Illinois Open 2021 - General Discussion and Thanks

[Auroni]

Thanks to everyone for playing Illinois Open. This was a big undertaking, as these things usually are, and it could not have happened without the efforts of a lot of people. First up, my co-editors: Iain Carpenter (physics/other science minus computer science/arts minus film), Mitch McCullar (literature minus poetry), Brad Maclaine (philosophy), Alex Fregeau (history), Jonathen Settle (computer science). All five were delightful to work with and oversaw their categories capably with a creative, bold vision. Next, the large cast of writers: Mike Bentley, Ethan Ashbrook, Justin Wytmar, Jack Christopher, Dylan Bowman, Caroline Mao, Mike Hu, Trevor Hart, Kevin Kodama, Karthik Prasad, Lalit Maharjan, Henry Atkins, Tyler Vaughan, Karan Gurazada, Veer Bhatt, Geoffrey Chen, Olivia Kiser, and Ryan Rosenberg. Special thanks to Jack and Justin for contributing 30 interesting, impressive questions between them despite this being their first forays into writing of any kind. A big shout out to Mike Bentley, Caroline, Trevor, Kevin, Lalit, Henry, Tyler, Karan, Veer, Geoffrey, Ryan, and Jonathen for volunteering to work on the set when we were in dire need two weeks before the first site of the tournament. Thanks also to Olivia, Caroline, and Ethan for proofreading the packets, tightening up a lot of wording, and suggesting pronunciation guides.

I don't have much to say about my approach as a head editor. I've incorporated a lot of approaches and best practices that the community as a whole has pioneered and developed since 2015, with an emphasis on interesting material, diversity (in multiple senses), and playability. Insofar as I did anything differently, it was to consciously rein in the difficulty of many middle parts and some hard parts, aggressively erring on the easier side, gambling that this would almost always result in more enjoyment. Reading at the main site, I think this was the right call.

I've attached the version of the set that was available during the fourth weekend mirror at Maryland (3/14/22). Please do not share them with anyone else who does not have access to the subforum. We have a few more mirrors lined up, and are planning to run an online mirror as well. We're fixing the set for later mirrors, so if you notice any issues, post them in the Errata thread in the subforum rather than here. You can use this thread to give general feedback about the set; comments about specific questions should go in the corresponding thread.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I enjoyed playing this set - a lot of fresh, challenging material that I'm excited to learn about!

I particularly appreciated this set's crisp prose and very detailed "explanatory" clue style, which sacrifices putting in a zillion clues in exchange for fewer, meatier ones which are easy for players to process. This was consistent and noticeable across the humanities categories and the few science areas I pay attention to. Even though I wasn't having a very good day playing this event (for reasons not related to the tournament), it was still pretty easy to follow along, be engaged, etc. This is not meant as an underhanded statement to imply the rest of the aspects of the set weren't good, but it really stood out to me as a big, big positive - the more hard tournaments that are written this way, the better!

With regards to content, I have two main points of critique:

1) The history questions were excellent but, by and large, too hard. Some data I saw suggested that there was exactly one power during the whole main site tournament on the European History category, a pretty odd result given a field with Tejas, MattBo, and Chris Ray, among other excellent history players. I have no real insight if this is because the clues hadn't come up before, topic selection, or whatever - but it does seem like a reasonable case for trimming some early clues and adding late ones. I liked hearing a lot of cultural history clues, legends, books, etc. but also think more room could have been made for "traditional" political history.

2) There were no economics questions during the rounds we played, apart from the misery index tossup which, no offense, isn't a very important topic (both in and out of academia). I get that this category can be fairly tricky to write, but this seems like a pretty glaring oversight. I'm happy to offer some ideas to the writers and maybe write a question or two if that would be helpful.

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

The history questions were excellent but, by and large, too hard. Some data I saw suggested that there was exactly one power during the whole main site tournament on the European History category, a pretty odd result given a field with Tejas, MattBo, and Chris Ray, among other excellent history players. I have no real insight if this is because the clues hadn't come up before, topic selection, or whatever - but it does seem like a reasonable case for trimming some early clues and adding late ones. I liked hearing a lot of cultural history clues, legends, books, etc. but also think more room could have been made for "traditional" political history.

I'm sorry my questions overshot the difficulty mark, but I'm glad to hear you at least liked them conceptually! I'm going to try to tone down some of the harder questions and probably replace a few tossups/bonus parts for future mirrors. I don't know how to weight them and they are all interrelated, but here are some reasons that I think contributed to why the history was so hard:

1. Transparency/dropping clues too early was very much on my mind as I wrote (probably overly so), and I could have been more generous with what I put in power.

2. Only one answerline that could only appear at a tournament of this or greater difficulty was allowed, so I only wrote three that met this condition (Fulbe, Ancestral Pueblo, Canary Islands). Easier answerlines + my fear of making my questions too easy = I erred towards harder clues.

3. For several reasons, I didn't have a great sense for where the ideal difficulty was. I've played several tournaments with the same advertised difficulty, but this was my first time in an editorial position, I haven't staffed a tournament of this difficulty, and I never got much specific feedback on FRENCH I/II, so I don't think my sense of how other people play my questions/questions in general is fantastic.

