2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

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2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Galadedrid Damodred »

This is your general discussion thread for 2022 Chicago Open. I’d like to thank the following people:

-above all, Kurtis Droge, who is the MVP of this set and deserves the lion’s share of the head editing credit;
-our amazing team of seven subject editors;
-our equally amazing team of three logistics coordinators;
-our numerous contributors who wrote, playtested, and/or provided useful comments on questions;
-our volunteer staff who gave up their valuable time to bring the tournament to life;
-and finally, everyone who signed up to play, making this by far the largest Chicago Open to date!

I hope you all had a positive experience. Discuss away.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by VSCOelasticity »

Thank you to all the editors, writers, logistics people, staffers, and anyone else involved in making this event happen. It was an enjoyable quiz bowl death march. I can't say much about individual questions because it was kind of a blur, and evaluating questions at game speed is very difficult.

I had fun playing the vast majority of the science questions. Thank you again to the science writers/editors for their hard work! It was a very difficult but very rewarding set in my opinion. A few trends stuck out to me though:
  • * The physics felt a bit "great man"-like in its answer line choices, especially for harder answers. Chemistry also had 2 (iirc) TU answer lines that were "great men"
    * I liked all the CS questions, but thought the distribution could have been adjusted. I admit this is a matter of preference. I think we played 2/0 data structures and 2/0 computer architecture. With such little space in the tournament, I would've liked to see a wider spread of CS topics represented.
    * The pronoun/referent/whatever was often very late in sentences, making it difficult to process clues well. I don't think this was unique to science questions.
    * A specifically frustrating example of the above was when bonuses, which did not use a "answer the following about X, FTPE." construction, did not place a pronoun in the bonus lead-in. At game speed, it was hard for me to retain the lead-in information and apply it to the bonus part without having the pronoun to anchor it.
    * Bonus length has already been discussed in the Discord and the announcement thread. I'll second that here. Later in the day, I began interrupting moderators on long bonus parts that had already said the easiest information.
Questions I particularly enjoyed/thought were good ideas/remember (select to reveal, I hope): B trees, convection, differential forms, Jupiter, correct (computer programs), heterostructures, branch instructions, and probably more things, but my brain is a bit melted from the experience and the drive. I don't think I can remember a single bonus, oops.

Again, thank you to all involved with the set! It was a blast.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Sam »

This was a very good set. In the other thread someone pointed out how this is a relatively less experienced editing crew and it's really impressive how successful they were with this.

Some of the prompts to the players could have used a little more thought. Several times there'd be a note like "We are asking for TWO countries" and then the tossup would begin "These two countries." I appreciate being clear about what's being asked for, but usually these were unnecessary and just added game time. If the writer is concerned players will lose track it'd be less intrusive to have a note telling the reader to emphasize certain words. More problematic (but also rarer) were "description acceptable" questions where the answer line fell safely in the category of Things with Names. Examples that stand out are "Glorious Revolution" and "information avoidance." Both of these have multiple names, and may warrant more complicated than normal prompts, but "description acceptable" just confused people.

I was also really pleased with the tournament direction. There was never a time where I was unsure where I was supposed to be, or what we were waiting for. One suggestion I'd make, and this isn't at all unique to this tournament, is when sending out email announcements, send them to all players rather than team representatives. That would require getting everyone's email when a team registers but that doesn't seem impossible. It gets rid of one potential bottleneck for messages, and can be especially useful if the team contact isn't actually at the tournament due to something like flight cancellations.

Thanks again to all the writers, staffers, and fellow players for producing such an excellent event.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Overall, this was a fun set that exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed the slightly lower difficulty and would like future COs to stay around this level. Thanks to all the editors for their hard work!

The CS tossups were nice and straightfoward enough that even I could track what was going on throughout most of them, leading to a lot more CS buzzes for me in typical years. I personally had more trouble with the visual fine arts than usual but I'd have to take another look at the questions. I've theoretically read about Sofinisba's chess paintings but apparently forgot all details when playing. There did seem to be more "deep description" in that category than some recent sets I've played which I personally find a little harder to buzz on.

I'll probably have more to say later including some thoughts on specific questions.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Lagotto Romagnolo »

I wrote six physics bonuses scattered throughout the set. A big thanks to Austin for inviting me to contribute and for cleaning up the tortured language of my drafts. I'm glad to hear that people generally enjoyed the set.
VSCOelasticity wrote: Mon Aug 08, 2022 10:39 pm
* The physics felt a bit "great man"-like in its answer line choices, especially for harder answers. Chemistry also had 2 (iirc) TU answer lines that were "great men"
This is a challenging philosophical debate that merits more than one thread. I do see where Jon is coming from. When I edited physics for ACF Nationals 2018, I requested that players limit the number of tossups they submitted on scientists - though my reasoning was not so much to move away from the 'great man' reference frame as to prevent tossups that reduced to pyramidal sequences of eponymous stuff. The final set had two physicist tossups (both by me, admittedly) across the 20-odd packets, which I still think is reasonable. While this year's CO did have a smaller chemistry distribution than the aforementioned nats did physics, I don't think that two TU answerlines on "great men" (if by that term you mean male scientists who worked in the field) is excessive, or even indicative of a general great man lens of the subject.

Which brings me to my larger point: while it is a good thing to recognize the danger of the great man approach and all the other biases/prejudices/economic and power imbalances, etc., that have affected science as much as any field, I'm concerned that we may turn the dial too far in the other direction. Some scientists do make a bigger impact than others, even when that impact happens by luck or because they had resources that others didn't. Equations and experiments have names attached to them that are universally used in the field. People learn and describe those four electromagnetism equations as "Maxwell's equations," even though the behavior they describe has existed since near the dawn of time and he didn't use the divergence and curl operators that we do today.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

I'm responding to Ryan's post from the announcement thread. I figure that this is the more appropriate thread, now that it has been created.
ryanrosenberg wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:19 am The most common way that adherence to the notion of 90% conversion creates a suboptimal playing experience is in the case of a hard tossup on a relatively easy answerline. The editor spends much of the question on very hard clues, then throws in a giveaway that anyone could buzz on. I believe the question on owls from this year's CO, which was entirely about owls on ancient coins before ending with "symbol of Athena", is a good example. This sort of question will invariably lead to a buzzer race in most rooms below the top bracket, and even in some top bracket rooms.
That's not a problem that stems automatically from a 90% conversion rate. That's a problem with gradating clues poorly, thus creating a cliff. That kind of cliffing is equally bad for gameplay regardless of which difficulty level it occurs at. So, for example, I don't know how the Don Quixote tossup played in this tournament. But a deep Don Quixote tossup at CO is a good idea, and I don't think that the giveaway needs to be extra coy to make sure the conversion rate is below 90%.

Rather than discouraging people from writing tossups with 90% conversion, I think we should be encouraging people to pay extra attention to the late clues in 90%-conversion tossups to ensure a smooth pyramid. But if it's not possible to create a smooth pyramid, because the answerline doesn't afford sufficient late-middle clues given the field's knowledge, only then can we say that that particular 90%-conversion tossup answerline is an inherently poor idea.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by gyre and gimble »

Sam wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 12:59 am This was a very good set. In the other thread someone pointed out how this is a relatively less experienced editing crew and it's really impressive how successful they were with this.
I can't stress this enough. I hope this set and its reception will be strong inspiration for other aspiring editors. I am pretty detached from the circuit now, and many of the subject editors on this set were people I have never heard of. But it seemed like they all did an excellent job.

