2021 ACF Nationals: Specific Question Discussion

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Creating this thread for discussion of specific questions, to keep the other thread for thanks and discussion of overall philosophy. Have at it!

[Aaron's Rod]

Someone already told me on Discord that they were planning on commenting on a question I wrote, so I'll just list all the ones I freelanced.

OSci T: approximating pi
OSci B: update/null/indexes

Classical T: Washington DC, Polovtsian Dances, Beethoven piano sonatas, tambourine
Classical B: camp theme (Howard Hanson/Dance of the Hours/Arirang), misattribution theme (Alfred Einstein/Casadeus/Schubert), Glagolitic Mass/Janaczek/organ

OFA T: Don Giovanni, Cuba, pantomime
OFA B: sneeze theme (sneezes/Barber of Seville/Hindemith), Go Down Moses/Swing Low Sweet Chariot/A Child of Our Time, meditations theme (Thais/A Love Supreme/deep listening), film theme (Marriage of Figaro/Rusalka/Castor et Pollux)

Religion T: desert fathers and mothers, Oscar Romero
Religion B: John Wesley/purgatory/toll houses

OAc T: reversing the Chicago River
OAc B: kilogram/iridium/weights and measures

[Ike]

Ken-kun, the enterpreneur selling sweet potatoes, unfortunately passed away two months before this tournament began. I did not catch this in time, apologies to anyone who may have been confused.

It was an open casket funeral.

(Ken-kun will be missed but readers should probably get some warning before seeing a large picture of a dead dog, which is what the below link is to --staff)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3LOavkVUAI ... name=large

[Kazunogawa Pumped Storage Power Station]

Could I see the Daughters of Bilitis tossup? It was one of the ones I submitted in our packet, so I’m just curious how much it ended up being edited.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Could I see the Daughters of Bilitis tossup? It was one of the ones I submitted in our packet, so I’m just curious how much it ended up being edited.

This organization received early donations in the form of several three-thousand dollar checks given by an anonymous figure called “Pennsylvania.” One of its members, with the pen name Lisa Ben, released a music album for this group with songs like “Cruising down the Boulevard” after earlier creating the magazine Vice Versa. Its first national conference at the Whitcomb Hotel had an opening statement by Reverend Fordyce Eastburn. This group dissolved after Rita LaPorte stole the list of subscribers to its main publication, The Ladder, from its headquarters. It was named after a fictional Greek poet created by Pierre Louÿs, chosen by its founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon just because it was obscure. This group initially followed the lead of the Mattachine Group in advocating for assimilation, though it focused more on family rights. For 10 points, name this first lesbian rights organization in the United States, whose name deliberately mocks the Daughters of the American Revolution.
ANSWER: Daughters of Bilitis [or DOB; prompt on The Daughters]

[modernhemalurgist]

Regarding the continuous tossup (Editors 4), I really like questions with this theme, but I have a few nitpicks.

The clue on Urysohn's Lemma says that "a space is considered normal iff for every pair of disjoint sets, there exists a function that separates disjoint subsets that have this property." For one thing, Urysohn's lemma needs to specify that these sets are closed (otherwise this is obviously wrong), and not specifying this makes what it's asking for harder to parse at game speed. More importantly though, the use of the word "have" means that you're asking for what property the sets have, which is closure, not continuity. I think specifying "closed sets" and changing the phrasing to "exists a function with this property separating disjoint sets" would be an improvement here.

The Zariski topology clue seems a bit odd to me - in general the topologies are commonly defined as the weakest in which a set of maps are continuous, so adding the extra conditions for a Zariski topology seems to just be obfuscating this easier clue. Also I'm not sure that "algebraic topology" has a meaning as a countable noun, though I may be wrong.

[EvanKnox]

Out of curiosity, who wrote the E-M algorithm question? I don't know much about E-M algorithms, so I wanted to ask someone smarter/more knowledgable than me (e.g. the author) about how an answer of Data Augmentation would've gone on this, and what the differences in EM and DA are.

I probably would've negged with Data Augmentation on the PX clue, but I'm not sure if that's just because I'm more familiar with PX-DA than PX-EM and they're vaguely/superficially? similar or if DA is functionally the same thing in some of these cases.

Maybe saying the model is augmented excludes DA? Again, I'm no expert, I was just curious how y'all tried to differentiate one from the other.

EDIT: Loved the Buffon needle experiment in the approximating Pi question!

[Abdon Ubidia]

Regarding the continuous tossup (Editors 4), I really like questions with this theme, but I have a few nitpicks.

More importantly though, the use of the word "have" means that you're asking for what property the sets have, which is closure, not continuity.

Yeah this almost made me neg this tossup. I agree that the question is cool overall though.

[No Rules Westbrook]

Thanks for that Daughters of Bilitis question, by the way. I really enjoyed that idea, and was determined to keep it in the set.

[csa2125]

There were too many questions I loved to single any out for their greatness without having to look back at the packets; there wasn't a packet that went by without at least four or five home runs.

Again, going back to the packets would let me detail this better, but I remember a few questions that seemed to cliff very hard in games I played--as in, going from everyone being clueless to an immediate 8-way buzzer race hard. Obviously, this isn't ideal, and many seemed to be with answerlines that could easily have had several more middle clues before what was often a very common high school-level clue. Could I see the Lyndon Johnson, Leonard Bernstein, Gymnopedies, Maurice Ravel, and traffic tossups? They seemed to exemplify this phenomenon, but I want to make sure that my memory is correct and this isn't just me being unhappy about being beat to (mostly) music and social science content.