4. "Traditional" quizbowl history and I don't get along and I wrote the vast majority of the distro. Political parties, politicians, elections, court cases, and tactic/battle-based military history just don't catch my eye. I struggle to make myself write in those veins (or at all, honestly) without at least a novel answerline or theme, but doing so would require having the knowledge of what is novel within those topics. What people thought, felt, believed- that's what moves me and inspires me to write. The legacy of Sparta in Roman times, the belief that the Great Plains were a wasteland, the reflection of 1950's gender roles in kitchens, the rumor that early Christians worshiped donkeys, the centuries-old doodles of a boy from Novgorod- I'll leave appraising the quality of those questions to others, but I loved writing them. I think this passion-driven approach skewed playability much more than for the average set. For better or worse, this was a very "me" set of questions.

[t-bar]

Can you post the version of the set that was played at MIT? I have some (complimentary) thoughts to gather into a post, but I'd like to look through the set first to make sure I'm not just relying on vague recollections.

[Auroni]

Just updated the opening post with the 2/26/22 version of the set that was played at MIT.

[Jem Casey]

I enjoyed playing this set. Many categories--especially lit, history, and "belief"--included an enviably high proportion of clues that were a blast to listen to (and sometimes outright hilarious--the "dog kings" bonus part comes to mind) even when we didn't know them. Thank you all for writing and editing!

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Read at Maryland this weekend after playing the set months ago - wanted to come back and observe that I really liked the set! In particular, this was one of my favorite sets of history questions ever. I was super happy to hear great new questions in the boring old areas I like.

[jinah]

[As a note, this post references both the 3/12 set, which I played, and the 2/26 set, which is the most recent listed on the forums.]

First, I had a fun time playing this set! In particular, the bonuses felt both interesting and accessible; in addition to the “dog kings” bonus Jordan mentioned, I really enjoyed a lot of the lit bonuses, especially the bonuses on “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein” from Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects, the bonus centered on The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, and the bonus on Shakespeare and Keats. I also enjoyed hearing the social history — the kitchens bonus and the bonus on “different ways women made different parts of their silhouettes large or small through fashion” were particularly fun. The “can’t be expressed in first-order logic” tossup was also extremely entertaining and unexpected (and which Caleb first-lined with what appeared to be some very real knowledge).

That said, I did have a few issues. I had some quibbles with the philosophy, which is nitpicky and which I’ll put in specific question discussion. As a more general note, it seemed like the set was overall a little inconsistent on answerlines. This was obviously a burden on moderators, but it also made it frustrating to play some questions. While I am personally a fan of more “creative” answerlines, as well as questions in the vein of “it sounds like a real thing but it’s actually a fictional thing,” it was hard to feel confident buzzing if it wasn’t clear how specific your answer needed to be, or how punctilious the editor/writer in question had been in crafting a given answerline. For example, it feels inconsistent that “the play from Six Characters In Search of an Author” was acceptable for Mixing it Up, but answers like “the country from Pale Fire” were not acceptable or promptable for Zembla. Similarly, there were no alternate answerlines for the strange situation tossup, when the procedure made it sound like a generic procedure could be acceptable, while in the same packet you could (reasonably!) get prompted on related answers on other science tossups, such as decision trees or cirrhosis.

As someone who enjoys questions on fresh or unusual answerlines, I think if editors are going to continue to write and justify them, they should make sure answerlines are adequately and comparably complete and generous. That said, those answerline issues were fairly minor.

On the other hand, I thought the previously-mentioned-in-this-thread imbalance in the social science distribution and the quality issues with the few econ questions were worse problems. Across the full 13 packets, there was one econ tossup (misery index) and I think one econ bonus, which seems like a bizarrely low proportion for a standard set. Similarly, I think there was one linguistics tossup (in round 13, which I assume most teams did not hear), and something like two linguistics bonuses.

Moreover, the econ questions that made it in were not good:

• As Will has pointed out, the misery index is not really notable in either the academic study or practical applications of economics.
• The transaction costs / institutions / rationality bonus is too easy for a set of this difficulty.
• While it appears it wasn’t intended to be played, as it’s not powermarked, the “time preferences” tiebreaker is also flawed in terms of execution and conception. It conflates several different, distinct things, most of which aren’t “behaviors” (as the pronoun indicates).

I am well aware of and sympathetic to the fact that the social science distribution’s breadth makes it hard for a single person to edit it, and especially when a set is in a time crunch, it’s easier to churn out questions on a subcategory the writer or editor knows well (which, based on this set, was psych). However, other sets have managed to get around this issue by asking other people to contribute; lots of the contributors listed for this set can write econ, and I’m not sure why Will’s offer to freelance econ was not accepted. The abnormal SS distribution and the issues in the few econ questions feel like they should have been pretty glaring, and they stood out in what was otherwise a fun, interesting, and well-balanced set.

[Father of the Ragdoll]

On the other hand, I thought the previously-mentioned-in-this-thread imbalance in the social science distribution and the quality issues with the few econ questions were worse problems. Across the full 13 packets, there was one econ tossup (misery index) and I think one econ bonus, which seems like a bizarrely low proportion for a standard set. Similarly, I think there was one linguistics tossup (in round 13, which I assume most teams did not hear), and something like two linguistics bonuses.