Of course, praise is also due to Kurtis and Austin, who served admirably as the experienced writers and editors that a production team like this would have needed. (And separate from the quality of the set, I think we owe them many thanks just for stepping up and making sure there was a CO set at all!)

I may be having a hard time separating my enjoyment of the set with my enjoyment of playing alongside great teammates, but this was definitely one of my favorite CO experiences.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

So contra everyone else in this thread, I wasn't a huge fan of this set. First, there were a lot of tossups where the answerline was needlessly convoluted, e.g., northeast India, the last chapter of Age of Innocence, etc. These only make the questions easier to fuck up and create additional hassles for moderators who have to read long answerlines and notes to players. Second, the easier tossups made the games a lot more random. There were also quite a few pretty transparent questions (e.g., garum), which turned a lot of the tournament into a cat and mouse game.

The tournament also made a lot of kind of weird and imo bad distributional choices. For example, it's already questionable to have two Indian philosophy tossups, but it's wayyy more questionable to have two Indian phil tossups on the same exact time period in back-to-back rounds. Another glaring example: other than, I believe, Bela Tarr, every film tossup was on a 21st century director!
Last edited by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows on Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I didn't find the last chapter of The Age of Innocence tossup to be that confusing, although you probably could have just done a tossup on The Age of Innocence that only clued the last chapter.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Borrowing 100,000 Arrows wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:19 pm The tournament also made a lot of kind of weird and imo bad distributional choices. For example, it's already questionable to have two Indian philosophy tossups, but it's wayyy more questionable to have two Indian phil tossups on the same exact time period in back-to-back rounds. Another glaring example: other than, I believe Bela Tarr, every film tossup was on a 21st century director!
I think it's quite hard to space out questions in a packet sub tournament as big as this one. But it would have been nice if there was a little more attention paid to intrapacket sub-distributions. I don't have my answer book in front of me but numerous rounds ended up skewed in over-emphasizing particular time periods and regions. Again, this is a really hard problem to solve at a packet-sub tournament of this size but I do think it was one of the weaker parts of the overall set.

I'll also note that the protest resolution process at this tournament wasn't the greatest. We didn't get any formal explanations of why protests were accepted / not. Some of the more long-shot protests filed against us and by our team were accepted leading me to believe that the editors / TDs were working from a looser interpretation of the correctness rules than you'd see at an ACF tournament. One of our protests remains unresolved. I'm not expecting this tournament to have the same level of protest resolution as something like ACF Nationals or PACE NSC but it did seem a little more informal than you'd like for the premiere open tournament of the year.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by meebles127 »

Mike Bentley wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:27 pm I'll also note that the protest resolution process at this tournament wasn't the greatest. We didn't get any formal explanations of why protests were accepted / not. Some of the more long-shot protests filed against us and by our team were accepted leading me to believe that the editors / TDs were working from a looser interpretation of the correctness rules than you'd see at an ACF tournament. One of our protests remains unresolved. I'm not expecting this tournament to have the same level of protest resolution as something like ACF Nationals or PACE NSC but it did seem a little more informal than you'd like for the premiere open tournament of the year.
I have the results of that protest and will communicate them to you as soon as I get home. Unfortunately, I've been experiencing a travel disaster and just made it back to Denver less than 20 minutes ago.

Regarding the protest process in general, I greatly apologize that the justifications for your protests resolutions were not communicated in detail. If there are any specific ones you wish to hear the reasoning for, I am happy to share it with you. This goes for all.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by 1992 in spaceflight »

meebles127 wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:09 pm
Mike Bentley wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:27 pm I'll also note that the protest resolution process at this tournament wasn't the greatest. We didn't get any formal explanations of why protests were accepted / not. Some of the more long-shot protests filed against us and by our team were accepted leading me to believe that the editors / TDs were working from a looser interpretation of the correctness rules than you'd see at an ACF tournament. One of our protests remains unresolved. I'm not expecting this tournament to have the same level of protest resolution as something like ACF Nationals or PACE NSC but it did seem a little more informal than you'd like for the premiere open tournament of the year.
I have the results of that protest and will communicate them to you as soon as I get home. Unfortunately, I've been experiencing a travel disaster and just made it back to Denver less than 20 minutes ago.

Regarding the protest process in general, I greatly apologize that the justifications for your protests resolutions were not communicated in detail. If there are any specific ones you wish to hear the reasoning for, I am happy to share it with you. This goes for all.
This was my error, I mistakenly believed that all protests that needed to be resolved before round 16 started had been resolved, and only noticed it after you said something, Mike.

In the future, I'm leaning towards having one control room person who handles communicating protest resolution as it is needed (and seeing if there are protests that need to be resolved), so as to reduce any confusion and communication issues. I'm open to any other ideas as well, though.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I thought the protest process occasionally took too long in the sense of especially in rooms that only had one staffer, that staffer had to stop reading and fill out a protest form in the middle of a game. In most cases, the protest made no difference, and in most cases, the teams didn't really need to know who won or lost the game before moving on anyway (as opposed to something like HSNCT, where you need to know who won every game for the card system to work).
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by 1992 in spaceflight »

Cheynem wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:37 pm I thought the protest process occasionally took too long in the sense of especially in rooms that only had one staffer, that staffer had to stop reading and fill out a protest form in the middle of a game. In most cases, the protest made no difference, and in most cases, the teams didn't really need to know who won or lost the game before moving on anyway (as opposed to something like HSNCT, where you need to know who won every game for the card system to work).
Yeah, this is something that I will be thinking about when I discuss next year's CO with the next editing team. We had a few staff drops leading up to the tournament, but I think we're probably going to have to be very conservative about field expansion or go on a big staff recruitment drive. (I'd prefer the latter, to be clear here)
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

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Borrowing 100,000 Arrows wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:19 pm Another glaring example: other than, I believe, Bela Tarr, every film tossup was on a 21st century director!
I will concur with this point. Although I for the most part liked the film tossups, it is strange and probably not good that every tossup was on "this director" and that they all skewed pretty modern (even though I enjoyed this detail).
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by kdroge »

First off, I'd like to mirror what Austin said at the start of this thread; a big thanks to everyone who helped make this tournament happen!

I'm sorry that some of the sub-distributions were not ideal. As was earlier suggested, this was party a function of the packet-submission process, and partly a function of having other priorities to fix for writing last-minute replacements. I can see that having two Indian philosophy TUs in the first two rounds of the set was far from great.