[Mike Bentley]

There were too many questions I loved to single any out for their greatness without having to look back at the packets; there wasn't a packet that went by without at least four or five home runs.

Again, going back to the packets would let me detail this better, but I remember a few questions that seemed to cliff very hard in games I played--as in, going from everyone being clueless to an immediate 8-way buzzer race hard. Obviously, this isn't ideal, and many seemed to be with answerlines that could easily have had several more middle clues before what was often a very common high school-level clue. Could I see the Lyndon Johnson, Leonard Bernstein, Gymnopedies, Maurice Ravel, and traffic tossups? They seemed to exemplify this phenomenon, but I want to make sure that my memory is correct and this isn't just me being unhappy about being beat to (mostly) music and social science content.

Not sure how much LBJ changed since playtesting but the initial version of that leaned easy to me.

In terms of cool questions, I only heard some of the final set but the one on the Encyclopedia illustrations was neat.

[No Rules Westbrook]

I agree that both LBJ and Peterloo had way too much of a cliff in clue difficulty - LBJ on the Treatment, and Peterloo on the Six Acts. Those were two that really should've had a few more hard middle clues stuffed in the third to fifth lines.

Also, that sans-culottes tossup was not very good, and was kinda meant to be an emergency replacement tossup that ended up getting thrown in to the last "use only if needed" packet.

[Ike]

My bad on the continuous tossup; I could have sworn I checked twice for math hoses. Someone who actually knows topology should always playtest those pesky questions.

[henrygoff]

The literature in this set was very fun to play! Off the top of my head, I thought the tossups on Oakland, Oberon, hunger, and the Entertainment were all extremely cool, as well as a ton of other stuff that I'm forgetting right now. I also liked a lot of the content on literature-adjacent subjects, such as the painting tossup about Zola and the death of Christopher Marlowe tossup. In general, I thought that this tournament also did a very good job of striking a balance between reasonable and challenging answerlines. I also enjoyed the ways that the tournament found to ask about core canon stuff, but each tossup with this angle felt like it cliffed pretty hard (I'm specifically thinking of the tossups on Madame Bovary, Gatsby's party guests, and Glengarry Glen Ross, which had significant cliffs at pharmacist, Owl Eyes, and Chinese restaurant, respectively).

There were a few questions which played as a bit frustrating to me:
- The Renaissance tossup. The question itself was fine, but I was confused why it was packetized as British literature.
- the Parson Yorick tossup. I'm curious as to how this played in other rooms, because I thought it had one of the largest discrepancies between pre-FTP difficulty and FTP difficulty of any lit tossup I played this weekend (asking for a significant character from Tristram Shandy is not too hard in itself, but asking you to name Yorick from Hamlet must be one of the easiest FTPs of the whole tournament).
- the love suicides tossup. I'm curious if it was a conscious decision not to mention in the FTP that the genre titles those Chikamatsu plays--that addition certainly would've helped me convert the tossup.
- naming "Good Babies Make Good Poems" in the WCW tossup felt like the question was trying to get you to think Robert Frost, but I prob should've figured it out at "New Jersey" anyway
- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

[jinah]

Crossposting from the other thread:

A figure like Albert Hirschman is of fairly marginal importance to the field nowadays - I had actually never heard of him before (in my experience, his name is usually dropped from the Herfindahl index) and after looking up some of his work, it sounds very much like the sort of research from the 70s that is mostly forgotten today.

I didn't think this set's economics was spectacular or anything (it was probably my least favorite part of the social science, the rest of which was awesome) but I wanted to push back on this. Criticism of "marginal importance to the field" is a really insular perspective and doesn't reflect the breadth of range across with people in general -- and especially those who play quiz tournaments as opposed to attend economics conferences -- engage with the field. Admittedly I also have seen it just called the Herfindahl index, but knowing the full name of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index isn't a huge ask especially, as the tossup explained, the thing is of great importance to the US's (admittedly outdated) antitrust laws and is of course an extremely common intro economics topic. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is a classic of modern political economy, insofar as that field even exists anymore, and is something I ran into in my public economics class in undergrad, as well as through numerous casual readings about the subject. I'm not a fan of "minor things this economist did" approaches for too many early clues and maybe the question could have used more from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty but this question hardly seems like such an awful offender.

[disclaimer: I wrote this tossup]. For what it’s worth, I wrote this tossup inspired by reading some of the response around Hirschman’s death, and found his rich and diverse life/legacy fascinating (there wasn’t much room for it in the tossup, but check it out). I wouldn’t say it was intended at all to focus on minor parts of a famous academic’s career — he was extremely important in development economics, which in turn was a large part of his earlier career. The reason I only included Exit Voice and Loyalty at the end was because Andrew felt there was a fair amount of more “corporate” econ in the other packets. It might have played too hard/cliffed at the end, but wasn’t *intended* to be coy by any means.

(I’m not particularly attached to this tossup — of the few I wrote, it was probably my least favorite tossup — just wanted to set the record straight).

