Let's take Charlie up on his contention and see if we can learn anything from analyzing the use of the answerline of
Polish
Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) wrote:Your post had enough other decrees about what is right and wrong about question construction in questions that were absolutely in the range of acceptable that I feel OK saying what I said. Rather than declaring that the Ferrara question "didn't need to exist," or "There's zero reason for this not to be a tossup on Stanislaw Lem*," and perpetuating the norm of people sounding constantly angry over perceived imperfection, is it that hard to instead say "I don't understand what asking about Poland brings to the table, I think a tossup on Lem might have played better?
I'll preface by saying that I think there are three main motivating advantages for using common links:
1) Thematic: A common link can highlight a particular common theme across several works/topics, or within a single topic, that a more standard answerline might not be able to accomplish
2) Accessibility: A common link can allow you to ask material that would be too difficult or otherwise unfeasible to toss up on its own
3) Artistic / Creative: A common link can be on a novel answer which is cool in and of itself, and which is fun to play
I would like to expand on this theory at some point, ideally in a longer and more public post, because there are a lot of drawbacks to common links as well, including leaving a lot more room for technical execution flaws than "standard" tossups. But for now, back to Lem.
Now, this Polish tossup really isn't a common link, since it's only a "link" to one author, but the choice of answerline is clearly motivated using the same line of reasoning - the selection of the answerline
Polish was done because Stanislaw Lem is a fairly challenging author who may not get a high conversion rate if asked on his own. Let's try to think of players who benefit from the selection of
Polish as an answer versus those who are at a disadvantage with this answer selection (since I suspect this is a non-zero number of people):
Players who are advantaged
- People who recognize clues about Lem and do not remember his name, but do remember that he's a Polish author / wrote in Polish
- People who, at the giveaway, do not recognize Lem's name, but do recognize "Stanislaw Lem" as a plausibly Polish name and make a logical guess
Players who are disadvantaged
- People who recognize clues about Lem and remember his name, but do not know that he wrote in Polish
- People who lose a buzzer-race on a giveaway that is decided on linguistic guessing
Players who are indifferent
- People who recognize clues about Lem and know that he wrote in Polish
From here, there's no necessarily "correct" answer as to whether Lem or Polish is the better answer choice - there are a series of advantages and drawbacks. However, I'm going to argue that Lem is a better answer here for several reasons:
1) Stipulating that some people will only convert this "Polish" tossup for linguistic reasons, I would argue such people are not demonstrating substantive engagement with the material enough to "deserve" points. I'll call this the "Japan Problem" as this crops up commonly in easy parts on Japan - bonus parts which give distinctively Japanese names and which have an answer of "Japan" may be testing legitimate academic material, but there will be some number of people who pick up the easy part perfunctorily ("find your ass" as it were) without knowing anything about the material.
2) Related to (1) - selecting a tossup which allows for linguistic conversion at the giveaway is more likely to produce buzzer races at the giveaway between weaker teams. This may be an idiosyncratic view of mine, but I think dead tossups are a fairer outcome (0-0) than what is essentially a coin flip / speed check for points.
3) Let's posit someone who only knows Stanislaw Lem's name, but not his origin, and has some degree of familiarity with Lem's work. In order for such a person to conclude that Lem wrote in Polish, they must be able to do one of the following:
a) Know that Stanislaw Lem is a Polish name AND assume that he wrote in Polish because of this (as opposed to maybe another language - after all, Polish people have emigrated to many places)
b) Infer some inherent connection to Poland/Polish identity from his work and also make the same assumption
Based on some very brief conversations I've had, it seems that a casual sci-fi reader would not necessarily be able to make inference (b) in the same way that, say, a reader of Nadine Gordimer's work would be able to infer she's South African, since Gordimer wrote a lot about apartheid. Thus, I think there are going to be some non-zero number of people who will have potentially read the books being asked about in this question. I think this is a real concern, and would guess that it's more likely that the converse scenario (oh, what's that Polish sci-fi author's name...) occurs when somebody has perhaps memorized Lem as "the Polish sci-fi author of
Solaris" or whatnot as opposed to actually reading Lem's books.
CONCLUSION: On balance, it seems that using an answer of
Polish is likely to help to muddy the battlefield for weaker teams by producing higher conversion rates for undesirable reasons, and is also more likely to punish some small, but non-zero number of the fraction of the audience that has interacted with Lem. Thus, I would argue that tossing up
Polish instead of
Stanislaw Lem is a poor choice in this scenario.
There are some other possible remedies besides changing the answer to Lem, of course:
- Include clues from other, easier Polish authors. This would produce more pre-giveaway buzzes and solve the "muddying the battlefield" problem, which I think is the biggest issue with tossing up "Polish," but it would reduce thematic coherence
- Use a different common-link to ask this material
I've gone way past my previous statement that I would not engage in set discussion in public fora anymore, so I should probably shut up at this point to avoid seeming like too much of a hypocrite. However, I would encourage other folks to engage in critical thinking of this sort about how people arrive at the correct answer to a tossup based on the clues. It looks really tedious to nitpick a single question like this, but I think this sort of analysis of "why am I choosing this answerline" can be broadly applied to answer selection in many other contexts and help us optimize the play experience of folks choosing to come to hard tournaments.
EDIT/ADDENDUM: I'd like to discuss a Poland tossup from a different tournament, in a different category, that I think implements the "include clues from easier authors late in the tossup" concept well:
2015 ACF Nationals wrote:A social scientist born in this country argued that individuals' "in-groups" and "out-groups" are a source of self-esteem as part of social identity theory. A social scientist from this country posited a "pointillist" conception of time in Consuming Life. This birthplace of Henri Tajfel was the birthplace of the University of Leeds professor who claimed the title event is neither a "Jewish problem" or a "German Problem" in Modernity and the Holocaust. A sociologist from this country claimed that humanity was not in an era of postmodernity but liquid modernity. In a 1922 book, another social scientist from this country examined the building of the waga and noted that necklaces passed clockwise while bracelets moved counter-clockwise in an analysis of the kula ring. For 10 points, name this home country of the author of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski.
I think this tossup does a good job of testing hard material in a pyramidal fashion, while also giving weaker teams some pre-giveaway clues from a much better known thinker to buzz on before the question goes to clues that you can guess from linguistic knowledge, even if you know nothing about Malinowski (who is, needless to day, much more famous than Henri Tajfel and Zygmunt Bauman). You could make this into a two-thinker tossup on Zygmunt Bauman and Bronislaw Malinowski and I think it would work fine as well.
