2019 EFT - Specific Question Discussion and Errata

[Auks Ran Ova]

At my site, that tossup was gotten just out of power on the clue about the very famous musical Radiant Baby.

This is maybe too late to be particularly useful, since I failed to join the forum after reading the set with any sort of alacrity, but I took note of this while reading the thread and thought it worth a mention: I would be genuinely surprised if this buzz (and what I imagine are at least several similar such buzzes; I haven't looked at the stats) had anything to do with the musical, which as far as I know is not "very famous" by any stretch of the imagination. The symbol of the "radiant baby", though, is one of the most famous elements of Haring's work--it was his signature tag and showed up in, and often at the center of, many of his pieces. I was mildly surprised to see a tossup on Haring at EFT but relatively more surprised to see that clue (or at least the phrase) so far from the giveaway.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Thanks for the comment, Rob! I admittedly didn't have a ton to go on about clue ordering - just what we put back and forth in our chat. Might play around with the clue ordering a bit more.

[Wartortullian]

Finally got around to finishing this post; sorry for the delay!

The editors did a fantastic job with this tournament, and it seemed to have no systemic issues overall. The difficulty fluctuations were relatively minor, and I generally felt like I missed things due to gaps in my knowledge rather than poorly written questions. I can't speak for other categories as well as other people in this forum, but the science in particular did a great job of testing real knowledge.

Questions by packet:

Packet 1
- The witch doctors tossup was a cool idea and seemed to play well.
- Alfvén waves propagate parallel to the B field, not perpendicular to it. As written, the bonus uniquely identifies magnetosonic waves.
- Neural net and chain rule both seem like easy parts.

Packet 2
- Most tossups on superconductivity are ridiculously stocky, but this one was not and the early clues did a good job of testing real knowledge.
- "Anti-patterns" and "dark patterns" seemed very easy for the first line of the patterns tossup.
- The Helicases/progeria/mismatch repair bonus felt rather hard.

Packet 3
- The beans tossup was cool.

Packet 4
- While all the clues involved were "real," the Feynman diagrams tossup seemed pretty transparent within power ("what physics thing has loops and vertices?").
- The Doppler effect tossup was interesting and well-executed.
- The tossup the clued Flight 93 as "this specific vehicle" seemed very transparent, and playing it felt like a game of chicken.

Packet 5
- While it doesn't reflect on the quality of the Györgi Ligeti tossup (which seemed great, but I'm a very fake music player), Le grande macabre is one of my pet topics and I'm glad it came up.
- The tossups on Out of Africa and The God of Small Things seemed very hard to power. I have a lot of cards on the latter, and I didn't get it until just out of power.

Packet 6
- Alice Munro also seemed hard to power.
- The posters tossup was interesting and well-executed.
- I'll echo Kevin and Joelle's criticism of the purple tossup.

Packet 8
- The leadin to the speed of sound tossup is very real, and a good example of how to use equation clues.

Packet 9
- The Pearl River question was very transparent. Once it was obvious that the question was on China (which happened in the second line), the tossup was reduced to "are these things in Hong Kong or Shanghai?"
- The bonuses on October surprises and polling in US elections probably shouldn't have been in the same packet (both were well-written, though).

[Muriel Axon]

In the bonus on sexual obsession in film, the plot of Nymphomaniac is described, but a parenthetical in the answer line says that plot belongs to Melancholia.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The Pearl River question was very transparent. Once it was obvious that the question was on China (which happened in the second line), the tossup was reduced to "are these things in Hong Kong or Shanghai?"

I'd like to take issue with this statement. Let's define transparency loosely as ability to "see through" a tossup, or "easily divine what the answer is with limited knowledge of the topic at hand." To reduce the answer space to three possible rivers you have to know multiple things:

• That China is the country with the most famous "Special Economic Zones" and/or where Tencent is headquartered
• That the three major rivers of China along which major cities are located are the Yellow, Yangtze, and Pearl

Is this knowledge "easy"? Maybe, maybe not - you can argue about that. I don't think it's super hard, but I also don't think this is an issue of immediately knowing the correct answer because, as we can see, there's still an answer space of at least three reasonably askable rivers if you know it's China, and obviously a lot more if you don't know it's China. To narrow it down to the Pearl itself on the second clue, you have to know specifically that Shenzhen was the first Special Economic Zone. That's not insignificant at all.

Furthermore, I'm not sure how the tossup is reduced to "are these things in Hong Kong or Shanghai" - in fact, the first two clues were from Guangzhou and Shenzhen, neither of which is Hong Kong or Shanghai. The clues afterwards are from Hong Kong.

In general, I think it would really behoove people to avoid using the word "transparent" in imprecise manners like this, because I think it can actually lead to people thinking they need to obfuscate their clues more than necessary. Particularly at the EFT level, but also at higher levels, obfuscation is more often than not a non-necessary barrier to preventing players with knowledge from answering questions correctly. The more you play quizbowl, the better you get at developing hunches and inferring contextual information, which is going to lead to a lot more questions being easier for you to "see through" than other players.

Similarly:

The tossup the clued Flight 93 as "this specific vehicle" seemed very transparent, and playing it felt like a game of chicken.

How so? What made you so certain that this was the only specific vehicle that could be asked? As a writer and editor, I'm not sure what I could glean from this statement. Not every statement needs to be useful, but I'd like to hear some thought behind this so we could discuss ways to improve the question, or things which other writers can learn from the question.

[csheep]

Entirely trivial, but referring to Tencent as a "financial" firm seems questionable.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Entirely trivial, but referring to Tencent as a "financial" firm seems questionable.

Yeah you're very right about this as well.

Also, re: Shan - you're right about the film note and we'll fix that. Thanks!

EDIT: Unrelated, but I'm extremely happy to hear that the physics questions managed to test "real" knowledge - I tried very hard to avoid falling into tropes of relying on named things while also avoiding cluing things of excess difficulty, particularly for topics people are only likely to encounter in later undergrad and/or grad school courses.