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

There were too many questions I loved to single any out for their greatness without having to look back at the packets; there wasn't a packet that went by without at least four or five home runs.

Again, going back to the packets would let me detail this better, but I remember a few questions that seemed to cliff very hard in games I played--as in, going from everyone being clueless to an immediate 8-way buzzer race hard. Obviously, this isn't ideal, and many seemed to be with answerlines that could easily have had several more middle clues before what was often a very common high school-level clue. Could I see the Lyndon Johnson, Leonard Bernstein, Gymnopedies, Maurice Ravel, and traffic tossups? They seemed to exemplify this phenomenon, but I want to make sure that my memory is correct and this isn't just me being unhappy about being beat to (mostly) music and social science content.

4. In an arrangement of one of these pieces, the orchestrator augments the music with a soft cymbal hit every sixth beat and arpeggios in the harp which alternate between cascading triplets on beats 2 and 3 and ascending triplets on beat 2. Years after its original publication, a private printing of one of these pieces listed as its dedicatee the composer’s classmate Jeanne de Bret. One of these pieces opens with the left hand alternating between G major seventh and D major seventh chords and is marked Lent et douloureux. The first of these pieces was published in the magazine La Musique des familles alongside an excerpt from the poem “Les Antiques” by Patrice Contamine de Latour. The composer of these pieces claimed their title comes from Flaubert’s Salammbo, but it may also refer to a festival with young, naked Greek men dancing. For 10 points, name this series of three languid compositions by Erik Satie.
ANSWER: Trois Gymnopédies

10. At 24, this politician gained influence by organizing elevator operators and mailmen to elect him secretary of a Capitol Hill club called the “Little Congress.” This politician often tried to build consensus by quoting his favorite Bible verse, “Come now, and let us reason together.” Ollie Quayle’s polling data led this politician to adopt the term “frontlash” to describe his crossover appeal to moderate voters. He used his physical bulk to threaten and cajole colleagues to pass legislation, in a process known as “the Treatment.” The support of his mentor, Richard Russell, enabled him to become Senate majority leader in 1955. He was mockingly called “Uncle Cornpone” by Robert Kennedy, a detail of their feud described in the 2012 volume The Passage of Power. The subject of biographies like The Master of the Senate written by Robert Caro, for 10 points, name this man who later became U.S. President and launched the “Great Society.”
ANSWER: Lyndon Baines Johnson [or LBJ; prompt on Johnson]

16. In the second movement of this composer’s Piano Trio, the trio section opens with a theme consisting of a pickup A, whole note G, half note F, up to half note C, then whole note E; in that trio, the piano plays in 4/2 time against the strings in 3/4 time. The first movement of this composer’s Piano Trio is in 8/8 time, organized as 3+2+3, and draws from an abandoned piano concerto. A piece by this composer for flute, clarinet, string quartet, and harp was commissioned by the Érard (“ay-RAR”) company. The second movement of this composer’s string quartet opens with the whole ensemble playing pizzicato and is marked Assez vif (“ah-say VEEF”). A virtuosic piece by this composer for violin and piano with a luthéal (“loo-tay-ALL”) accessory was commissioned by Jelly d’Arányi. The third movement of a piano suite by this composer was intended to be more difficult than Islamey. For 10 points, name this French composer of Tzigane (“tsee-GAHN”), Gaspard de la Nuit, and Boléro.
ANSWER: Maurice Ravel

20. According to a canonical 1992 book on this phenomenon, attempts to respond to it lead to temporal, modal, and spatial shifts in a so-called “triple convergence.” In 1982, Richard Steinberg and Willard Zangwill proved the mathematical foundations of a “paradox” originally posited in the study of this phenomenon by Dietrich Braess. The modeling of this phenomenon relies on “social” and “selfish” equilibria named for John Glen Wardrop. The relationship between spatial distribution and the intensity of this phenomenon is reflected in the empirical “Marchetti’s constant,” whose value is about one hour. After contributing to voting theory, U.S. economist Anthony Downs proposed an “iron law” relating the intensity of this phenomenon to maximum capacity. For 10 points, in the textbook example of “induced demand,” what phenomenon paradoxically [emphasize] increases when new roads are built?
ANSWER: road traffic [or road congestion; or traffic jams; or traffic snarl-ups; or gridlock; or automobile or highway traffic or congestion; prompt on road use or driving]

[Sima Guang Hater]

Out of curiosity, who wrote the E-M algorithm question? I don't know much about E-M algorithms, so I wanted to ask someone smarter/more knowledgable than me (e.g. the author) about how an answer of Data Augmentation would've gone on this, and what the differences in EM and DA are.

I probably would've negged with Data Augmentation on the PX clue, but I'm not sure if that's just because I'm more familiar with PX-DA than PX-EM and they're vaguely/superficially? similar or if DA is functionally the same thing in some of these cases.

Maybe saying the model is augmented excludes DA? Again, I'm no expert, I was just curious how y'all tried to differentiate one from the other.

