierre's political needs, and he situates himself in opposition to the argument associated with the French Revolutionary historian Albert Mathiez that the Committee of Public Safety's anti-clerical policies (the Cult of the Supreme Being) had their roots in pre-existing anti-clericalism of the French peasantry (embodied prior to Robespierre's preeminence as the Cult of Reason). Thus, Feher writes

Mathiez believes otherwise. His thesis is that Robespierre added nothing but a new name to what had already been created by anonymous militants, namely, the previous Cult of Reason.

Feher argues the opposite--that the "Supreme Being," i.e. a single deity, was necessary to create a unitary religion to serve a unitary state. The Cult of Reason was, to Feher, too anarchical to serve the needs of the Reign of Terror.

So, back to the question: even if these are distinct religions, and even if we ignore the issue of whether anyone ever "believed" in them or practiced them (and I for one would think a question on the Roman state religion could work just fine, or on the unitary Justinian-era version of Orthodox Christianity), the clues in this question do not distinguish between the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being until right before FTP, when it says "this replaced the Cult of the Supreme Being."

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Arguing that "Cult of the Supreme Being" should be acceptable for "Cult of Reason" because they both have roots in the same popular anti-clericalism is like arguing that one form of Protestantism should be acceptable for another form of Protestantism because they both have roots in the same opposition to Catholic doctrine.

The Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being were distinct cults, promoted by distinct groups of people at distinct points in time. They differed in their theology (the Cult of Reason was explicitly atheistic; the Cult of the Supreme Being was explicitly theistic and espoused the immortality of the soul), they differed in their ceremonies, and they differed in the extent to which they were a thing: the Cult of Reason was somewhat more established, with multiple temples and such, whereas as far as I could tell the Cult of the Supreme Being had only one large outdoor ceremony.

[Sam]

EDIT: If the question was irredeemably bad or Bruce didn't think it would get converted, replacing it seems fine; I haven't seen the submitted question so I can't remark on whether or not Bruce made the correct editorial decision. However, it seems ill-advised to write questions based solely on what Michael Arnold (or whoever wrote the question) dares you to do in a side comment.

I don't understand this: what does it matter why I chose a particular answer, so long as the question is good?

I would personally have rather heard the other question as it sounds more interesting and if Columbia is to be believed, closer to what "actual geographers" do. Maybe that preference does not hold for other people.
More generally, there was a noticeable (if not severe) degree of Bruce Arthur in-jokiness (at least two second-person geography bonuses, for example). I don't believe this affected game outcomes anywhere, but it can feel like teams are being forcibly submitted to the writer's private quirks. This "Tanzania" tossup is really just another example of that; even if Tanzania was the better choice of subject (and I'm not sure it was), it's aggravating to learn the editorial process depends on things editors find privately amusing.

EDIT: I should say: "even if Tanzania was as good a choice of subject as the submission." If you replace bad questions with good ones, I care much less about the process you go through to do that.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

This is the Geography tossup that Columbia submitted, exactly as submitted:

This man strongly influenced the recent book Rebel Cities, which in one section praises how city planning encouraged community action in El Alto and Cochabamba, while other applications of this man’s work to geography are encouraged by the Antipode Foundation and Journal. In 1990, Julie Graham argued that terminological differences caused schisms among contemporary geographers influenced by this man, while Kevin Cox tried to distinguish the “HGM” interpretations of him by Keith Buchanan and others from the related “critical human geography” field. David Harvey is this man’s most fervent contemporary geographer acolyte, and Harvey has used the analysis of “accumulation by dispossession” in works like Social Justice and the City to try situate this man’s ideas in real 20th century states. For 10 points, identify this philosopher whose application to geography revolves around how cities, peoples and spaces are influenced by capitalism.
ANSWER: Karl Marx (yes this is a tossup on Marxist geography, and if they cut this for some almanac question about Tanzania they’re ignoring what kind of nonsense geographers actually talk about)

I took one look at this, came to the conclusion that it was an untenable answerline for the geography distribution, and decided that "Tanzania" would in fact be a good answer: it wasn't repetitive of other questions in the set, and there were plenty of geography clues about it.

EDIT: as for the complaint that my writing sounded like...my writing, I am completely unsympathetic. The author's work matches the author's style? Such is the nature of reading things.