I don't have a ton to say about overall ideology; I tried to make sure that the difficulty was reasonable (for CO, of course) and that I was able to cover a wide range of topics. By "reasonable," the way I expressed this from the start of the set was avoiding the feeling of "the packet won." Part of this involved carefully selecting what very hard answer lines to use; part of this involved toning down the difficulty of submissions (I did this far more than making submissions harder, for whatever that's worth).
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

1992 in spaceflight wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:26 pm
Cheynem wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:37 pm I thought the protest process occasionally took too long in the sense of especially in rooms that only had one staffer, that staffer had to stop reading and fill out a protest form in the middle of a game. In most cases, the protest made no difference, and in most cases, the teams didn't really need to know who won or lost the game before moving on anyway (as opposed to something like HSNCT, where you need to know who won every game for the card system to work).
Yeah, this is something that I will be thinking about when I discuss next year's CO with the next editing team. We had a few staff drops leading up to the tournament, but I think we're probably going to have to be very conservative about field expansion or go on a big staff recruitment drive. (I'd prefer the latter, to be clear here)
obviously I would be happy to have a large event but is it perhaps a bit much to expect significant field expansion given that this event was (seemingly to me?) mostly single-staffed rooms of people who were pretty exhausted given how long the event ran? (I tbh thought the event was too big to start). It would be nice to have like, a formal protest committee that doesn't have to do shit in between rounds (My team was somewhat baffled by several protest resolutions, including ones that were ruled in our favor)
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by 1992 in spaceflight »

Good Goblin Housekeeping wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:13 pm
1992 in spaceflight wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:26 pm
Cheynem wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:37 pm I thought the protest process occasionally took too long in the sense of especially in rooms that only had one staffer, that staffer had to stop reading and fill out a protest form in the middle of a game. In most cases, the protest made no difference, and in most cases, the teams didn't really need to know who won or lost the game before moving on anyway (as opposed to something like HSNCT, where you need to know who won every game for the card system to work).
Yeah, this is something that I will be thinking about when I discuss next year's CO with the next editing team. We had a few staff drops leading up to the tournament, but I think we're probably going to have to be very conservative about field expansion or go on a big staff recruitment drive. (I'd prefer the latter, to be clear here)
obviously I would be happy to have a large event but is it perhaps a bit much to expect significant field expansion given that this event was (seemingly to me?) mostly single-staffed rooms of people who were pretty exhausted given how long the event ran? (I tbh thought the event was too big to start). It would be nice to have like, a formal protest committee that doesn't have to do shit in between rounds (My team was somewhat baffled by several protest resolutions, including ones that were ruled in our favor)
There were 6 single-staffed rooms to start the day, and at the end of the day, we had 5. 1 or 2, I could live with, but 5 was definitely too many solo rooms. In the future, I'm going to be more conservative with expanding the CO field.

And yes, a protest committee of people who aren't reading/aren't at the tournament and have the time to research things is the best way to form the protest committee going forward, in my opinion.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

1992 in spaceflight wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:57 pm
Good Goblin Housekeeping wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:13 pm
1992 in spaceflight wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:26 pm
Cheynem wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:37 pm I thought the protest process occasionally took too long in the sense of especially in rooms that only had one staffer, that staffer had to stop reading and fill out a protest form in the middle of a game. In most cases, the protest made no difference, and in most cases, the teams didn't really need to know who won or lost the game before moving on anyway (as opposed to something like HSNCT, where you need to know who won every game for the card system to work).
Yeah, this is something that I will be thinking about when I discuss next year's CO with the next editing team. We had a few staff drops leading up to the tournament, but I think we're probably going to have to be very conservative about field expansion or go on a big staff recruitment drive. (I'd prefer the latter, to be clear here)
obviously I would be happy to have a large event but is it perhaps a bit much to expect significant field expansion given that this event was (seemingly to me?) mostly single-staffed rooms of people who were pretty exhausted given how long the event ran? (I tbh thought the event was too big to start). It would be nice to have like, a formal protest committee that doesn't have to do shit in between rounds (My team was somewhat baffled by several protest resolutions, including ones that were ruled in our favor)
There were 6 single-staffed rooms to start the day, and at the end of the day, we had 5. 1 or 2, I could live with, but 5 was definitely too many solo rooms. In the future, I'm going to be more conservative with expanding the CO field.

And yes, a protest committee of people who aren't reading/aren't at the tournament and have the time to research things is the best way to form the protest committee going forward, in my opinion.
I was completely unaware that the majority of rooms were dual staffed because I have pretty strong memories of half or so of my games being in solo rooms (my memory of this is pretty weak now admittedly) so I suppose I should apologize for suggesting that was the case (although perhaps it's a problem in itself that I had this impression)
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by ryanrosenberg »

I also think that requiring teams on bye to staff would have been the right move. That would have ensured full double-staffing (since 3 teams on bye, those 3 staffers can pair with the remaining single staffers).
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

ryanrosenberg wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:14 pm I also think that requiring teams on bye to staff would have been the right move. That would have ensured full double-staffing (since 3 teams on bye, those 3 staffers can pair with the remaining single staffers).
I do think this has the potential for slowing down rooms as you deal with people switching off computers or instructing them to use a computer they don't usually use. Printed packets for this room(s) might be a better option to keep things moving.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Good Goblin Housekeeping wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:13 pm
obviously I would be happy to have a large event but is it perhaps a bit much to expect significant field expansion given that this event was (seemingly to me?) mostly single-staffed rooms of people who were pretty exhausted given how long the event ran? (I tbh thought the event was too big to start). It would be nice to have like, a formal protest committee that doesn't have to do shit in between rounds (My team was somewhat baffled by several protest resolutions, including ones that were ruled in our favor)
Without making too fine a point of it, I would also note that we had a protest resolution in a key playoff game that was rather baffling. I am to understand that the resolution was made with the direct consultation of the subject editor, but the given answer very clearly did not and couldn't reasonably apply to a large number of the previous clues given the language of the question; we were pretty surprised that it was ruled outright acceptable and not just promptable (or wrong). Admittedly, under the current ACF rules regarding "should have been prompted," this would have been unlikely to change the outcome of the game, but it was still rather strange.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by CPiGuy »

I quite enjoyed playing this set. It was very interesting and felt like a death march (in a good way) while not just being completely impossible or, worse, boring.

I will add my voice to the chorus of people who noted that the questions, especially the bonuses, were far too long, and I think this was the primary cause of the tournament's delays -- even if the 16-round schedule and staffing situation had not changed, the tournament would probably have finished an hour or more earlier with questions even of the same length as this year's ACF Nationals. I would encourage next year's CO editors to implement, and stick to, a hard cap on tossup and bonus length.

I also think that future CO TDs should very strongly consider using three-phase tournament formats when appropriate. These have the advantage of accommodating larger fields without very harsh prelims -> playoffs cutoffs, are more resilient to seeding errors, and provide teams more games against other teams of similar strength. While they do introduce an additional rebracketing break, CO prelims with field sizes in the 20-36 range would generally be long enough that lunch would come before rebracketing anyway, so this wouldn't introduce additional breaks to the schedule.

Lunch was also pretty long, but given that we had to get our own food and the closest establishments to the tournament building were around 10 minutes away, this was greatly appreciated. In future, I wonder if it may be possible to save time on lunch by placing a large food order for tournament attendees as well as staff (which would presumably be baked -- pardon the pun -- into the tournament entry fee). This would obviously require some additional amount of pre-tournament planning but I think is definitely worth considering.

In general I appreciated the moderator instructions in this set. However I think we could have done without the "we are looking for a first name, not a surname" warnings in questions that began "This first name...". If you don't listen to the question and you neg as a result then you should have listened to the question better.

There was one particular recurring theme in the set which was somewhat irritating, namely the presence of like, four or five very soft easy parts that all consisted of "name the decade in which [extremely well-known event] took place". I'm generally not a fan of "FTP touch your nose" bonus parts at tournaments that are this difficult, and obviously while some of them are going to have to happen it's weird that so many of them had the same exact form.