11. Excoffier and Slatin introduced this algorithm to haplotype inference. MEME uses this algorithm on every starting point of a biological sequence to discover motifs. An expansion parameter is added to create an augmented model, which is then reduced, in the faster PX modification of this algorithm. The generalized version of this algorithm relaxes one step to simply ensuring that an objective function increases. This algorithm is commonly used to find the distributions after fitting to a Gaussian mixture model. A special case of it used to train hidden Markov models is named for Baum and Welch. Named by Dempster, Laird, and Rubin, this algorithm alternately computes the extremum of the log-likelihood function, then updates the parameters of the distribution to increase that log-likelihood. For 10 points, name this algorithm used for parameter estimation in statistical models containing latent variables, named for its two steps.
ANSWER: EM [or expectation-maximization; accept Baum–Welch until “Baum” is read; prompt on maximum-likelihood estimation or MLE]

I wrote this question. From my cursory reading, the parameter expansion procedure is similar in both PX-EM and PX-DA, in that you add a parameter corresponding to missing data, so I can see why you'd make that neg. As far as I can tell the two methods have very different steps (EM maximizes the log-likelihood, but DA is trying to find the posterior distribution), but they're treated very similarly. Hopefully the use of the word "augmented" would deter you from buzzing with DA (and the leadins are unequivocally about EM), but I should probably have put the names of the people who developed PX-EM or just outright said "Like data augmentation, [rest of sentence]".

[Zealots of Stockholm]

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is fair or not, but it feels worth pointing out that, from my point of view, contemporary long fiction is way more widely read than either drama or poetry.

[caroline]

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is fair or not, but it feels worth pointing out that, from my point of view, contemporary long fiction is way more widely read than either drama or poetry.

from your point of view, yes, sure

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

We had a decent bit of contemporary drama, I think - Caryl Churchill, A.E. Housman from Invention of Love, and Sam Shepard all had content from within the lifetimes of people playing this tournament; Glengarry Glen Ross is a little before that but still recent. I agree that poetry skewed a bit older: Frank Bidart (in the "serial killers" tossup), various clues from the William Carlos Williams question, and "Citizen" are the main topics that stand out as arguably "contemporary" from this set.

Questions I wrote for this tournament:

Am Lit Tossups: Millay, Roger Malvin's Burial, Ahab's Pegleg
Bonuses: Edwards and the Spider/Lowell/Deacon's Masterpiece

Brit Lit tossups: Caryl Churchill, Isaac Newton, Parson Yorick, Love in Blake, Scotland in lit, Among School Children, Marianne Dashwood, D.H. Lawrence, Coriolanus, William Caxton, Return of the Native, Madwoman in the Attic, Death of Marlowe, Starvation

Brit Lit bonuses: Rossetti/House of Life/Fleshly School of Poetry, Battle of the Books/Swift/Dryden, Jacobin Novels/Caleb Williams/Wollstonecraft, Osborne/Saved/Joe Orton, Everyman/Mankind/Seven Deadly Sins, Eagle/Hardy/Harlot's House, Murphy/Beckett/Chess, Hill/Briggflatts/Heaney, Tietjens/Ford/Jean Rhys, Malcontent/Marston/Iago, Offshore/Fitzgerald/Byatt, Overbury/Essex/Webster, Wordsworth/Shelley/Egotistical Sublime,

Euro Lit tossups: Marguerite Yourcenar, doubles, Oberon, Iphigeneia in Tauris, Prague, Three Sisters, Statius, Wittgenstein Family, Russian symbolism, princesses, Gerard de Nerval, Hamsun, Tokarczuk, Kraznahorkai, Daphnis and Chloe, Madame Bovary, The Judgment

Euro Lit bonuses: Herzog/Hauser/Simplicissimus, Catalan/Petrarch/Barber, crabs/Nausea/Schulz, Generation of 98/Valle-Inclan/Jimenez, Within a Budding Grove/Proust/Delft, Waterloo/Charterhouse/Passport, Saragossa Manuscript/Decameron/Gil Blas, Breton/Bataille/corpse, Orlando Furioso/Ruggiero/Catullus 64, Book of Disquiet/Portugal/Tabucchi, Lost Illusions/Balzac/Swedenborg, Water is Best/Pindar/Epodes, Ovid/de Lorris/Book of Good Love

World Lit tossups: Said, Lu Xun, Backlands, Tayeb Salih

History tossups: Germania, Court Jesters, Rights of Man, Oil

Painting tossups: Lucretia, Polish Rider, Emile Zola, Poets

Painting bonuses: Qingming Festival/Shitao/Pollock, Tauromaquia/Goya/Dog, Aristotle/Power of Women/School of Athens, Tughra/Eggs/Blue Mosque, monkeys/lobsters/Snyders, red-figure/Pieta/Pioneer Group

Other Arts tossups: Night in Tunisia, Don Quixote, Ornette Coleman, Elektra, Nijinsky, So What, Charles Mingus

Other Arts bonuses: Wes Montgomery/Grant Green/Count Basie, Italian Girl in Algiers/Rai/Armstrong, Carnegie Hall/Lester Young/James Reese Europe, Greece/Utzon/Church on the Water, Muddy Waters/Little Walter/Mississippi Delta, Koto/Straight No Chaser/Blindness, I Got Rhythm/Gershwin/Bechet, Corea/Herbie Hancock/John McLaughlin, Raft of the Medusa/Henze/Stockhausen

Religion tossups: Nichiren, clay, Ijtihad, jewels, Kerala state, Sri Lanka, Brazilian pentecostalism, Rajneesh movement, Family of Muhammad, Chinese alchemy, Philippines, Azrael, Ethiopian Jews, Vedanta, rebbe, Sati, Magi, fear of God