[Tees-Exe Line]

Although I'm not responsible for any of the questions you're complaining about, Marshall, and they may indeed have some problems, it sounds to me like you're essentially accusing ACF of trolling the quizbowl community. I hate to use the term "good faith" for its obvious problematic associations within our little corner of the world, but that doesn't really sound to me like a good faith argument; no one in this editing team, or any other ACF editing team that I know of, has written questions for ACF with the intent to spite or troll someone. Some of those questions may not have been the best ideas, but I don't really appreciate insinuations that we're making a mockery out of something or doing it to screw you over.

You don't appreciate the insinuation that the editors were motivated by spite or mockery? Neither do I, but you accused me of exactly that in an argument that devolved from complaints about questions in a tournament discussion!

I'm not saying you must agree with all these norms, but a surefire way to lose reputation is to disagree with them by, essentially, trolling the people who hold them. Which is kind of what you did, not just with the question release policy, but by doing things like intentionally writing a bad question. When people think they're engaged with an intractable adversary who does things for inscrutable reasons (and, frankly, despite doing my Davidsonian best to try and understand what you're doing, I'm at that point myself), they're going to stop assuming good faith and just think you're being a dick.

I don't know whether the Cult of Reason, challah, "lifting the Torah," Marin Barleti, "the Ottoman Invasion of Italy," etc were motivated by spite or mockery, and I'm certainly not making the accusation that they were.

[magin]

Also, there was already a social science tossup mostly on Karl Marx, so I agreed with Bruce's decision to replace the submission with some other topic.

[Cheynem]

That's actually a pretty interesting question on Marxian geography. I've long wanted to ask about David Harvey.

[Tees-Exe Line]

Arguing that "Cult of the Supreme Being" should be acceptable for "Cult of Reason" because they both have roots in the same popular anti-clericalism is like arguing that one form of Protestantism should be acceptable for another form of Protestantism because they both have roots in the same opposition to Catholic doctrine.

The Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being were distinct cults, promoted by distinct groups of people at distinct points in time. They differed in their theology (the Cult of Reason was explicitly atheistic; the Cult of the Supreme Being was explicitly theistic and espoused the immortality of the soul), they differed in their ceremonies, and they differed in the extent to which they were a thing: the Cult of Reason was somewhat more established, with multiple temples and such, whereas as far as I could tell the Cult of the Supreme Being had only one large outdoor ceremony.

This is post-hoc justification. None of the clues in the question clearly delineate the distinctions you're making here. I'm serious: did this question play as designed in literally any room at the tournament (i.e., people familiar with the iconography and practice of the Cult of Reason specifically buzzing and saying that answer before the Cult of the Supreme Being was named?)

[Tees-Exe Line]

This man strongly influenced the recent book Rebel Cities, which in one section praises how city planning encouraged community action in El Alto and Cochabamba, while other applications of this man’s work to geography are encouraged by the Antipode Foundation and Journal. In 1990, Julie Graham argued that terminological differences caused schisms among contemporary geographers influenced by this man, while Kevin Cox tried to distinguish the “HGM” interpretations of him by Keith Buchanan and others from the related “critical human geography” field. David Harvey is this man’s most fervent contemporary geographer acolyte, and Harvey has used the analysis of “accumulation by dispossession” in works like Social Justice and the City to try situate this man’s ideas in real 20th century states. For 10 points, identify this philosopher whose application to geography revolves around how cities, peoples and spaces are influenced by capitalism.
ANSWER: Karl Marx (yes this is a tossup on Marxist geography, and if they cut this for some almanac question about Tanzania they’re ignoring what kind of nonsense geographers actually talk about)

This is a great question.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Arguing that "Cult of the Supreme Being" should be acceptable for "Cult of Reason" because they both have roots in the same popular anti-clericalism is like arguing that one form of Protestantism should be acceptable for another form of Protestantism because they both have roots in the same opposition to Catholic doctrine.

The Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being were distinct cults, promoted by distinct groups of people at distinct points in time. They differed in their theology (the Cult of Reason was explicitly atheistic; the Cult of the Supreme Being was explicitly theistic and espoused the immortality of the soul), they differed in their ceremonies, and they differed in the extent to which they were a thing: the Cult of Reason was somewhat more established, with multiple temples and such, whereas as far as I could tell the Cult of the Supreme Being had only one large outdoor ceremony.

This is post-hoc justification. None of the clues in the question clearly delineate the distinctions you're making here. I'm serious: did this question play as designed in literally any room at the tournament (i.e., people familiar with the iconography and practice of the Cult of Reason specifically buzzing and saying that answer before the Cult of the Supreme Being was named?)