Overall, though, I think this set was quite good and rewarded both traditional "quizbowl knowledge" and substantive engagement with topics outside of the standard quizbowl canon. Thanks to all the writers and editors for what was clearly a lot of hard work that went into it.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I wanted to post a short screed against a really bad practice that cropped up several times in this tournament. If you're going to have "description acceptable" tossups, which is itself totally fine, you simply cannot give a description of the thing at the end of the tossup for players to paraphrase and then get points. It's cheap, stupid, not at all fun gameplay, and creates bizarre situations for moderators having to evaluate what a player said to see if it's just "you said the thing in the tossup" or an acceptable answer. Please stop writing this way.

You should also consider something other than "description acceptable" for the preface to a tossup on something that has a name (but you'll also accept descriptions). The "description acceptable" only serves to confuse and discourage buzzes when it's appended to an answer such as "Glorious Revolution" (which has an obvious and well-known name) rather than something that does not have any sort of reified name, and you should consider something like "we'll accept either a name or a description" for tossup answers such as "Glorious Revolution."
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Gene Harrogate »

I had a great time at this set, and thought that it had a high proportion of clues that were fun to listen to. I'm particularly glad that it featured many relatively new 4 dot editors; there's an idea sometimes expressed that I find unhelpful, which is that there are only a single digit number of active players capable of editing a quality high-level event. Some of my favorite questions included Tolstaya, the bonus on Faulkner quips, Gordon Parks, David Graeber, Magda Szabo bobus, the Faust legend, poetry in Dream of the Red Chamber (though I'm curious what the translation was), The Secret Agent, the trial of Joan of Arc, flensing bonus, and the bonus on jokes. I also like the way this tournament tossed up ACF Fall level answerlines like Kafka and Ionesco without any gimmick (as much as I also love gimmicks).

I did, however, want to draw attention to a question-writing practice that I find creates janky gameplay. Many of the literature commonlinks in this set took a very wide (as opposed to deep) approach, in which every line introduced a basic description of a new work. These questions effectively played as a list of titles ordered by obscurity, asking players "have you heard of this." Here's an example from Editors 1:
17. The narrator recalls the death of his father and growing up in this place with his sister Sylvia in Joseph Heller’s memoir Then and Now. Isaac Bashevis Singer discusses tourist visas in a sketch titled “A Day in” this location. A rich man falls in love with a millinery shop worker after spending time in this location, unaware that he owns the tenement where she lives, in O. Henry’s story “Brickdust Row.” In a movie theater, the narrator watches his parents go on a date to this place in (*) Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” This is a place where “Everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters” in Henry Miller’s book Black Spring. A poem in a collection partly named for this place begins “The pennycandystore beyond the El / is where I first / fell in love / with unreality.” For 10 points, “Junkman’s Obbligato” appears in a Lawrence Ferlinghetti collection titled for what place “of the Mind”?
ANSWER: Coney Island [prompt on New York City or Brooklyn; prompt on boardwalks or amusement parks]
<American Literature>
The issue with this tossup is that it creates a gameplay situation in which reading any of the clued works and knowing their basic premises are functionally equivalent. A player who has read "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" can easily lose to a player who has read a description of it or heard the tossup on it from a few ACF Nationals ago. In my ideal world, this tossup looks something like 1. Something that happens in "Brickdust Row", 2. Somethng that happens in "In Dreams", 3. "Brickdust Row title drop", 4. "In Dreams" title drop or some Ferlinghetti clue, etc. Basically, I think commonlinks focused on rewarding broad knowledge are better gradated when tempered with some clues targeting deep knowledge as well.

My only other complaint would be the occasionally awkward way the set clued gender (i.e., "For 10 points, name this female author of Speetboat.") Again, I thought the literature and other categories in this set were quite enjoyable and overall accesible.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I think it's unfair to single this CO out as having particularly long questions. I certainly don't think CO 2019 and 2021 had shorter questions; rather, they just had fewer rounds and some contributing factors that made rounds take less time - harder answers in 2021 meant more dead tossups and fewer bonuses heard; easier tossups in 2019 led to earlier buzzes, shortening game time.

At least in the areas of literature I'm more knowledgeable about - older literature and poetry - I found the questions to be very well-done. Again, at least in these areas (perhaps not others) the common-links (God in Rilke, Ann, rings, birds, Latin, women from the finals, etc.) generally rewarded of a solid combination of depth and breadth; maybe the moon tossup didn't need to drop "elixir of immortality" in the middle, but that also struck me as a smart way of asking a lot of older Japanese prose. The Aesop tossup clued heavily from the Aesop romance was also a delight. The lit bonuses also seemed more 30able than some of the other humanities areas, though perhaps that's just my teammates' skills talking.

I know many folks weren't a fan of the inclusion of a lot of lowbrow and genre lit questions, but on principle I appreciate that Kurtis's questions try to pay attention to a wide audience. I think it's a good idea to try to represent some of these areas in harder tournaments, and maybe even in some easier ones, without dipping into contemporary pulp too much (ala the YA lit tossups that have poor conversion rates at NAQT events). Perhaps the volume of these "low-midbrow" questions could have been tuned back a bit and there could have been some better genre balance, with maybe a bit more "highbrow" sci-fi and fewer mystery/fantasy stories, but there's something worth building on here.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Jem Casey »

Thanks to the editors for a very fun set! I’d like to post some more feedback soon, but a couple other things for now:
Gene Harrogate wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 1:20 pm I did, however, want to draw attention to a question-writing practice that I find creates janky gameplay. Many of the literature commonlinks in this set took a very wide (as opposed to deep) approach, in which every line introduced a basic description of a new work. These questions effectively played as a list of titles ordered by obscurity, asking players "have you heard of this." Here's an example from Editors 1:
...
The issue with this tossup is that it creates a gameplay situation in which reading any of the clued works and knowing their basic premises are functionally equivalent. A player who has read "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" can easily lose to a player who has read a description of it or heard the tossup on it from a few ACF Nationals ago. In my ideal world, this tossup looks something like 1. Something that happens in "Brickdust Row", 2. Somethng that happens in "In Dreams", 3. "Brickdust Row title drop", 4. "In Dreams" title drop or some Ferlinghetti clue, etc. Basically, I think commonlinks focused on rewarding broad knowledge are better gradated when tempered with some clues targeting deep knowledge as well.
This is an interesting argument, but I think the issues with this tossup don’t have much to do with “wide” commonlinks being more janky than “deep” ones. One problem is that the premise of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is by the far the most buzzable clue until the pre-giveaway clue, and possibly until FTP (I personally don’t know the “pennycandystore” poem, but it may be famous). I wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk of rooms had players with basic “In Dreams” knowledge--it’s been part of the upper-level qb canon for a decade and has been ceaselessly referenced, recommended, and analyzed by writerly types for much longer. In contrast, I’d be seriously impressed if anyone was on top of the Singer or O. Henry clues; if Google results are to be believed, buzzing on either would require being a world-class expert on their respective authors’ deep cuts, or having gone through an edition of their complete stories somewhat recently. The Miller clue seems interesting, but it’s functionally just rewarding guesses based on context, since almost no one in the field will know specific lines from Black Spring. If these were the best available clues for a “wide” Coney Island tossup, I agree it would be better gradated with in-depth clues about “In Dreams” or Ferlinghetti, or just as a tossup on whichever of these authors the question writer was most excited to ask about.