Religion bonuses: Thunder Perfect Mind/Thomas/Irenaeus, Adi Granth/Langaar/Karah Parsad, Abu Lahab/Quraysh/Ka'aba, Loa Possession/Vodou/Veve, Amoris Laetitia/remarried/infallibility, Sufi Orders/Rumi/Chishti, Havdalah/Purim/Firstborn, Camels/Rebecca/Saleh, vultures/Tibet/49 Days, polygamy/Mernissi/Aisha, hoodoo/Roosters/Cosmogram, Sefirot/Luria/Malkuth, Steiner/Theosophy/Besant, Trigrams/I Qing/mirror

Other Academic tossups: Eris, Romania

Other Academic bonuses: Bogdanovich/Popol Vuh/Bayesian Networks, TM/Synanon/Scientology

[Mike Bentley]

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is fair or not, but it feels worth pointing out that, from my point of view, contemporary long fiction is way more widely read than either drama or poetry.

from your point of view, yes, sure

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but it seems pretty uncontroversial to me that contemporary long fiction is much more read and gets much more attention than contemporary poetry and drama. I don't have the greatest understanding of what's being taught in college literature courses, but certainly the major literary awards, literary magazines, and bestseller lists (for what they're worth) are going to be more dominated by long fiction than those other genres. The World As It Is had a handful of questions in these categories while devoting most of the space to long fiction and non-fiction and I stand by this choice.

[caroline]

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is fair or not, but it feels worth pointing out that, from my point of view, contemporary long fiction is way more widely read than either drama or poetry.

from your point of view, yes, sure

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but it seems pretty uncontroversial to me that contemporary long fiction is much more read and gets much more attention than contemporary poetry and drama. I don't have the greatest understanding of what's being taught in college literature courses, but certainly the major literary awards, literary magazines, and bestseller lists (for what they're worth) are going to be more dominated by long fiction than those other genres. The World As It Is had a handful of questions in these categories while devoting most of the space to long fiction and non-fiction and I stand by this choice.

Nah. This perspective is a pretty unrealistic view of how people engage with literature today. I guess you have some basis for saying contemporary poetry is not very widely read if your only experience with engaging with poetry is taking classes on specific poets so you've somehow only ended up reading William Wordsworth books or something, but that's a fairly limited way to engage with literature in itself. Contemporary long fiction is more widely read than contemp poetry/drama in so far as much long fiction is more widely read than poetry and drama, which is why we typically (and fairly) have more long fiction than poetry or drama in a tournament, but it is not why we should ask less about contemporary poetry relative to the rest of the poetry distribution.

Some ways people nowadays engage with contemporary poetry:

• Any poetry writing class ever: I have taken two poetry writing classes + one shorter workshop, and every full-length collection we were assigned was contemporary (the oldest one I read was Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris (1992)). I can count on my hands the number of individual poems in those classes we've read that were pre-1900; the majority were dated post-1950.

• Spoken word events: this is one of the most common ways people engage today with poetry, if not literature as a whole. It is very, very accessible (there's usually a time limit so it is much less of a commitment than reading a novel, poems are usually not very dense, etc), and there is often a big community attached to it (see e.g. slam poetry competitions). Many well-known contemporary poets got their start in, or are notable for, their spoken word poetry.

• English classes (of the non-creative writing variety): You probably won't see an entire class dedicated to Ocean Vuong or whatever the way you would T.S. Eliot, but it is still common to read individual works of contemporary poetry in classes. To go off an example from this very tournament, Citizen was assigned in my US Multiethnic Lit class in freshman year.

• Literary magazines / journals / indie presses: I realize quizbowlers probably don't read litmags because most of the poets within are way too obscure to possibly come up, but Poetry (the one run by Poetry Foundation) is still pretty widely read, and many people I've met (who do not care whether the things they read will get them points) read these very often.

This is mostly about poetry because I know very little about drama and am a terrible drama player. However, I would hazard lots of people still engage with contemporary drama on the basis that people who have an interest in a topic, especially in a "not taking it in a class" context, care about what is happening with regard to that topic right now, today. I'm very biased here wrt my own limited worldview as at least >60% of my poetry reading is contemporary, but like (outside of quizbowl, at least), all the people I've met who like poetry read mostly contemporary (and sometimes modern) poetry unless they're an academic who specializes in an older topic, and there aren't many of those sorts of academics relative to the amount of people who read poetry outside class.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Contemporary poetry is inarguably a topic many people engage with - that said, we did write a solid helping of old stuff into the distro intentionally, since more recent literature has really inundated recent hard tournaments. People may of course like or dislike that as they will. I agree that if you only read super old stuff then you're limiting yourself, but there is quite a range between like, Statius and Denise Levertov.

[Mike Bentley]

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is fair or not, but it feels worth pointing out that, from my point of view, contemporary long fiction is way more widely read than either drama or poetry.

from your point of view, yes, sure

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but it seems pretty uncontroversial to me that contemporary long fiction is much more read and gets much more attention than contemporary poetry and drama. I don't have the greatest understanding of what's being taught in college literature courses, but certainly the major literary awards, literary magazines, and bestseller lists (for what they're worth) are going to be more dominated by long fiction than those other genres. The World As It Is had a handful of questions in these categories while devoting most of the space to long fiction and non-fiction and I stand by this choice.