No, it's not post-hoc, it's the thinking that structured the tossup as I was writing it. Let's look at the tossup:

One leader of this organized religion changed his name to Anaxagoras. Payan condemned this religion for being excessively feminine. Adherents of this religion erected statutes representing sleep on top of graves, and posted the inscription “Death is an Eternal Sleep” at cemeteries. This religion’s holidays included the “Feast of Victory” and “Feast of Brutus” and this religion’s places of worship were adorned with the scripture “To Philosophy”. To discourage idolatory, Sophie Momoro was selected to portray this religion’s namesake figure, most prominently at a ceremony where this religion’s temple was established inside the desecrated Cathedral of Notre Dame. Replaced by the Cult of the Supreme Being, for 10 points name this atheistic cult adopted as the state religion of Revolutionary France.
ANSWER: Cult of the Reason [accept: Culte de la Raison; prompt on “atheism”]

Let's go line-by-line:

"One leader of this organized religion changed his name to Anaxagoras." - this is a reference to this man. He was an atheist who was executed by supporters of the Cult of the Supreme Being.

"Payan condemned this religion for being excessively feminine." - Payan was a supporter of the Cult of the Supreme Being who was criticizing the Cult of Reason in this quote

"Adherents of this religion erected statutes representing sleep on top of graves, and posted the inscription “Death is an Eternal Sleep” at cemeteries." - adherents of the Cult of Reason did this because they did not believe in an afterlife. Adherents of the Cult of the Supreme Being believed in the immortality of the soul!

"This religion’s holidays included the “Feast of Victory” and “Feast of Brutus” and this religion’s places of worship were adorned with the scripture “To Philosophy”." - these holidays were established by the Hebertists, who established the Cult of Reason. Further, the Cult of Reason established places of worship (temples, converted churches) - the Cult of the Supreme Being never did this because it fell too quickly

"To discourage idolatory, Sophie Momoro was selected to portray this religion’s namesake figure, most prominently at a ceremony where this religion’s temple was established inside the desecrated Cathedral of Notre Dame." - this is unique to the Cult of Reason. The only large ceremony conducted by the Cult of the Supreme Being happened outdoors and used a male model

It's certainly possible that people don't know these clues, but these clues are uniquely identifying to the Cult of Reason.

[historical pun]

Cult of Reason: I can't believe this question hasn't been more complained about. This amounts to a joke question in ACF Nationals and a mockery of the idea that religion is a quizbowl-worthy subject. Oh, you buzzed on the description of rationalizing iconography with Cult of the Supreme Being? FUCK YOU!! Congratulations--that neg made me feel I'd been played, so mission accomplished I guess.

This tossup originally began life as a question on the Cult of the Supreme Being, and then I determined that there weren't enough good clues for that and switched it to a tossup on the Cult of Reason. As such, I'm now fairly familiar with both cults, and I'm quite sure that every specific clue I've mentioned uniquely identifies the Cult of Reason.

But yes, there were multiple "religions" in revolutionary France that did somewhat similar things, so if you buzz in with essentially a guess you have a 50/50 shot of pulling in a neg 5.

Well yes, that's one of the reasons why it's a bad question. Another one is that whether either of these things was ever actually practiced is very much in question, which should be a warning to those who profess that religion questions ought to be about what is practiced. Thanks to quizbowl, I know there's something called the Cult of the Supreme Being that's treated like a religion so we have one more minor religion to throw into the mix for minor religion bowl. Did this question play as planned in any room?

I found an online version of the edited volume The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, whose ninth chapter (by Ferenc Feher, the editor of the volume) is entitled "The Cult of the Supreme Being and the Limits of the Secularization of the Political." The author's argument is that the Cult of the Supreme Being took shape as it did to suit Robespierre's political needs, and he situates himself in opposition to the argument associated with the French Revolutionary historian Albert Mathiez that the Committee of Public Safety's anti-clerical policies (the Cult of the Supreme Being) had their roots in pre-existing anti-clericalism of the French peasantry (embodied prior to Robespierre's preeminence as the Cult of Reason). Thus, Feher writes

Mathiez believes otherwise. His thesis is that Robespierre added nothing but a new name to what had already been created by anonymous militants, namely, the previous Cult of Reason.

Feher argues the opposite--that the "Supreme Being," i.e. a single deity, was necessary to create a unitary religion to serve a unitary state. The Cult of Reason was, to Feher, too anarchical to serve the needs of the Reign of Terror.

