2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Elaborate on the merits of specific tournaments or have general theoretical discussion here.
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Galadedrid Damodred
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2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Galadedrid Damodred »

This is your specific question discussion thread for 2022 Chicago Open. I'll read Finals 2 on Discord very soon (see this post), and then I'll upload the set.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

I like that the tossup on Chekhov from his short stories just went ahead and used Russian names from close to the start, rather than obscuring character and place names to "hide the ball". At CO level, there are enough Russian authors in the answer space that you can do this, allowing for more precise clues about a wider range of stories, without as much fear of rewarding "linguistic fraud".

I think that "aletheia" was mentioned too early in the Heidegger tossup and "Convention" too early in the David Lewis tossup. Both of those terms are real-world important enough that they've been used multiple times as early-to-middle clues at Regionals difficulty. (Though maybe not recently, I dunno.)

EDIT: Since no one else has posted yet, and I remembered some more stuff: What was the full list of accepted answers for "information avoidance"? I buzzed at the end and said "denial" (i.e. being in denial about information), which seemed like an apt descriptor, albeit from psychology rather than economics.

Similar question for the "social media marketing" question -- it seems like every room had some sense of what this was about, but all rooms struggled to produce the desired answer. I was prepared to buzz in and say "community management," as many people who do the described job have the title "Community Manager" or similar, but many of the clues in the middle seemed to also apply to other forms of digital marketing (e.g. email).
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

It is rare that I disagree so strongly with Matt Jackson. And I endeavor not to deliver question-specific tournament commentary these days. But Matt Jackson’s praise for the Chekhov tossup alarms me (because it’s possible that people might read his post and write similar questions in future) and a general principle is at stake. So, I will break with my current practice. Stuffing the Chekhov tossup full of Russian names from the outset was perhaps the only truly terrible tossup idea in this tournament’s literature distribution, whose tossups I thought were otherwise generally well-executed. (Adding to the sentiment of that second clause, I’ll join the chorus of those who think the more accessible subject matter of this tournament's tossups—à la 2019 rather than 2017–18—was most welcome.)

First, the general point: There is seldom a good reason to put character names in the first couple of lines of an eight-line literature tossup, even independent of the question of whether they introduce an element of linguistic fraud. This is for a few reasons:

(1) Lead-ins are the best place in tossups to reward some kind of deep intellectual engagement. Character names do not contribute to that intellectual engagement, except in cases in which they have some sort of symbolic/allegorical meaning or brim with the eccentricity of someone like Dickens. For this reason, I disagree with Matt’s use of the phrase “more precise” to describe the effect of adding character names. If one wishes to make lead-ins "more precise,” those words are better spent on describing the scene being clued more vividly, to make the clue more evocative, or on simply making room for an additional clue that contains more of the intellectual/literary substance of the work being clued.

(2) In my experience—both from my own playing and from talking to other players—the names of obscure characters do not necessarily tend to reward the literature-reader over the non-reading name-memorizer. Character-name flashcards on books I haven’t read have frequently allowed me to beat people who have read the book being tossed up. And I have frequently lost tossups on books I’ve read to people who have rote-memorized character names.

(3) As someone who has a massive flashcard deck of character names that I’ve used from time to time, I am well qualified to say that memorizing them is the most soul-killing part of being a literature player. The less that quizbowl questions require that literature players do this in order to become “good,” the less tedious and more rewarding the experience of studying literature will be.

Now, moving from the general to the specific tossup at hand: While it is true that there are many more tossupable Russian authors at this level than at (e.g.) a two-dot difficulty, I can’t think of any additional Russian short-story writers of the pre-Soviet era who are likely to be tossed up at this difficulty. I don’t want to speak for MattBo (who was one of my opponents in the match that featured this tossup), but I know that Will Alston and I smelled Chekhov almost immediately, and the tossup consequently felt like a giant game of chicken. Now, it is my own fault for playing that game of chicken as poorly as I did. But it was an unpleasant and entirely needless game of chicken nonetheless.

In short, to future writers of literature tossups: Do not write early clues like this. Their contribution to gameplay is overwhelmingly negative. Find some sort of meaningful information or flesh out your descriptions instead. Don't create games of chicken for no good reason.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Yeah, I concur with John that every clue in the Chekhov question sounded like the most Chekhov story ever; I held off from buzzing until late due to both situational pressure and sheer disbelief.