More generally: practical complaints about “wide” commonlinks can almost always be teased out into broadly agreed-upon principles of question-writing that really have little to do with any particular tossup construction. In this case, the “Coney Island” tossup may have violated the maxim that a tossup’s clues should be plausibly ordered and gradated in difficulty. Other examples: if the field notices that a lot of tossups in a set take a “wide” approach, the editor may have miscalculated on their subdistro, in the same way as if a set had a ton of “this country” tossups or 2/2 poetry. Or, if a tossup is really a ne plus ultra of the “wide” form and just lists premises + authors + title fill-in-the-blank’s, it likely comes up against the common intuition that tossup clues should be “interesting” and varied. Or, if a clue in a “wide” commonlink rewards superficial knowledge of an out-of-print book most notable for having a page linked on its author's wiki page, it would be just as lame in a tossup on that writer.

We probably share the sense that there’s something unsatisfying about a commonlink that ties a bunch of canonical material to a detail they only coincidentally have in common, however mechanically sound it is (not to mention that cluing ~6 canonical authors in one question can be a pain for set production and packetization). But I wouldn’t proscribe “wide” commonlinks in general because that’s not usually how or why they’re written these days. Most often, a writer is taking a bet that the field has untapped knowledge of a significant work (or field of study, historical era, etc.) that would be too extra-canonical to ask about any other way (I assume this is what Nick was doing in his "Carnival" submission, for instance). Sometimes it doesn’t work out--if a set contains a ton of efforts at canon expansion that no one is ready for, the writers may have to re-evaluate the processes they used to select those clues. But when it does, the knowledge a “shallow” commonlink clue rewards is often no less “deep” or worth points than in-depth knowledge of a more familiar text.
naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 2:57 pm I think it's unfair to single this CO out as having particularly long questions. I certainly don't think CO 2019 and 2021 had shorter questions; rather, they just had fewer rounds and some contributing factors that made rounds take less time - harder answers in 2021 meant more dead tossups and fewer bonuses heard; easier tossups in 2019 led to earlier buzzes, shortening game time.
Not sure how this stacks up with previous years' sets, but this set did seem to have a lot of bonus parts/leadins that ran on to a third line, when most of what was interesting and helpful about them could have been expressed more economically (for instance, see bonus parts like "ethnoscapes" or "preface to Lyrical Ballads" in the first packet I opened, Editors 1). Just something that future editors might want to control more carefully, especially if the other factors Will identified (lots of rounds and easier answers) remain in place.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Sam »

Jem Casey wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 8:50 am More generally: practical complaints about “wide” commonlinks can almost always be teased out into broadly agreed-upon principles of question-writing that really have little to do with any particular tossup construction. In this case, the “Coney Island” tossup may have violated the maxim that a tossup’s clues should be plausibly ordered and gradated in difficulty. Other examples: if the field notices that a lot of tossups in a set take a “wide” approach, the editor may have miscalculated on their subdistro, in the same way as if a set had a ton of “this country” tossups or 2/2 poetry. Or, if a tossup is really a ne plus ultra of the “wide” form and just lists premises + authors + title fill-in-the-blank’s, it likely comes up against the common intuition that tossup clues should be “interesting” and varied. Or, if a clue in a “wide” commonlink rewards superficial knowledge of an out-of-print book most notable for having a page linked on its author's wiki page, it would be just as lame in a tossup on that writer.

We probably share the sense that there’s something unsatisfying about a commonlink that ties a bunch of canonical material to a detail they only coincidentally have in common, however mechanically sound it is (not to mention that cluing ~6 canonical authors in one question can be a pain for set production and packetization). But I wouldn’t proscribe “wide” commonlinks in general because that’s not usually how or why they’re written these days. Most often, a writer is taking a bet that the field has untapped knowledge of a significant work (or field of study, historical era, etc.) that would be too extra-canonical to ask about any other way (I assume this is what Nick was doing in his "Carnival" submission, for instance). Sometimes it doesn’t work out--if a set contains a ton of efforts at canon expansion that no one is ready for, the writers may have to re-evaluate the processes they used to select those clues. But when it does, the knowledge a “shallow” commonlink clue rewards is often no less “deep” or worth points than in-depth knowledge of a more familiar text.
I agree very much with Jordan's entire post. To his last point I would add that in the course of doing a "deep" dive into a particular book or study or subfield, people often accumulate a great amount of "shallow" knowledge about books/studies/subfields bordering it. I can think of several papers or books I've never read but know the rough thesis because they're so often cited in things I have read. Of course literature doesn't explicitly cite its influences (as amusing as that would be) but I think it's fair to assume reading lots of novels or poems is positively correlated with reading book reviews, academic essays, and other secondary sources.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Jem Casey »

A few notes, by category:

Literature: while Kurtis’s answer difficulty restraint was impressive, I thought he picked his spots well in the harder end of the lit content too--the few canon-busting tossup answers (e.g. Renata Adler) were well-chosen, and the hard parts seemed reasonable. In case my subjective difficulty assessments are of any interest, the early clues felt as hard as or harder than other recent COs’ literature, but the questions got to the point much more quickly after power than CO questions usually do, causing some buzzer races. The Anne commonlink is one example of this; the first two clues look quite niche and the pre-power clue is roughly the same as the pre-power clue in the Anne More-themed Donne tossup last year, but the three clues before FTP--Wyatt’s Anne Boleyn connection, Anne More, and Anne Hathaway--could each be in or near the giveaway at this level. And as good as the content was, the tossup constructions sometimes felt “experimental” in a way that’s more common in hard subject tournaments than in marquee open sets. Examples include: the several “[X] from [Y]” tossups; conceits that petered out of normal pyramidal form a bit near the end (Rilke’s “Autumn Day” is great but it’s a big drop from that to “whose in charge of the angels,” the Don Quixote tossup that ended by emphasizing the cave episode and not naming Cervantes confused some teams); and, the Oresteia tossup, which wouldn't have lost anything as a tossup on Aeschylus (might just be me, but I spent several clues trying to remember which "work" in the trilogy the clues applied to).

History: +1 on Will’s praise and difficulty analysis from the other thread. Some highlights include the smattering of creative “textual” clues (e.g. De Maistre on executioners, the “bringing owls to Athens” idiom, Tacitus’s quip about Galba, and the Vasconcelos clue in the casta system tossup) and the social history (stuff like the Natchez and Venice tossups, or the tertulias hard part). History medium parts seemed to require more Guy Remembering than many of the other categories (e.g. Peter Lalor, Torstenson, Szálasi), which may have made the bonuses relatively hard on washed people (me). The tossups on specific historical moments (e.g. the Draft Eisenhower movement, the funeral of Napoleon, the crossing of the Rhine) were very entertaining, but I'd be surprised if the field had the depth of knowledge tested by some of them.