So, back to the question: even if these are distinct religions, and even if we ignore the issue of whether anyone ever "believed" in them or practiced them (and I for one would think a question on the Roman state religion could work just fine, or on the unitary Justinian-era version of Orthodox Christianity), the clues in this question do not distinguish between the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being until right before FTP, when it says "this replaced the Cult of the Supreme Being."

I think it was a bad question, but I sort of disagree with this complaint, because the clues do not match up with the Cult of the Supreme Being. When it's taught, what's emphasized is the central porpoise (along with consolidating power) was to replace the Diderot/D'Holbach/etc; inspired atheism preferred by the Hebertists with a Rousseau-inspired system that maintained certain features of tradition religion. The "death is an eternal sleep" clue represents a viewpoint that the Cult of the Supreme Being was designed to stamp out. In the quoted section, Mathiez is trying to say "both the Cult of the Supreme Being and the Cult of Reason had their roots in popular anti-Christian movements," not, "they were the same thing as practiced." My personal problem with the question is more basic- as far as I know, it was never a state religion and thus it should not be described as such (whether it can even be described as religion is also open to question), especially given that the Cult of the Supreme Being was briefly a state religion of sorts. Without some sort of evidence that it was, it's hard to see the question as anything other than factually wrong.

[Cheynem]

the central porpoise .

YESSSS

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I'll admit I'm not aware of a law specifically saying "the cult of reason is the official religion of France" - however as it was a religion organized by the people running France at the time, who used the levers of state power to promote it to the exclusion of other competing religions, and who likely had public policy driven purposes for promoting the religion, I feel completely comfortable calling it a state religion.

If you heard all of the most famous clues for "cult of reason" and then hesitated to buzz because of reservations about the definition of the word "state", then I think you're being a bit too hesitant

[grapesmoker]

You don't appreciate the insinuation that the editors were motivated by spite or mockery? Neither do I, but you accused me of exactly that in an argument that devolved from complaints about questions in a tournament discussion!

Marshall, I don't know which illiterate cretin you think you're arguing with, but I assure you that despite my foreign birth, I am as adept a user of the English language as anyone posting on these forums. The notion that I "accused" you of anything is preposterous, given that you admitted your own trolling in your first post in the discussion thread!. To wit:

The Frederick the Great tossup was intended to be abysmal.

You literally wrote a bad question on purpose. If that's not the definition of trolling, then words have no meaning and all discussion is as pointless as Gorgias alleged.

I don't know whether the Cult of Reason, challah, "lifting the Torah," Marin Barleti, "the Ottoman Invasion of Italy," etc were motivated by spite or mockery, and I'm certainly not making the accusation that they were.

This amounts to a joke question in ACF Nationals and a mockery of the idea that religion is a quizbowl-worthy subject.

I realize that you did not point your virtual finger and shout "J'accuse!" which is why I used the word "insinuate." Which is what you did, without any substantive evidence for doing so. Again, you may think you are fooling some other idiot with your weasel-words and hair-splitting, but you aren't fooling me or anyone on the editing team.

You have a problem with some questions, that's fine. You should make those complaints. Insinuations that Bruce Arthur is trolling you at one of the two premier tournaments of the year are completely unwarranted.

[Tees-Exe Line]

You literally wrote a bad question on purpose. If that's not the definition of trolling, then words have no meaning and all discussion is as pointless as Gorgias alleged.

I had apologized for that question by the time you made your accusation, which is quite clearly not occurring right now. Instead, a question that I can only imagine generated eighteen negs before going dead is being aggressively defended as good.

[Ringil]

This was a problem not only in a couple religion tossups but also in history; the tossup on comfort women required that exact term, but the tossup on atomic bomb survivors didn't require Hibakusha.

"Comfort women" is the term that is used (though the protest on this was denied on simple factual grounds--the answer given of "Korean prostitutes" was wrong because most of the question to that point was about a specific person who was not Korean). "Hibakusha" is just a Japanese word that means "atomic bomb survivors"; English translations are always acceptable.

I don't know why Michigan as a team consistently has problems with this, but: when things have a name, that is the name you need to give. When they don't, you don't. Knowing whether something has a name is part of having knowledge about that thing, and sometimes when you don't have complete knowledge about a thing you don't get questions on it, which is how quizbowl works. I don't think increased use of pre-question flags that tell you what kind of answer we are looking for will solve this, for two reasons. One is that questions which don't tell you what kind of answer we are looking for OR use clues that make it impossible to give a right answer in a different category are bad questions and should not be written, and this is going to become an excuse to write ambiguous questions if we start doing it. The second is that saying "general description acceptable" or "specific term required" would not change anything about either of those questions you mentioned--"Hibakusha" IS a general description, just one that is in Japanese, and "Swiss Catholics" IS the specific term used for Swiss Catholics, so it can actually be misleading to say that one is a "term" and the other a "description" when it's just as true to say the reverse. You're not adding anything for people who don't already know what the answer is and you're opening the door to a lot of problems, so I oppose this idea.