I will say that I don't think I'd narrowed it down chronologically as much as John did, although I likely missed something. In principle I think you can ask about a 19th-century Russian short story writer without being coy about the national/temporal context. In this case, the similarity of some of the early clues to "Lady with a Dog" did make it a game of chicken on my end, though.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

JLaw wrote:Now, moving from the general to the specific tossup at hand: While it is true that there are many more tossupable Russian authors at this level than at (e.g.) a two-dot difficulty, I can’t think of any additional Russian short-story writers of the pre-Soviet era who are likely to be tossed up at this difficulty. I don’t want to speak for MattBo (who was one of my opponents in the match that featured this tossup), but I know that Will Alston and I smelled Chekhov almost immediately, and the tossup consequently felt like a giant game of chicken. Now, it is my own fault for playing that game of chicken as poorly as I did. But it was an unpleasant and entirely needless game of chicken nonetheless.
Matt Jackson is right that there's a bunch of Russian writers that you can toss up at this level. But that being said, the very famous ones will be well-read by the field, to the point where players will start to second-guess themselves at the CO level, particularly after hearing difficult tossups on The Song of Achilles and "The Highwayman". It's good to have "defamiliarization" in that you don't know what to expect in terms of an answer, but such switches in approaches can be quite jarring when they make the questions themselves much easier.

I think writing a tossup that sounds "Chekhovian" in the way that question did is totally fine at this level, provided that your answer isn't Chekhov himself. There's got to be at least twenty tossupable individual Chekhov works at this level, not to mention plenty of common-link ideas. Sometimes you'll get a "Lady with a Dog" question, sometimes it might be something harder like "Rothschild's Violin" - but you won't be able to tell what the answer is from just the prose/general feel alone unless you're quite familiar with the story.

--- MUSINGS ON SPECIFIC HISTORY QUESTIONS ---

I really liked a lot of the history answerline ideas that were an important idea, concept, or event that could probably be answered or recognized by a lot of the field, i.e. ending the slave trade, the racial caste system in the Spanish Americas, Malaysian independence, crossing of the Rhine, etc. These, plus a number of harder answer questions that really just "hit it on the nose" in terms of picking good answers to delve into an area where few writers have really gone recently (Natchez, Chu, Chaulukyas, etc.) showed real thoughtfulness in filling out the tournament, hitting on the under-asked and reframing the well-known. The Natchez question in particular was my favorite of the tournament, highlighting their unique societal structure as one of the last major descendants of Mississippian culture for which we have records of written encounters.

I do think that many of these questions could have trimmed a bit on the early clues and used some later space to "paint more of a picture." For the Natchez question, maybe some more tied-down late clues that hinted at the player that it's a native group in the Louisiana-Mississippi area (one of the early clues mentioned some French names, but at that point it wasn't clear that we were necessarily in the Americas). Empirically, I didn't notice a ton of history buzzer races in our games, but most questions went quite late; I don't recall* a single history power in any of our games on the editor packets, either from our team or our opponents, as contrasted with 8 history powers (3 for us and 5 for our opponents) in our prelim games. This is speculative, but I can imagine that some of the questions where the giveaway got more definitional (such as crossing the Rhine and Malaysian independence) might have produced a fumble-at-the-giveaway experience for weaker teams.

EDIT: grammar

*EDIT 2: I forgot, MattBo first-lined the garum tossup against us
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Sam »

naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:02 pm. The Natchez question in particular was my favorite of the tournament, highlighting their unique societal structure as one of the last major descendants of Mississippian culture for which we have records of written encounters.
I knew nothing about the Natchez before the tossup (except the trail) and want to second Will's praise of the question. I found all the clues interesting even as I knew I wasn't going to get it--neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a question being good, but it certainly helps.

I share Matt Jackson's confusion about the information avoidance question. I mentioned in the other thread that I don't think "description acceptable" is very helpful here. (I've also never heard of any the clues, so maybe there's something I'm missing.)
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Sam wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:20 pm I share Matt Jackson's confusion about the information avoidance question. I mentioned in the other thread that I don't think "description acceptable" is very helpful here. (I've also never heard of any the clues, so maybe there's something I'm missing.)
Maybe you avoided learning the clues.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Sam »

Cheynem wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:23 pm
Sam wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:20 pm I share Matt Jackson's confusion about the information avoidance question. I mentioned in the other thread that I don't think "description acceptable" is very helpful here. (I've also never heard of any the clues, so maybe there's something I'm missing.)
Maybe you avoided learning the clues.
Did I avoid it, or am I in denial? It's unclear.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