Philosophy: especially in the editors packets, Young did a great job of picking buzzable clues for significant thinkers and texts. For the sake of offering feedback, one suggestion: for hard parts that both sound and are very hard (thinking of stuff like The Logic of the Moral Sciences, the Menexenus, or Thomas Abbt), a good exercise might be wording the prompts in a way that makes the case for why they're interesting and deserve to be an answer; if this is difficult to do, you can always find a more accessible (or at least accessible-sounding) way to ask about whichever part of the content you'd like to emphasize.

My will to post is fading, but I'd also like to praise Young's work on the VFA, Austin's religion, and Ashish's geography; there were lots of cool ideas in these categories. Thanks again to all the editors for their hard work.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Jem Casey wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:10 pm The tossups on specific historical moments (e.g. the Draft Eisenhower movement, the funeral of Napoleon, the crossing of the Rhine) were very entertaining, but I'd be surprised if the field had the depth of knowledge tested by some of them.
I liked these questions. To me, at least, it's easier to to come up with one of these answers than a more straightforward but harder answer line. It's probably been 12 years since I last read about the repatriation of Napoleon but it was memorable enough to stick in my mind, whereas I probably wouldn't convert the name of some second tier Napoleonic battle anymore.

There were a couple of questions that I found somewhat easy to figure out from cross-category knowledge. For instance, the tossup on banks in Islam pretty clearly told you that these were "institutions" that existed early in Islamic history and had some regulations. Knowing some basics about the history of this era, it was hard to imagine there would be many other possible answers.

The VFA tossup on circuses had an early clue about an artist "running off to join" this occupation, which is most commonly associated with the circus (at least in my experience). The "donors" question gave you the "description acceptable" hint that it would be a somewhat "weird" answer line and then mentioned several examples of these types of people being around saints and praying. Without necessarily knowing these particular paintings, it was pretty easy to buzz with high confidence that it had to be donors.

To some extent, I personally like tournaments that have these types of questions as I think I'm a better than average player at either figuring these out or putting aside doubts and just hitting the buzzer. But I definitely had more successful guess buzzes in this year's set than last year's.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Mike Bentley wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:53 pm
Jem Casey wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:10 pm The tossups on specific historical moments (e.g. the Draft Eisenhower movement, the funeral of Napoleon, the crossing of the Rhine) were very entertaining, but I'd be surprised if the field had the depth of knowledge tested by some of them.
I liked these questions. To me, at least, it's easier to to come up with one of these answers than a more straightforward but harder answer line. It's probably been 12 years since I last read about the repatriation of Napoleon but it was memorable enough to stick in my mind, whereas I probably wouldn't convert the name of some second tier Napoleonic battle anymore.
I liked these questions as well, but I think the point is that the questions demanded quite a deep command of the specific details in order to score a strong buzz. For example, the crossing of the Rhine is important and worth asking about, but looking at the text of the question, you really have to know the names of the specific leaders involved or the specific date on which it occurred; otherwise, you're probably stuck buzzing around "frozen" (as I did) since there were quite a few consequential events involving barbarian migrations that could plausibly be asked. Calibrating this correctly is a tricky process - as an editor, it takes a lot of intuition to divine whether folks are going to know the date of December 31, 406 CE, or the exogamous marriage patterns of the Natchez, or whatnot. It's also a lot more important to get this right with easier-to-convert answers since those are, well, easier to come up with and thus more likely to produce buzzer races if they go late; and precisely, because they're easier, it's a lot more tempting to "hide the ball" as an editor.

At CO it's more "fine" to overshoot than other tournaments because, at least at the top, the field is good enough to handle it anyways; empirically, it didn't seem like there were many more more history buzzer races than in other categories, even though the vast majority of history questions were going well into or past the sixth line in our playoff games. If the questions were of lower quality than those of this set, I could see this producing more issues with the play experience; I'd be curious to hear from teams in other brackets on how these played out.
Last edited by naan/steak-holding toll on Mon Aug 15, 2022 8:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

As a team which I think was literally the median team at CO, it seemed like all of the aforementioned history questions went like to the end, dead, or buzzer race near the end. That doesn't inherently mean much--I can't say any of us had deep history knowledge of the topics in question. In many cases, I would guess my teammates and I probably had an inkling of what was going on but didn't know the exact thing to say (story of my life). I didn't play the draft Eisenhower tossup at the tournament, but it is the only one of the mentioned questions which I do have some knowledge on--it seems good but very hard.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Here Comes Rusev Day »

I was on Dr Mike's median team, and I feel the same way in regard to the history tossups. There just weren't many things asked on the day tossup-wise where we had deep knowledge of and probably saw more of that in the bonuses (For example the historiography bonus with Eugen Weber, would have 30ed the last bonus on the Cheese and the Worms if we got to it). Didn't feel at most points of the day where it was asking us for something unreasonable, but rather just points where we really didn't know how to answer it or just didn't know it (for example the "Invading Corsica" tossup which geographically I think we figured out what was going on but didn't know there were multiple operations of invading Corsica). I think many will agree that this set was generally hard to power on and history was one of those topics where it might have been harder to get there.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

Jem Casey wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:10 pm Philosophy: especially in the editors packets, Young did a great job of picking buzzable clues for significant thinkers and texts. For the sake of offering feedback, one suggestion: for hard parts that both sound and are very hard (thinking of stuff like The Logic of the Moral Sciences, the Menexenus, or Thomas Abbt), a good exercise might be wording the prompts in a way that makes the case for why they're interesting and deserve to be an answer; if this is difficult to do, you can always find a more accessible (or at least accessible-sounding) way to ask about whichever part of the content you'd like to emphasize.
I don't want to be too critical, because I appreciate the effort Young put into this set. But, the philosophy was extremely frustrating to play especially the editors' packets. However, I think the mistakes made in this set are representative of the mistakes a lot of people make when writing philosophy; so, I think they might be worth cataloguing. There were several tossups with mechanical issues, but I'll leave that to the other thread and get to my big philosophical (hehe) issues with the set.

First, every (??) tossup was on a thinker, text, or school, and tended to read/play like glorified literature questions. This is really poor form in my opinion. Philosophy is first and foremost about ideas; hence, those should be at the forefront of the philosophy distro. Furthermore, tossups on ideas tend to not only be more interesting, but have higher conversion rates (e.g., a tossup on just war theory is going to be easier for most people to convert than say a tossup on Hugo Grotius). Likewise, the choice of topics was often suboptimal. The section of Mills' A System of Logic, for example, isn't just hard, it's also just not important; likewise, the Menexenus is not something that I think even ancient Greek philosophers care about. Again, if I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that these sorts of ideas derive from a tendency to write philosophy as though it were literature.

Tl;dr: Everyone should resist the urge to write philosophy as if it were literature (that's why it has its own 1/1 guys!)
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Jem Casey »

Borrowing 100,000 Arrows wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:17 pm
Jem Casey wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:10 pm Philosophy: especially in the editors packets, Young did a great job of picking buzzable clues for significant thinkers and texts. For the sake of offering feedback, one suggestion: for hard parts that both sound and are very hard (thinking of stuff like The Logic of the Moral Sciences, the Menexenus, or Thomas Abbt), a good exercise might be wording the prompts in a way that makes the case for why they're interesting and deserve to be an answer; if this is difficult to do, you can always find a more accessible (or at least accessible-sounding) way to ask about whichever part of the content you'd like to emphasize.
I don't want to be too critical, because I appreciate the effort Young put into this set. But, the philosophy was extremely frustrating to play especially the editors' packets. However, I think the mistakes made in this set are representative of the mistakes a lot of people make when writing philosophy; so, I think they might be worth cataloguing. There were several tossups with mechanical issues, but I'll leave that to the other thread and get to my big philosophical (hehe) issues with the set.