Uhh... there are plenty of examples where English translations are NOT always acceptable. For example, Nats 2011 Editors 6 TU 19: prompts on the English translation of kafir, namely infidel. I don't see any difference between this tossup and say a tossup that required Hibakusha and prompted on atomic bomb survivors as kafir from what I can find is just an Arabic word that means infidel. It is a general description, just one that is in Arabic. It seems stupid to force players to have to guess whether the tossup will be kind and let you get away with English translation or whether the tossup is hardcore and wants the original language term.

Obviously, there should be no theoretical reason to write a bad tossup and adding pre-question flags should not lead to more of that. The Swiss Catholics tossup had a pre-question flag that made it very clear what they wanted. If its pre-question flag had been "general description acceptable" then of course that would be misleading, but that just means the pre-question flag was incorrectly used. It's merely an argument for the fact that they should be used carefully, when questions specifically wanted a description (like atomic bomb survivors or Zoroastrian priests).

Also, Marshall expressed my ideas about the religion distribution much better than I could have myself.

[Muriel Axon]

I had apologized for that question by the time you made your accusation, which is quite clearly not occurring right now. Instead, a question that I can only imagine generated eighteen negs before going dead is being aggressively defended as good.

I can't speak as to the quality of the clues in this question, but it looks like each one uniquely points to the Cult of Reason. I don't know if we can draw any conclusion other than that your buzzing strategy on this particular question didn't work out. In at least a couple rooms it got converted without a neg, though I don't know if anyone got it off of early clues. (Note: I am not claiming this question was good or bad.)

[magin]

It seems very plausible to me that 1) the clues in the Cult of Reason tossup were uniquely identifying, and 2) the players at Nationals didn't have enough knowledge of either the Cult of Reason or the Cult of the Supreme Being to figure out the differences between them at game speed. That suggests to me that the Cult of Reason didn't end up working as a good tossup, although we thought players had enough knowledge to tell them apart. Clearly that is our fault.

We tried to catch gameplay issues like this during extensive playtesting, but it looks like we missed on this one. I apologize.

[grapesmoker]

As I said before, I don't care to defend that question. Its quality is irrelevant to my point; it may well be a bad question and I'll let you and Bruce and whoever else hash that out. My point is that suggesting, without any evidence, that editors are trolling their teams on the biggest stage of the year is much more offensive and absurd than simply saying they wrote a bad question.

[historical pun]

I'll admit I'm not aware of a law specifically saying "the cult of reason is the official religion of France" - however as it was a religion organized by the people running France at the time, who used the levers of state power to promote it to the exclusion of other competing religions, and who likely had public policy driven purposes for promoting the religion, I feel completely comfortable calling it a state religion.

If you heard all of the most famous clues for "cult of reason" and then hesitated to buzz because of reservations about the definition of the word "state", then I think you're being a bit too hesitant

I think there are two concepts getting lumped together here. It's certainly true that de-christianization was as an official state policy. Replacing Christianity with an atheistic cult had support from many important people, but even if you don't require a law for something to be described as a state religion, I feel as though that description is a bridge too far.

[AuguryMarch]

George Stigler: Stigler did not invent frictional unemployment, contrary to what Wikipedia says. Indeed, Wikipedia's citation for that claim itself refers to earlier work of Hicks and others. I also don't know what Stigler's namesake law is or how it could possibly state that "all demand curves are inelastic," which is ludicrous. The only way I can intuit an intellectual background for that clue is that Stigler's partial-equilibrium model of price dispersion assumes a unit demand function, which is not even close to an empirical claim about "all" demand curves. The only Stigler's Law that I know of is the one ironically named for his son that states that no eponymous laws are named for the right person.

Here's the tossup in full:
While working for NBER, he created the first measure of Total Factor Productivity, publishing it in Trends in Output and Employment. This economist continued his work on employment, writing the first article on what is now called frictional unemployment. This gave rise to the subfield of search theory, which focuses on the process of hunting for bargains or for work. He argued that the minimum wage is ineffective in combating poverty because it affects different professions differently, because of the variance in optimum wage for employers. This economist argued in his paper “The Economics of Regulation” that regulatory agencies end up inadvertently furthering special interests in a phenomenon that he called regulatory capture. And his namesake law states that all demand curves are inelastic. For 10 points, name this Chicago school economist, the author of The Intellectual and the Marketplace, the namesake of a law of demand and supply elasticities, and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1982.