Sam wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:20 pm
naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:02 pm. The Natchez question in particular was my favorite of the tournament, highlighting their unique societal structure as one of the last major descendants of Mississippian culture for which we have records of written encounters.
I knew nothing about the Natchez before the tossup (except the trail) and want to second Will's praise of the question. I found all the clues interesting even as I knew I wasn't going to get it--neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a question being good, but it certainly helps.
This question was good because it was both interesting and clued something less than a block from my old apartment.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by kdroge »

Adventure Temple Trail wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:20 pm EDIT: Since no one else has posted yet, and I remembered some more stuff: What was the full list of accepted answers for "information avoidance"? I buzzed at the end and said "denial" (i.e. being in denial about information), which seemed like an apt descriptor, albeit from psychology rather than economics.

Similar question for the "social media marketing" question -- it seems like every room had some sense of what this was about, but all rooms struggled to produce the desired answer. I was prepared to buzz in and say "community management," as many people who do the described job have the title "Community Manager" or similar, but many of the clues in the middle seemed to also apply to other forms of digital marketing (e.g. email).
ANSWER: information avoidance [accept equivalents, such as avoiding information or refusing to look at information; accept the Ostrich Effect before read; prompt on avoidance; reject “information asymmetry”]

ANSWER: reputation management [or ORM; accept brand management; accept answers such as controlling or influencing public opinion; accept answers such as improving a business’s image; accept raising popularity of a business; prompt on advertising; prompt on marketing or digital marketing or social media marketing; prompt on public relations or PR; prompt on manipulating or altering sources of information; prompt on search engine optimization or search engine marketing or SEO or SEM before “SEO”; prompt on tweeting before “Twitter”; anti-prompt on whitewashing or astroturfing or posting fake reviews; reject “branding” or “management” alone]
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Mitchellaneous »

I enjoyed much of the literature in the set, and to discuss a couple of the already discussed lit questions: I enjoyed the tossup on the last chapter of The Age of Innocence, it didn't seem that convoluted to me, and I felt rewarded when I figured it out. The Chekhov tossup wasn't super transparent from what I recall when playing it, but it certainly was the primary answer I was thinking of (also, was it solely cluing the "Little Trilogy"? I don't recall what other stories were clued in it).

I enjoyed the Two Gentlemen of Verona tossup and the Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay bonus, but perhaps having them both in the same packet is not ideal packetization.

I felt that the lead-in to the Vidocq tossup (the yellow leaves of the Memoirs of Vidocq from Joyce's "Araby") seemed quite misplaced as that exact clue was out of power for a 2019 CO tossup on Vidocq. But perhaps I'm overestimating how well known that clue is.

I'm somewhat ignorant of naming conventions, but I felt a bit confused when I was ruled incorrect for saying "Châtelet" for the Émilie du Châtelet tossup, that "du Châtelet" was needed, and that leaving out the "du" doesn't even have a prompt. 2021 Penn Bowl does not require the "du" for a bonus part on her. Perhaps this comparison doesn't work because she's British, but "Maurier" is all that is needed for a tossup on Daphne du Maurier is it not? Again, my ignorance could be to blame for this, but it did strike me as a bit odd.
Last edited by Mitchellaneous on Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

kdroge wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 2:38 pm
Adventure Temple Trail wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:20 pm EDIT: Since no one else has posted yet, and I remembered some more stuff: What was the full list of accepted answers for "information avoidance"? I buzzed at the end and said "denial" (i.e. being in denial about information), which seemed like an apt descriptor, albeit from psychology rather than economics.

Similar question for the "social media marketing" question -- it seems like every room had some sense of what this was about, but all rooms struggled to produce the desired answer. I was prepared to buzz in and say "community management," as many people who do the described job have the title "Community Manager" or similar, but many of the clues in the middle seemed to also apply to other forms of digital marketing (e.g. email).
ANSWER: information avoidance [accept equivalents, such as avoiding information or refusing to look at information; accept the Ostrich Effect before read; prompt on avoidance; reject “information asymmetry”]