First, every (??) tossup was on a thinker, text, or school, and tended to read/play like glorified literature questions. This is really poor form in my opinion. Philosophy is first and foremost about ideas; hence, those should be at the forefront of the philosophy distro. Furthermore, tossups on ideas tend to not only be more interesting, but have higher conversion rates (e.g., a tossup on just war theory is going to be easier for most people to convert than say a tossup on Hugo Grotius). Likewise, the choice of topics was often suboptimal. The section of Mills' A System of Logic, for example, isn't just hard, it's also just not important; likewise, the Menexenus is not something that I think even ancient Greek philosophers care about. Again, if I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that these sorts of ideas derive from a tendency to write philosophy as though it were literature.

Tl;dr: Everyone should resist the urge to write philosophy as if it were literature (that's why it has its own 1/1 guys!)
With the (rather substantial) caveat that I'm not a philosopher and am worse at writing philosophy questions than Caleb, I'd be interested to hear more about his reasoning here; why should editors avoid writing tossups on philosophers or texts if the clues used are 1) things players would encounter while pursuing an academic or personal interest in philosophy and 2) uniquely and notably associated with the intended answer?

I'm not sure if Caleb means to say that no "literary" features of philosophical primary sources (stuff like famous passages, colorful metaphors, unusual formatting features) are fair game for philosophy questions; I happen to disagree if so, but even granting that restriction, it doesn't seem like the thinker questions in this set were particularly "literary." At a glance, the tossups on, for instance, Jaegwon Kim and David Lewis seem to mostly summarize famous arguments and concepts from their famous papers in (apart from the misplaced Convention title drop) a plausibly correct order. If the property exemplification theory of events is 1) discussed in The Academy and 2) mostly encountered in Kim's paper itself, or otherwise sources that credit his work, what makes a tossup that ties it together with other similarly buzzable contributions due to Kim worse than one that ties it together with other work on "properties" or "events"? And not to confuse two separate issues (answerline selection vs. clue selection), but I also thought that the "work" tossups had well-chosen answers and seemed solidly clued. The Mengzi and (the fragments of) Peri Physeos are the only extant works credited to their much-discussed authors, so it doesn't seem terribly unfair to require knowledge of stuff like the Mengzi's passage about Yangism for power.

On a practical note, concept tossups are much harder to write without introducing ambiguities or errors and, even when successful, more likely to punish the momentary lapses in brain function that everyone experiences while playing a long day of difficult quizbowl questions. As a possible case in point, my only philosophy neg was on the one "this property" tossup of the editors packets (the "necessity" one, which was also arguably the weakest of the batch in execution). I think that Young, as a relatively inexperienced editor at this difficulty level, made the right call by not trying to go too big-brained with their tossup conceits and did an excellent job with almost all the answers they picked.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

I also disagree somewhat with Caleb. Many people definitely do engage with historical primary source texts from philosophical traditions by reading them rather closely as-is (e.g. in "Great Books" type curricula/courses). I think different editors have wide latitude in where they set the slider between a "literary"/historical-text-based approach versus a depersonalized/"ideas-first" approach, though the best sets will always have a bit of both based on what's better for a particular topic. (I agree somewhat with Caleb, in that I don't think any sizable number of players have good textual recall of either A System of Logic or Menexenus.)

(Tangentially: at least one philosopher argued explicitly that philosophy just is a kind of literature!)
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

Jem Casey wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 5:31 pm
I'm not sure if Caleb means to say that no "literary" features of philosophical primary sources (stuff like famous passages, colorful metaphors, unusual formatting features) are fair game for philosophy questions.

I certainly don't mean anything that strong, and I agree with most of what you and Matt have to say. What I mean is, you shouldn't write philosophy questions as if they're lit questions. For example, a lot of hard lit tossups get written by finding deep cuts by an author and making them the lead-in or whatever. This same style of writing doesn't translate to thought questions, because, well, a lot of thinkers deep cuts aren't actually important.

For example, I didn't like the tossup on Kim because it felt very quizbowly. You find a dude that's come up at other hard tournaments, and find some deep cut papers by him. But, in real world philosophy, Kim isn't super famous outside of the pairing problem and the supervenience argument. However, we get in power a bunch of stuff about his kind of esoteric contributions to a debate about the metaphysics of events from the 70s and 80s that's mostly been forgotten (I think compared to Davidson, Parsons, etc. Kim's work on events is much less important and infrequently read).

So, again, it's not that I don't think literary elements of philosophicals works are fair game, they most certainly are. Rather, I think the recipes people use to write hard lit questions (like, find hard guy, find more obscure works by hard guy) really don't make for good hard philosophy (or, for that matter, social science) questions. I think by focusing on concept tossups I sort of obscured the bigger point I wanted to make, but hopefully that makes sense? This is something that's been bothering me for awhile but I've had a hard time articulating it clearly.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

Borrowing 100,000 Arrows wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 4:17 pm Tl;dr: Everyone should resist the urge to write philosophy as if it were literature (that's why it has its own 1/1 guys!)
Rather, I think the recipes people use to write hard lit questions (like, find hard guy, find more obscure works by hard guy) really don't make for good hard philosophy (or, for that matter, social science) questions.
I find Caleb's way of framing this issue rather odd. I understand why focusing on authors/works (rather than on concepts) may seem to derive from literary approaches. But otherwise, the way that Caleb describes how literature questions are written (“find hard guy, find more obscure works by hard guy”) is not how most post-Yaphe editors think literature questions should be written.

I actually think the process of choosing lead-ins in both disciplines should be somewhat similar. In the cases when one is, indeed, writing on an individual author (literary or philosophical), one needs to determine how much of their body of work is regularly engaged with, in the world at large and/or in the quizbowl community. How “deep” one can go into their oeuvre is individual-specific, not something one can determine using an all-purpose rule (e.g. “start with their third most-famous work”). For example, in literature, for an author like Dickens, one could draw freely from any of his novels, when writing at Nats or CO difficulty level; for an author like Lope de Vega, one cannot draw freely from most of his works, because virtually no one engages with them. Likewise, in philosophy, each individual philosopher will have a different ideal scope of clue space. I’m not sure which major work of Aristotle is considered his fifth most famous, but one can certainly draw freely from it, or even toss it up. Drawing clues from Henry Sidgwick’s fifth most famous work would be a very poor idea indeed.