Moreover, the econ questions that made it in were not good:

• As Will has pointed out, the misery index is not really notable in either the academic study or practical applications of economics.
• The transaction costs / institutions / rationality bonus is too easy for a set of this difficulty.
• While it appears it wasn’t intended to be played, as it’s not powermarked, the “time preferences” tiebreaker is also flawed in terms of execution and conception. It conflates several different, distinct things, most of which aren’t “behaviors” (as the pronoun indicates).

I am well aware of and sympathetic to the fact that the social science distribution’s breadth makes it hard for a single person to edit it, and especially when a set is in a time crunch, it’s easier to churn out questions on a subcategory the writer or editor knows well (which, based on this set, was psych). However, other sets have managed to get around this issue by asking other people to contribute; lots of the contributors listed for this set can write econ, and I’m not sure why Will’s offer to freelance econ was not accepted. The abnormal SS distribution and the issues in the few econ questions feel like they should have been pretty glaring, and they stood out in what was otherwise a fun, interesting, and well-balanced set.

Thank you for your comments JinAh. I do want to clarify my role with the set given your (justified) comments on phil and soc sci. Primarily that I stepped away from the set after the first mirror over frustrations with the set production process - beyond just the crunch at the end which necessitated a call for writers there were also such issues as knowingly planning to include spoiled content, content remaining unwritten until the morning of the second mirror, and not taking action on feedback such as the comments posted earlier in the thread. Additionally I was never supposed to be anything more than a support writer for soc sci but decided to mass produce content to fill the slots in an attempt to stave off a set delay. Not to excuse any of my soc sci questions which fell flat, I am sorry if those worsened anyone's experience of the set, but I did want to clarify my role with it since I possess the set of initials on the better number of the social science questions. I’m sorry if this affected anyone’s experience, and I hope people enjoyed my questions in spite of this.

As for the philosophy, that lies squarely at my feet. I apologize for any suboptimal experiences arising from questions written by me or edited by me during my time working on the set. I hope overall that the philosophy content produced and overseen during my editing tenure provided challenging and interesting content in spite of the aforementioned issues and I appreciate the time and effort put in to provide feedback on those questions.

[Auroni]

knowingly planning to include spoiled content

One note of clarification -- this is untrue. A player at the main site spoiled three answers in the main quizbowl discord server before deleting them, and I replaced all three questions before the set ran for the second time. I was a bit slow to do it, as I was dealing with considerable burnout from the set production crunch, but nobody would have ever played spoiled questions.

[Auroni]

The aforementioned burnout prevented me from proactively seeking the help of Will or others to shore up the econ content in the set, and for that I'll accept responsibility.

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

Read at Maryland this weekend after playing the set months ago - wanted to come back and observe that I really liked the set! In particular, this was one of my favorite sets of history questions ever. I was super happy to hear great new questions in the boring old areas I like.

I enjoyed playing this set. Many categories--especially lit, history, and "belief"--included an enviably high proportion of clues that were a blast to listen to (and sometimes outright hilarious--the "dog kings" bonus part comes to mind) even when we didn't know them. Thank you all for writing and editing!

Thanks! I spent a lot of time working to highlight fun clues and interesting connections in the history distro, i.e. to not be boring, so I'm glad that people appreciated it!

[t-bar]

Can you post the version of the set that was played at MIT? I have some (complimentary) thoughts to gather into a post, but I'd like to look through the set first to make sure I'm not just relying on vague recollections.

This weekend's mirror reminded me that I never made my promised post praising this set. I thought its content was consistently interesting, well-clued, and fun to listen to. The physics questions were a particular bright spot, at least for me. However, many sets these days are so well-written that that's not really what made this set stand out. Rather, while I was playing I consistently thought back to this goal from the set announcement:

7 of the tossups in each packet will be on an "idea for a question" that could be executed uncontroversially at ACF Fall, and 7 more tossups will be on an "an idea for a question" that would work just fine at ACF Regionals. For a tossup to be counted towards these quota, not only does its answerline have to be sufficiently easy, but it would need to have enough clues that could appear at tournaments of those difficulties.

I haven't counted to check whether the set achieved this goal in a numerical sense, but I definitely felt its spirit throughout the day. In particular, the writers clearly felt that having stuck to this rule for 14 tossups, they had license to get a little wild with the remaining six tossups, which I appreciated. As I alluded to in the fifth paragraph of my Nationals post, I think open sets and "core" closed-circuit events work differently in terms of how much variation in difficulty or predictability there can be. This set nicely wedded the classic Chicago Open sense that anything can come up with a healthy dose of more basic—though certainly not boring or stale—content.

To be specific, I was especially delighted by the tossups on sedevacantism, carcinization, the mass gap, Benjamin's aura, the analytic–synthetic distinction, and of course, "whether the monster's name is Frankenstein," all of which would push the envelope as a tossup answer below and perhaps even at Nationals. I know my teammates had similar reactions to other questions.