Nah. This perspective is a pretty unrealistic view of how people engage with literature today. I guess you have some basis for saying contemporary poetry is not very widely read if your only experience with engaging with poetry is taking classes on specific poets so you've somehow only ended up reading William Wordsworth books or something, but that's a fairly limited way to engage with literature in itself. Contemporary long fiction is more widely read than contemp poetry/drama in so far as much long fiction is more widely read than poetry and drama, which is why we typically (and fairly) have more long fiction than poetry or drama in a tournament, but it is not why we should ask less about contemporary poetry relative to the rest of the poetry distribution.

Some ways people nowadays engage with contemporary poetry:

• Any poetry writing class ever: I have taken two poetry writing classes + one shorter workshop, and every full-length collection we were assigned was contemporary (the oldest one I read was Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris (1992)). I can count on my hands the number of individual poems in those classes we've read that were pre-1900; the majority were dated post-1950.

• Spoken word events: this is one of the most common ways people engage today with poetry, if not literature as a whole. It is very, very accessible (there's usually a time limit so it is much less of a commitment than reading a novel, poems are usually not very dense, etc), and there is often a big community attached to it (see e.g. slam poetry competitions). Many well-known contemporary poets got their start in, or are notable for, their spoken word poetry.

• English classes (of the non-creative writing variety): You probably won't see an entire class dedicated to Ocean Vuong or whatever the way you would T.S. Eliot, but it is still common to read individual works of contemporary poetry in classes. To go off an example from this very tournament, Citizen was assigned in my US Multiethnic Lit class in freshman year.

• Literary magazines / journals / indie presses: I realize quizbowlers probably don't read litmags because most of the poets within are way too obscure to possibly come up, but Poetry (the one run by Poetry Foundation) is still pretty widely read, and many people I've met (who do not care whether the things they read will get them points) read these very often.

This is mostly about poetry because I know very little about drama and am a terrible drama player. However, I would hazard lots of people still engage with contemporary drama on the basis that people who have an interest in a topic, especially in a "not taking it in a class" context, care about what is happening with regard to that topic right now, today. I'm very biased here wrt my own limited worldview as at least >60% of my poetry reading is contemporary, but like (outside of quizbowl, at least), all the people I've met who like poetry read mostly contemporary (and sometimes modern) poetry unless they're an academic who specializes in an older topic, and there aren't many of those sorts of academics relative to the amount of people who read poetry outside class.

I don't want to derail this whole discussion, but in the areas that I have any familiarity with (poetry's coverage in literary magazines, the sales figures of 21st century poetry collections), I'm going to have to disagree here. The amount of coverage of contemporary poetry in something like the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Literary Review, the New York Times Book Review, etc. is significantly less than reviews of new novels. Poetry magazine had a circulation of 30,000 as of 2007 (although of course most young people are consuming this online).

Looking at some random "Best 100 Books of the 21st Century" like Vulture's or the Guardian's, you typically see like 2-5 poetry collections on there.

I can believe that in college classes, contemporary poetry bats above average. That being said, it's also the case that historically poetry was much more widely read compared to other types of fiction than it is today. I can see the argument for giving poetry more overall weight in a pre-1900s distribution given its importance at the time.

[Mike Bentley]

Also, I'm not saying there should be no contemporary poetry in the distribution (especially at a tournament like ACF Nationals). But I think it's the right choice to weight it considerably less than contemporary long fiction.

[Aaron's Rod]

Also, I'm not saying there should be no contemporary poetry in the distribution (especially at a tournament like ACF Nationals). But I think it's the right choice to weight it considerably less than contemporary long fiction.

I believe Caroline is saying just that:

Contemporary long fiction is more widely read than contemp poetry/drama in so far as much long fiction is more widely read than poetry and drama, which is why we typically (and fairly) have more long fiction than poetry or drama in a tournament, but it is not why we should ask less about contemporary poetry relative to the rest of the poetry distribution.

And they're more arguing about contemporary poetry as a proportion of all poetry, rather than contemporary poetry vs. long fiction. Caroline is free to correct me here!

[caroline]

Also, I'm not saying there should be no contemporary poetry in the distribution (especially at a tournament like ACF Nationals). But I think it's the right choice to weight it considerably less than contemporary long fiction.

I believe Caroline is saying just that:

Contemporary long fiction is more widely read than contemp poetry/drama in so far as much long fiction is more widely read than poetry and drama, which is why we typically (and fairly) have more long fiction than poetry or drama in a tournament, but it is not why we should ask less about contemporary poetry relative to the rest of the poetry distribution.

And they're more arguing about contemporary poetry as a proportion of all poetry, rather than contemporary poetry vs. long fiction. Caroline is free to correct me here!

Alex is correct. Obviously I don't speak for Henry, but I read his post as saying that the proportion of contemp poetry to the rest of poetry was much lower than the proportion of contemp long fic to the rest of long fic, and that he disagreed with that choice, rather than saying the amount of contemporary poetry should be equal to the amount of contemporary long fiction (that would radically increase the amount of poetry asked in a tournament overall compared to long fic, and I don't think that is what he is trying to argue here).

I don't really have much to say about the choice to ask about less contemporary poetry in this tournament either; I would've enjoyed more of it and would certainly like to see more of a push toward it, but it's really just one of many possible and fine editorial approaches, and to not do that is also perfectly valid.