Put simply, whether or not “deep cuts” work for an author is author-dependent within disciplines, not discipline-dependent.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Gene Harrogate »

Jem Casey wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 8:50 am Thanks to the editors for a very fun set! I’d like to post some more feedback soon, but a couple other things for now:
Gene Harrogate wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 1:20 pm I did, however, want to draw attention to a question-writing practice that I find creates janky gameplay. Many of the literature commonlinks in this set took a very wide (as opposed to deep) approach, in which every line introduced a basic description of a new work. These questions effectively played as a list of titles ordered by obscurity, asking players "have you heard of this." Here's an example from Editors 1:
...
The issue with this tossup is that it creates a gameplay situation in which reading any of the clued works and knowing their basic premises are functionally equivalent. A player who has read "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" can easily lose to a player who has read a description of it or heard the tossup on it from a few ACF Nationals ago. In my ideal world, this tossup looks something like 1. Something that happens in "Brickdust Row", 2. Somethng that happens in "In Dreams", 3. "Brickdust Row title drop", 4. "In Dreams" title drop or some Ferlinghetti clue, etc. Basically, I think commonlinks focused on rewarding broad knowledge are better gradated when tempered with some clues targeting deep knowledge as well.
This is an interesting argument, but I think the issues with this tossup don’t have much to do with “wide” commonlinks being more janky than “deep” ones. One problem is that the premise of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is by the far the most buzzable clue until the pre-giveaway clue, and possibly until FTP (I personally don’t know the “pennycandystore” poem, but it may be famous). I wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk of rooms had players with basic “In Dreams” knowledge--it’s been part of the upper-level qb canon for a decade and has been ceaselessly referenced, recommended, and analyzed by writerly types for much longer. In contrast, I’d be seriously impressed if anyone was on top of the Singer or O. Henry clues; if Google results are to be believed, buzzing on either would require being a world-class expert on their respective authors’ deep cuts, or having gone through an edition of their complete stories somewhat recently. The Miller clue seems interesting, but it’s functionally just rewarding guesses based on context, since almost no one in the field will know specific lines from Black Spring. If these were the best available clues for a “wide” Coney Island tossup, I agree it would be better gradated with in-depth clues about “In Dreams” or Ferlinghetti, or just as a tossup on whichever of these authors the question writer was most excited to ask about.

More generally: practical complaints about “wide” commonlinks can almost always be teased out into broadly agreed-upon principles of question-writing that really have little to do with any particular tossup construction. In this case, the “Coney Island” tossup may have violated the maxim that a tossup’s clues should be plausibly ordered and gradated in difficulty. Other examples: if the field notices that a lot of tossups in a set take a “wide” approach, the editor may have miscalculated on their subdistro, in the same way as if a set had a ton of “this country” tossups or 2/2 poetry. Or, if a tossup is really a ne plus ultra of the “wide” form and just lists premises + authors + title fill-in-the-blank’s, it likely comes up against the common intuition that tossup clues should be “interesting” and varied. Or, if a clue in a “wide” commonlink rewards superficial knowledge of an out-of-print book most notable for having a page linked on its author's wiki page, it would be just as lame in a tossup on that writer.

We probably share the sense that there’s something unsatisfying about a commonlink that ties a bunch of canonical material to a detail they only coincidentally have in common, however mechanically sound it is (not to mention that cluing ~6 canonical authors in one question can be a pain for set production and packetization). But I wouldn’t proscribe “wide” commonlinks in general because that’s not usually how or why they’re written these days. Most often, a writer is taking a bet that the field has untapped knowledge of a significant work (or field of study, historical era, etc.) that would be too extra-canonical to ask about any other way (I assume this is what Nick was doing in his "Carnival" submission, for instance). Sometimes it doesn’t work out--if a set contains a ton of efforts at canon expansion that no one is ready for, the writers may have to re-evaluate the processes they used to select those clues. But when it does, the knowledge a “shallow” commonlink clue rewards is often no less “deep” or worth points than in-depth knowledge of a more familiar text.
Thanks for the considered response, Jordan! I actually agree with the points you and Nick have made. I don't really envision a better quizbowl world as one where players have to sift through deep clues they have no real chance of buzzing on (which makes my use of the O. Henry story in my example rather careless; I was probably just distracted by the name). I was more trying to get at the notion that if every clue in a tossup introduces a new work/title, the tossup has a greater likelihood of violating those principles of good question construction. It's difficult enough to order a bunch of works with little-to-no real world relationship into something that resembes a smoothly sloping pyramid of clues. It's even harder to do so for new works introduced late in the tossup, since much of the field (hopefully) has the ability to buzz on the basics of those works. That's not to say that cliffs are unique to (very) wide commonlinks. But my subjective experience is that they are more common, especially for bottom bracket teams whose knowledge tends to concentrate more in core works.

My inuitive sense is that the best wide commonlinks intersperse a bit of middle-difficulty cluing from the easiest works in the question so as to soften the hammerblow of the surface-level late-clue drops. I think it's fair to say that a writer hasn't failed if they can introduce 3 or 4 overlooked books into the canon instead of 5 or 6. I wouldn't advocate doing away with wide commonlinks, and I apologize if I gave that impression. Indeed, playing Canada's HSNCT mirror this past weekend reminded me how fun ludicrously broad commonlinks can be, and both you and Nick have explained how wide commonlinks can be written well and for good reasons. That said, I maintain that most of the time that the second halves of these tossups play better with a couple clues that aren't new titles.
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Re: 2022 Chicago Open: General Discussion

Post by Jem Casey »

Gene Harrogate wrote: Wed Aug 17, 2022 8:30 pm Thanks for the considered response, Jordan! I actually agree with the points you and Nick have made. I don't really envision a better quizbowl world as one where players have to sift through deep clues they have no real chance of buzzing on (which makes my use of the O. Henry story in my example rather careless; I was probably just distracted by the name). I was more trying to get at the notion that if every clue in a tossup introduces a new work/title, the tossup has a greater likelihood of violating those principles of good question construction. It's difficult enough to order a bunch of works with little-to-no real world relationship into something that resembes a smoothly sloping pyramid of clues. It's even harder to do so for new works introduced late in the tossup, since much of the field (hopefully) has the ability to buzz on the basics of those works. That's not to say that cliffs are unique to (very) wide commonlinks. But my subjective experience is that they are more common, especially for bottom bracket teams whose knowledge tends to concentrate more in core works.

My inuitive sense is that the best wide commonlinks intersperse a bit of middle-difficulty cluing from the easiest works in the question so as to soften the hammerblow of the surface-level late-clue drops. I think it's fair to say that a writer hasn't failed if they can introduce 3 or 4 overlooked books into the canon instead of 5 or 6. I wouldn't advocate doing away with wide commonlinks, and I apologize if I gave that impression. Indeed, playing Canada's HSNCT mirror this past weekend reminded me how fun ludicrously broad commonlinks can be, and both you and Nick have explained how wide commonlinks can be written well and for good reasons. That said, I maintain that most of the time that the second halves of these tossups play better with a couple clues that aren't new titles.
These are excellent points. Even though the tossup construction issues we’ve mentioned don’t inhere in “wide” commonlinks and aren’t unique to them, it’s tricky to find 5+ buzzable sources for many commonlink answers, let alone arrange them in a functional pyramid that won’t give players whiplash clue-to-clue. The CO lit may have benefited from more caution in this regard--the very most breadth-y tossups do seem to have more issues with deeply obscure early clues (besides the Coney Island tossup, possible examples include the first couple sentences in the Narcissus, infinite, and Anne tossups) than the “wide” commonlinks that mixed in some “deep” clues (e.g. the moon, the country, or Tolstaya). And the long fiction distro certainly could have used some more “Lawrencian” tossups focused on textual details from one or two works, especially since the few we did hear (such as Sartor Resartus, Charles Brockden Brown, Lolita, and Aesop) were a lot of fun.
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