Ok, I rewrote this question. Two comments:
1) The tossup did not say he "invented" frictional unemployment. It said he wrote the first paper to explore it. Wikipedia cites his paper "Information in the Labor Market"--I don't know where you are getting the Hicks citation from. Hicks does talk about frictional unemployment in his The Theory of Wages, which last I checked, was not a paper. You may say thats misleading--perhaps--but the first clue before that should tell you it's not Hicks, who as far as I know, never did any work for NBER, being a Brit and all.

2) That Stigler's law is a joke from one of his papers, The Intellectual and the Marketplace. It is ill-placed in that tossup--I thought about replacing it with his work with Becker on "De Gustibus", but there was that revealed preference question later, so I was concerned that would be too close. In retrospect I should have given you "economics of information" in the giveaway. Apologies. However, I do give you the Nobel, and regulatory capture, and search theory in unemployment. Those are 3 pretty famous clues for Stigler.

So, in short, was this tossup perfect? No. Was it a travesty that fucked up any true Stigler partisans from getting the tossup? I doubt it.

[Tees-Exe Line]

So, in short, was this tossup perfect? No. Was it a travesty that fucked up any true Stigler partisans from getting the tossup? I doubt it.

I agree entirely, and my critique should be read accordingly. The particular issue with the idea that Stigler was the first to write a paper on frictional unemployment is only that I, at least, chose not to buzz there because I didn't think that was uniquely identifying even if the question suggested that it was. I think that second clue would have been better as a formal description of the model in the 1961 paper "The Economics of Information."

[marnold]

Yeah, as people have sussed out, I wrote the Marx question. I got the answer line the same way I got the answer line for that human geography bonus people seemed to like in Regionals: find one of the most cited geographers and work him into a question in an answerable way. David Harvey is by miles the most cited geographer of all time (OF ALL TIME!) but since he's too hard to be an answer, I did this. I thought it was an okay tossup (A- idea, B+ execution, say?) but I don't really care if it gets cut. That said, I'm thinking my snarky aside to Bruce was proved correct as I'm pretty confident it would have been better than people buzzer racing because Mafia Island has a memorable name or whatever.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Yeah, as people have sussed out, I wrote the Marx question. I got the answer line the same way I got the answer line for that human geography bonus people seemed to like in Regionals: find one of the most cited geographers and work him into a question in an answerable way. David Harvey is by miles the most cited geographer of all time (OF ALL TIME!) but since he's too hard to be an answer, I did this. I thought it was an okay tossup (A- idea, B+ execution, say?) but I don't really care if it gets cut. That said, I'm thinking my snarky aside to Bruce was proved correct as I'm pretty confident it would have been better than people buzzer racing because Mafia Island has a memorable name or whatever.

Seems like an interesting enough and workable tossup. My post upthread was perhaps too glib, but I still wonder if this tossup would have been better in the SS distro. What do people think of having occasional geography "theory" questions in that distribution at harder events?

[women, fire and dangerous things]

I thought the linguistics at this tournament was well executed overall, and I didn't notice any factual errors or confusing descriptions. The articulatory phonetics bonus was excellent, in particular, though the hard part on the sociolinguistics bonus seemed pretty impossible.

On a personal level, I didn't particularly enjoy the linguistics, since it had a lot of stuff that most linguists have no particular reason to know about, like the history of linguistics (although it's true that Chomsky quotes Wilhelm Humboldt a lot) and all the questions on language families, which are the equivalent of history of science and taxonomy. The tossup on Australia, though, was a good example of a tossup that could have gone badly, but actually asked about important things that linguists know about - I think all the clues from R. M. W. Dixon on were well chosen.

[The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man]

This man strongly influenced the recent book Rebel Cities, which in one section praises how city planning encouraged community action in El Alto and Cochabamba, while other applications of this man’s work to geography are encouraged by the Antipode Foundation and Journal. In 1990, Julie Graham argued that terminological differences caused schisms among contemporary geographers influenced by this man, while Kevin Cox tried to distinguish the “HGM” interpretations of him by Keith Buchanan and others from the related “critical human geography” field. David Harvey is this man’s most fervent contemporary geographer acolyte, and Harvey has used the analysis of “accumulation by dispossession” in works like Social Justice and the City to try situate this man’s ideas in real 20th century states. For 10 points, identify this philosopher whose application to geography revolves around how cities, peoples and spaces are influenced by capitalism.
ANSWER: Karl Marx (yes this is a tossup on Marxist geography, and if they cut this for some almanac question about Tanzania they’re ignoring what kind of nonsense geographers actually talk about)

This is a great question.