[theMoMA]

Crossposting from the other thread:

A figure like Albert Hirschman is of fairly marginal importance to the field nowadays - I had actually never heard of him before (in my experience, his name is usually dropped from the Herfindahl index) and after looking up some of his work, it sounds very much like the sort of research from the 70s that is mostly forgotten today.

I didn't think this set's economics was spectacular or anything (it was probably my least favorite part of the social science, the rest of which was awesome) but I wanted to push back on this. Criticism of "marginal importance to the field" is a really insular perspective and doesn't reflect the breadth of range across with people in general -- and especially those who play quiz tournaments as opposed to attend economics conferences -- engage with the field. Admittedly I also have seen it just called the Herfindahl index, but knowing the full name of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index isn't a huge ask especially, as the tossup explained, the thing is of great importance to the US's (admittedly outdated) antitrust laws and is of course an extremely common intro economics topic. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is a classic of modern political economy, insofar as that field even exists anymore, and is something I ran into in my public economics class in undergrad, as well as through numerous casual readings about the subject. I'm not a fan of "minor things this economist did" approaches for too many early clues and maybe the question could have used more from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty but this question hardly seems like such an awful offender.

[disclaimer: I wrote this tossup]. For what it’s worth, I wrote this tossup inspired by reading some of the response around Hirschman’s death, and found his rich and diverse life/legacy fascinating (there wasn’t much room for it in the tossup, but check it out). I wouldn’t say it was intended at all to focus on minor parts of a famous academic’s career — he was extremely important in development economics, which in turn was a large part of his earlier career. The reason I only included Exit Voice and Loyalty at the end was because Andrew felt there was a fair amount of more “corporate” econ in the other packets. It might have played too hard/cliffed at the end, but wasn’t *intended* to be coy by any means.

(I’m not particularly attached to this tossup — of the few I wrote, it was probably my least favorite tossup — just wanted to set the record straight).

For what it's worth, I tried to include a mixture of economics questions to cover subjects of both contemporary and historical interest. Although every question can't be to everyone's taste, and I'm sure that you could achieve a fair result with a radically different mix of subjects, I think the subdistribution did a good job of covering a wide range of topics in the limited space of 8-10 questions across the tournament.

[jinah]

For what it's worth, I tried to include a mixture of economics questions to cover subjects of both contemporary and historical interest. Although every question can't be to everyone's taste, and I'm sure that you could achieve a fair result with a radically different mix of subjects, I think the subdistribution did a good job of covering a wide range of topics in the limited space of 8-10 questions across the tournament.

Agreed; I think because the econ distribution is so small, editor-level preferences will have much more significant effects from tournament to tournament. I’d also guess that Andrew’s variety-focused approach toward the category is probably more accessible than more phd-core and technically oriented hard econ that a few of the past spring opens have had, though this is also a matter of taste.

I only wrote 1/1 of the philosophy, so I have basically no skin in the game, but I’d be curious with how people felt the work tossups on less-standard answerlines — Untimely Meditations, Society of the Spectacle, Cyborg Manifesto — played, along with the less-standard concept answerlines — context, explanation, value — as they all felt a little “experimental” and seemed to have played quite hard despite having clues that are, to varying degrees, firmly in the quizbowl canon.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

For what it's worth, I tried to include a mixture of economics questions to cover subjects of both contemporary and historical interest. Although every question can't be to everyone's taste, and I'm sure that you could achieve a fair result with a radically different mix of subjects, I think the subdistribution did a good job of covering a wide range of topics in the limited space of 8-10 questions across the tournament.

Agreed; I think because the econ distribution is so small, editor-level preferences will have much more significant effects from tournament to tournament. I’d also guess that Andrew’s variety-focused approach toward the category is probably more accessible than more phd-core and technically oriented hard econ that a few of the past spring opens have had, though this is also a matter of taste.

I only wrote 1/1 of the philosophy, so I have basically no skin in the game, but I’d be curious with how people felt the work tossups on less-standard answerlines — Untimely Meditations, Society of the Spectacle, Cyborg Manifesto — played, along with the less-standard concept answerlines — context, explanation, value — as they all felt a little “experimental” and seemed to have played quite hard despite having clues that are, to varying degrees, firmly in the quizbowl canon.

The context, explanation (which I unfortunately negged on the N-D model clue after much prompting ), and the value tossups were my favorite tossups of the entire tournament. Just really awesome ideas packed with really important underexplored clues. The Untimely Meditations tossup was the only philosophy tossup I wasn't a big fan of. It seems like a work few people will have read or really engaged with any meaningful way (in our game against Stanford, it played pretty poorly--it went to the very end, Stanford guessed something wrong, and then I picked it up, but I had zero clue what Nietschze work it was before the giveaway.)

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

For what it's worth, I tried to include a mixture of economics questions to cover subjects of both contemporary and historical interest. Although every question can't be to everyone's taste, and I'm sure that you could achieve a fair result with a radically different mix of subjects, I think the subdistribution did a good job of covering a wide range of topics in the limited space of 8-10 questions across the tournament.