ANSWER: reputation management [or ORM; accept brand management; accept answers such as controlling or influencing public opinion; accept answers such as improving a business’s image; accept raising popularity of a business; prompt on advertising; prompt on marketing or digital marketing or social media marketing; prompt on public relations or PR; prompt on manipulating or altering sources of information; prompt on search engine optimization or search engine marketing or SEO or SEM before “SEO”; prompt on tweeting before “Twitter”; anti-prompt on whitewashing or astroturfing or posting fake reviews; reject “branding” or “management” alone]
Could I see the information avoidance tossup? This was a thing I encountered in a decision theory class I took, but I didn't recognize any of the clues, except one which sounded like that one famous "myopic loss aversion" experiment.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Eddie »

Borrowing 100,000 Arrows wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:02 pm
kdroge wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 2:38 pm
Adventure Temple Trail wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:20 pm EDIT: Since no one else has posted yet, and I remembered some more stuff: What was the full list of accepted answers for "information avoidance"? I buzzed at the end and said "denial" (i.e. being in denial about information), which seemed like an apt descriptor, albeit from psychology rather than economics.

Similar question for the "social media marketing" question -- it seems like every room had some sense of what this was about, but all rooms struggled to produce the desired answer. I was prepared to buzz in and say "community management," as many people who do the described job have the title "Community Manager" or similar, but many of the clues in the middle seemed to also apply to other forms of digital marketing (e.g. email).
ANSWER: information avoidance [accept equivalents, such as avoiding information or refusing to look at information; accept the Ostrich Effect before read; prompt on avoidance; reject “information asymmetry”]

ANSWER: reputation management [or ORM; accept brand management; accept answers such as controlling or influencing public opinion; accept answers such as improving a business’s image; accept raising popularity of a business; prompt on advertising; prompt on marketing or digital marketing or social media marketing; prompt on public relations or PR; prompt on manipulating or altering sources of information; prompt on search engine optimization or search engine marketing or SEO or SEM before “SEO”; prompt on tweeting before “Twitter”; anti-prompt on whitewashing or astroturfing or posting fake reviews; reject “branding” or “management” alone]
Could I see the information avoidance tossup? This was a thing I encountered in a decision theory class I took, but I didn't recognize any of the clues, except one which sounded like that one famous "myopic loss aversion" experiment.
Packet 13 wrote: 7. Note to players: description acceptable.
In one study, museum visitors displayed this behavior more often when accepting a risk-free bet on a student’s failure than when accepting a similar bet on a student’s success. In a study of confirmation bias, subjects who obtained “bad news” about their intelligence or attractiveness were more likely to display this behavior than those who obtained “good news.” Economists often classify self-handicapping as a variety of this behavior. This behavior was used to explain the difference in yields between T-bills and equally risky bank deposits in a seminal paper by (*) Galai and Sade. Commonly cited examples of this behavior include bad teachers who don’t look at their reviews, at-risk patients who choose not to get HIV tests, and investors who don’t monitor their portfolios during bear markets. The Ostrich Effect is a form of, for 10 points, what behavior in which people willfully remain ignorant?
ANSWER: information avoidance [accept equivalents, such as avoiding information or refusing to look at information; accept the Ostrich Effect before read; prompt on avoidance; reject “information asymmetry”]
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Can I see the Corsica question? That was one of those questions that seemed to have a somewhat questionable protest resolution in our game.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: Specific Question Discussion

Post by Eddie »

Mike Bentley wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 4:21 pm Can I see the Corsica question? That was one of those questions that seemed to have a somewhat questionable protest resolution in our game.
Packet 1 wrote: 3. A defensive structure used in one of these campaigns inspired a series of copycat designs whose creators mistakenly translated the original structure’s name as “hammer” instead of “myrtle.” Along with the Letters of Junius, criticism of the British government’s timid response to one of these campaigns prompted the collapse of the Grafton ministry. The losing commander in one of these campaigns spent the next 20 years living off a pension granted by George III and hanging out with political supporters like James (*) Boswell. During one of these campaigns that ended with the surrender of Raphaël de Casabianca at Calvi, Horatio Nelson went partially blind in his right eye. The Comte de Vaux (“VOH”) conducted one of these campaigns in 1769 that forced the resistance leader Pasquale (“pass-KWAH-lay”) Paoli to go into exile. For 10 points, name these military expeditions that sought to capture an island off the southern coast of France.
ANSWER: invasions of Corsica [accept equivalents in place of “invasions”, e.g. “conquests” or “occupations”]
{The lead-in refers to the Torra di Mortella, which was the model for the British Empire’s Martello towers.}
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