This is a really interesting idea for a question, but it is poorly executed. Rebel Cities draws more heavily from Henri Lefebvre's book The Right to the City than it does from Marx. While Rebel Cities was certainly "strongly influenced" by Marx, this question would have drawn a neg or at best confusion from anyone who had read the book. People should sparingly use clues of the form "this person influenced so-and-so" because so-and-so was probably influenced by many people.

[Sima Guang Hater]

Forgot this one:

The region of phase space defined by assigning one of these quantities a particular value is known as an invariant torus and its corresponding coordinates are known as action angles. The conjugate momenta resulting from the Hamilton-Jacobi equation are this type of quantity, which have a zero Poisson bracket with the system’s Hamiltonian and with each other. Ones of these variables that do not depend on time explicitly are known as integrals. The energy is one of these in every Hamiltonian system; systems with the energy as their only one of these are known as non-integrable, while those with more than one are known as integrable. Each one corresponds to a symmetry of a Hamiltonian system’s Lagrangian according to Noether’s theorem. For 10 points, name these quantities that do not change along a system’s trajectory.
ANSWER: constants of the motion [prompt on conserved quantities; prompt on constants; prompt on integrals; prompt on conjugate momenta; prompt on actions]

So I heard that several people negged with "conserved quantities", which makes sense and I'm guessing should have been accepted. However, my thought process during this question came down to this. In the first line, you're describing action-angle coordinates, which can be assigned when the Hamlitonian is time-independent (i.e. constant). So I spent the entire question wondering what category of things that the Hamiltonian is part of (which in this case would include "conserved quantities"). I found this confusing.

[InspectorHound]

Yeah, as people have sussed out, I wrote the Marx question. I got the answer line the same way I got the answer line for that human geography bonus people seemed to like in Regionals: find one of the most cited geographers and work him into a question in an answerable way. David Harvey is by miles the most cited geographer of all time (OF ALL TIME!) but since he's too hard to be an answer, I did this. I thought it was an okay tossup (A- idea, B+ execution, say?) but I don't really care if it gets cut. That said, I'm thinking my snarky aside to Bruce was proved correct as I'm pretty confident it would have been better than people buzzer racing because Mafia Island has a memorable name or whatever.

Seems like an interesting enough and workable tossup. My post upthread was perhaps too glib, but I still wonder if this tossup would have been better in the SS distro. What do people think of having occasional geography "theory" questions in that distribution at harder events?

I think geography as an academic field (not as a bunch of place names) is worthy of more inclusion in the SS distribution, especially in tournaments like this. I submitted a tossup on David Harvey (one of the most cited authors in the humanities, not just geography or social science) for our packet and would have been a lot happier answering an interesting tossup on Marxist geography than a boring atlas-bowl tossup on Tanzania.

[Tees-Exe Line]

This man strongly influenced the recent book Rebel Cities, which in one section praises how city planning encouraged community action in El Alto and Cochabamba, while other applications of this man’s work to geography are encouraged by the Antipode Foundation and Journal. In 1990, Julie Graham argued that terminological differences caused schisms among contemporary geographers influenced by this man, while Kevin Cox tried to distinguish the “HGM” interpretations of him by Keith Buchanan and others from the related “critical human geography” field. David Harvey is this man’s most fervent contemporary geographer acolyte, and Harvey has used the analysis of “accumulation by dispossession” in works like Social Justice and the City to try situate this man’s ideas in real 20th century states. For 10 points, identify this philosopher whose application to geography revolves around how cities, peoples and spaces are influenced by capitalism.
ANSWER: Karl Marx (yes this is a tossup on Marxist geography, and if they cut this for some almanac question about Tanzania they’re ignoring what kind of nonsense geographers actually talk about)

This is a great question.

This is a really interesting idea for a question, but it is poorly executed. Rebel Cities draws more heavily from Henri Lefebvre's book The Right to the City than it does from Marx. While Rebel Cities was certainly "strongly influenced" by Marx, this question would have drawn a neg or at best confusion from anyone who had read the book. People should sparingly use clues of the form "this person influenced so-and-so" because so-and-so was probably influenced by many people.