Agreed; I think because the econ distribution is so small, editor-level preferences will have much more significant effects from tournament to tournament. I’d also guess that Andrew’s variety-focused approach toward the category is probably more accessible than more phd-core and technically oriented hard econ that a few of the past spring opens have had, though this is also a matter of taste.

I only wrote 1/1 of the philosophy, so I have basically no skin in the game, but I’d be curious with how people felt the work tossups on less-standard answerlines — Untimely Meditations, Society of the Spectacle, Cyborg Manifesto — played, along with the less-standard concept answerlines — context, explanation, value — as they all felt a little “experimental” and seemed to have played quite hard despite having clues that are, to varying degrees, firmly in the quizbowl canon.

The context, explanation (which I unfortunately negged on the N-D model clue after much prompting ), and the value tossups were my favorite tossups of the entire tournament. Just really awesome ideas packed with really important underexplored clues. The Untimely Meditations tossup was the only philosophy tossup I wasn't a big fan of. It seems like a work few people will have read or really engaged with any meaningful way (in our game against Stanford, it played pretty poorly--it went to the very end, Stanford guessed something wrong, and then I picked it up, but I had zero clue what Nietschze work it was before the giveaway.)

"Schopenhauer as Educator" and "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" are both essays I expect people to have engaged with (I believe Will said he'd read both of them, although he didn't remember which essay collection they were from). It seemed like the field had some trouble connecting the clues to the answerline though. I kinda think the issue there comes down to excessive difficulty, but I can understand how the way it played would be frustrating.

[jmarvin_]

As Matt just said, "Schopenhauer as Educator" and "Use and Abuse of History for Life" are in fact widely read and widely assigned; both were part of the 19th century segment of my undergraduate "great books"-style core requirements at BC. And as Matt and Caleb both noted, many completely forgot what the title of the book these essays are from was, including myself, even as I remember the names and general outlines of both essays from having read them, and thus the tossup went dead in our room. My personal take is that that's on us as players and that it really should be a fine answerline, but I can see the other side of the argument since I, myself, stand as evidence that it doesn't play well.

[Banana Stand]

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not

Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is fair or not, but it feels worth pointing out that, from my point of view, contemporary long fiction is way more widely read than either drama or poetry.

from your point of view, yes, sure

The problem here was two-fold. The set (at least my categories) didn’t have enough poetry in general, and the poetry it did have could’ve skewed more contemporary. Henry’s also correct that there was quite a lot of contemporary long fiction, which I’m fine with as a subdistributional quirk since I’m very happy with those questions. Frank Bidart was originally a full tossup but was (correctly) deemed too hard, and Shepard was the last drama answerline I wrote, but I would’ve preferred at least one play from this century (though one of the plays in the Churchill tossup probably fits this lol). The last tossup I wrote for this tournament’s literature was on Citizen specifically because I noticed the dearth of contemporary poetry and didn’t want it to be completely underasked (this was also probably not helped by one of the other contemporary poetry TU’s on South Korea being in the same packet, another minor bit of feng shui that could’ve been handled better). So yes, I’d say Henry and Caroline’s criticism is more than fair! And not to shirk responsibility or insinuate that the distributions weren’t handled with care, but not everything was a deliberate “choice”, sometimes the subdistributions organically swayed a certain way based on where quality submissions were written or what editors were interested in writing. I certainly didn’t go into this set thinking I needed to take contemporary poetry players down a peg, but it’s something I’ll be more cognizant of in the future.

[Mahavishnu]

Howdy. I really enjoyed this set, and found it very fun to play. I may make more comments later, but for now I'd like to note that the question on Daphnis and Chloe is neg-bait for Leucippe and Clitophon (the introduction as an ekphrasis on a painting and the kidnapping by pirates, along with the stylistic/linguistic clues that point to a Greek novel). This makes sense, given that the two works may be related, but it would have been very frustrating to have been negged if I provided the second answer (only stopped by my inability to recall the first half of the title).

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Howdy. I really enjoyed this set, and found it very fun to play. I may make more comments later, but for now I'd like to note that the question on Daphnis and Chloe is neg-bait for Leucippe and Clitophon (the introduction as an ekphrasis on a painting and the kidnapping by pirates, along with the stylistic/linguistic clues that point to a Greek novel). This makes sense, given that the two works may be related, but it would have been very frustrating to have been negged if I provided the second answer (only stopped by my inability to recall the first half of the title).

The ekphrasis at the start of Leucippe and Clitophon is of a painting of the Abduction of Europa, not the plot of the novel, as the tossup on Daphnis and Chloe said. The Greek novels certainly have similar plot points; however, if you're buzzing with the significantly less famous one based on those general similarities, that's definitely a risk you're choosing to take on.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Yeah, the material in Untimely Meditations was great to see come up and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask of players to know where those essays were from - but as posters above have noted, it's one of those instances where you're likely to have encountered the material elsewhere (in my case, mainly from a Nietzsche reader and Kaufmann's biography). IMO it's similar to tossing up a poetry or short story collection where you probably need to weigh carefully how likely players are to have seen the material out of that context/from an anthology/etc. and how important the publication of that collection in and of itself was. I think a tossup on Nietzsche's writings about Schopenhauer would have been pretty sweet, or perhaps a tossup on history focused on German works or Nietzsche specifically, though the latter answer in and of itself might have felt "stale" or guessable. But hey, the question still ended up rewarding people who had some in depth familiarity.