What's supposed to happen here is that a non-expert submits a good question on Marxist geography that happens to have an ambiguous clue, and then the editor inserts the phrase "This man isn't Henri Lefebvre, but he influenced Rebel Cities." If adding Lefebvre's name makes it too obvious that the answer is something materialist, then move the clue to later in the question.

[The Ununtiable Twine]

Forgot this one:

The region of phase space defined by assigning one of these quantities a particular value is known as an invariant torus and its corresponding coordinates are known as action angles. The conjugate momenta resulting from the Hamilton-Jacobi equation are this type of quantity, which have a zero Poisson bracket with the system’s Hamiltonian and with each other. Ones of these variables that do not depend on time explicitly are known as integrals. The energy is one of these in every Hamiltonian system; systems with the energy as their only one of these are known as non-integrable, while those with more than one are known as integrable. Each one corresponds to a symmetry of a Hamiltonian system’s Lagrangian according to Noether’s theorem. For 10 points, name these quantities that do not change along a system’s trajectory.
ANSWER: constants of the motion [prompt on conserved quantities; prompt on constants; prompt on integrals; prompt on conjugate momenta; prompt on actions]

So I heard that several people negged with "conserved quantities", which makes sense and I'm guessing should have been accepted. However, my thought process during this question came down to this. In the first line, you're describing action-angle coordinates, which can be assigned when the Hamlitonian is time-independent (i.e. constant). So I spent the entire question wondering what category of things that the Hamiltonian is part of (which in this case would include "conserved quantities"). I found this confusing.

Having taken a course in classical mechanics, I will respectfully disagree as I believe that each clue was referring specifically to the constants of motion and not necessarily general conserved quantities. I couldn't remember for the life of me what they were called as I was listening to the question (and I'm not going to buzz because things have names and I need the name to score points), but I thought it was clear what the question was asking for. Constants of motion are conserved quantities, so I knew a buzz of conserved quantities was going to get a prompt because the physicist who wrote this question knows to prompt on that. This was a great question until the Noether's theorem clue, which prompted (at least in our room and probably many others) a neg. That particular clue probably generated more negs than most other clues in the tournament. This was an excellent question otherwise.

[Matt Weiner]

There isn't anything in that question that makes Karl Marx more right than any other person who was an early influence on Marxist geography. No single insertion of a disqualifying phrase can save it. As I said in IRC:

<@WorstQEvr> if i were to be convinced that "marxist geography" is a meaningful thing*, i would make the answer line "geography" and talk about what "one subfield of this academic discipline" does
<@WorstQEvr> if there are no clues that aren't just "and what it does is talk about class and money a lot, but in regards to arrangement of space" then i would conclude that the topic is stupid** and should not be written

*poking around the Internet has not convinced me that Marxism as a methodology in geography is anywhere near as meaningful as it is in history, economics, or other fields, so this still seems like a rather idiosyncratic question topic
**for quizbowl purposes

[Cheynem]

Yeah, I agree that the wording in that question is not 100% accurate, although Harvey is almost always called a Marxist geographer. Aside from people possibly overthinking things (a fair critique), I think it clearly points to Marx. However, I do think we have a question with some degree of ambiguity, and perhaps better suited to a "whatever, writing on David Harvey anyway," or perhaps a bonus. I would argue though that "Marxist geography" is extremely influential within history. Perhaps I just go to a leftist school (schools? It's been at each institution I've been at), but I've read Harvey, Lefebvre, etc. in a number of different disciplinary classes, particularly history. I think it's a "meaningful thing" at least as meaningful as anything else asked about in quizbowl. I'll accept that maybe it's not the best use of the geography space, but a question on Marxist geography at a hard tournament in some portion of the distro is a very good idea in my opinion.

[Sima Guang Hater]

Having taken a course in classical mechanics, I will respectfully disagree as I believe that each clue was referring specifically to the constants of motion and not necessarily general conserved quantities. I couldn't remember for the life of me what they were called as I was listening to the question (and I'm not going to buzz because things have names and I need the name to score points), but I thought it was clear what the question was asking for. Constants of motion are conserved quantities, so I knew a buzz of conserved quantities was going to get a prompt because the physicist who wrote this question knows to prompt on that. This was a great question until the Noether's theorem clue, which prompted (at least in our room and probably many others) a neg. That particular clue probably generated more negs than most other clues in the tournament. This was an excellent question otherwise.

Yeah I took that class too; I guess we just didn't cover the name. That might have been because my professor was a string theorist who looked like he was high all the time.