2023 ACF Winter Discussion

[Ehtna]

I invite players, staffers, and people involved in production of 2023 ACF Winter to post their thoughts on the set or questions about content below. Note that I'll be posting my general thanks in a separate thread, in an effort not to clog up discussion. The set will be uploaded within the next few days, for those who would like to reference specific questions.

[rhn26]

I thought Winter was overall a very fun set and I enjoyed playing a long tournament on it. I played on a shorthanded team and was able to get occasional buzzes out of category due to the difficulty, which is always a great feeling, and I thought overall the categories I am more well-versed in were done well. I’ll leave some comments on the science for now and will maybe return for other categories later.

I thought the biology was slightly difficult, but this may have just been due to me playing more suboptimally on them compared to other categories. I did think that tossup difficulty on average was a bit tougher compared to the other science subcategories (ribosomal RNA, succession, recombination to name a few). I did like the variety of answerlines, e.g. even though I didn’t get either of these, I liked that Meselson-Stahl and echolocation were tossed up.

The chemistry was overall very good. I especially loved the pencil-and-paper SN2 reaction bonus; this was probably the bonus I enjoyed answering the most all tournament. There were a couple questions where the answer felt kind of inevitable from the start (light, graphene), but I don’t think this is actually an issue at this difficulty.

The physics was fun. I didn’t do as well on it personally, but I liked the variety in answerlines and thought that the clues were interesting. Some tossups may have been a bit tough (action, vortices, thermal expansion) for on-the-nose 2 dot, but I don’t mind it personally. I really liked the bonus on Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as I could finally get something out of studying all the national labs for science bowl in high school.

I performed much better on the other science tossups than bonuses, and I’m still trying to figure out why, but overall I liked the category as well. I felt like quite a few tossups had stuff representative of core computer science classes in college, which I really appreciated and liked (pointers, CPUs, software testing, and hash tables were ones heard at our site). I’m not sure if 4/12 tossups being CS is too much, but this was probably a quirk of the packets selected to be played at our site in any case and I enjoyed the tossups a lot. There was also quite a bit of math (tossups we heard: continuous, zeta, permutations, I guess r isn’t pure math but still, solutions to diffeqs), so I guess 9/12 of osci tossups we heard was CS or math-adjacent, which I’m all for but maybe others aren’t. I did think that the math was slightly tough on average, and the solutions to diffeqs tossup tripped a few people up at our site, but I liked it also.

[Santa Claus]

Copying some comments from the Discord to preserve them for posterity:

eurolit was fun from what i remember
[...] the balls tu
[...]
whoever wrote the sn2 bonus definitely my favorite question along with my teammates in the tournament

had fun with winter but on the whole it did seem a bit more difficult than last year

Liked the set, particularly the myth and lit
There were some repetition issues but on the whole I had a good time
Think I missed the Mabinogion question which is sad
Some nice myth/belief questions that come to mind are the Mead of Poetry TU and the Ramayana bonus
Though I did feel that some packets had a notable high amount of geographical overlap, i.e. multiple questions about India in different categories in a packet
I think some people were talking about that
Repetition-wise the main one I remember was Great Zimbabwe, though there might have been one or two more
Also it felt like some of the later packets had harder answerlines for the tossups, which a few people noted in-game.
[...]
In the later rounds the tossups on grad students, ironclads, and maybe Nineveh stuck out as somewhat harder or more confusing, but it might just be me.
There was a bonus relating to roles (not sure what packet) that seemed to us to be confusingly worded (and the other team agreed that it was quite hard) so I'm curious to see what it actually said

as the person who noted it in game, what the hell is the book of ezra
that being said it probably seemed more jarring because earlier packets tended to stick to extremely convertible answerlines

[Zealots of Stockholm]

For what its worth, the r tossup was social science... did the early clues seem very math-y? Interesting if so.

[LeoLaw]

I negged the psychology tossup on "prisoners" with "religious people" because of the Good Friday experiment. I was a bit salty, but It is just a skill issue since the Good Friday experiment took place in Boston, not Concord. Maybe Concord can be dropped before Timothy Leary to prevent a neg, but I understand it would be somewhat anti-pyramidal.

[Restitutor27]

21. An account of a plague during this conflict describes a symptom called lygx kenē, which may be hiccups, suggesting it was a viral hemorrhagic fever. An account of this conflict reasoned that a tsunami must have been caused by an earthquake. A history of this conflict was first translated into English by Thomas Hobbes, and a landmark four-volume history of it was written by Donald Kagan. In the wake of a revolt in this conflict, one politician asserted that a democracy is incapable of an empire. A besieging power in this conflict demanded surrender by stating “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melian dialogue and Pericles’ funeral oration are found in an account of this conflict by Thucydides. For 10 points, name this conflict between Athens and Sparta over a Greek peninsula.
ANSWER: Peloponnesian War
<Other History>

I realise the idea behind this is to try and do some historiography of the Peloponnesian War, but unfortunately this... doesn't work well as written; would someone mind explaining what the reasoning behind the clue choice and ordering was?

The main issues are that the first line is linguistically fraudable (and possibly quite disputed? would need someone who knows more than me to weigh in here), the second line is unbuzzably vague, the Hobbes clue is not really historically relevant, and if you're mentioning Kagan it is probably worth cluing something distinct he wrote rather than just a namedrop on its own. The democracy clue is similarly vague and quite possibly non-unique, and the giveaway makes it sound like the war centred around Athens and Sparta fighting for control over the Peloponnese in a similar way to what Sparta and Argos (and other powers of course) did in the Archaic period - "named for" would be perfectly sufficient here. In general several clues are just unbuzzably vague and the ones that aren't don't really tell the player anything substantial. A first line clue on the plague is probably just going to be too transparent at this difficulty but moving that down a line, replacing some of the vaguer clues with more famous sections that are buzzable, and a different choice of first line historiography clue would probably make it play much better.

Edit - have been informed of the relevance of the Hobbes but still think that it would be better to contextualise why it is important a bit more

14. Linda Schele notes how the appearances of Venus as the evening star coincided with several wars between holders of this position that led to the fall of Naranjo (“na-RAHN-ho”). A stairway in Dzibanche (“dzee-BAHN-chay”) marks the first appearance of Kaan (“kah-AHN”) snake heads used to identify holders of this position. Isotopic analysis of a “goggle-eyed” holder of this position suggests that he was unlikely to be a descendent of Spearthrower Owl. A tomb lid in the Temple of Inscriptions depicts a holder of this position under a world tree that resembles a rocket ship. The word k’uhul (“koo-HOOL”) or “holy” often preceded the title of ajaw (“ah-JOW”) given to holders of this position. An elaborate jade mask belongs to Pakal the Great, a holder of this position in Palenque for 68 years. For 10 points, name this position of power over Mesoamerican city-states such as Copán and Tik’al.
ANSWER: Mayan kings [or kings of the Maya or queens of the Maya; accept Mayan rulers or Mayan lords; accept k’uhul ajaw or k’uhul ahau before mention; accept kings of specific cities including Calakmul, Caracol, Teotihuacán, Palenque, or Copán until “Copán” is read; prompt on Mayan leaders; prompt on Mayans or Maya by asking “what was their position in Mayan society?”]
<Other History>

Will also point out that this question would probably play better as Maya with fewer place names given, as k'uhul ajaw wasn't exactly a homogeneous title with the same role in every city, and the UK site had issues with people giving similar but slightly incorrect answers.

[Fisher]

Enjoyed the tournament as a whole, thanks. A couple of questions seemed pretty odd to me (the Indus River tu that mentioned the word 'civilisation' on like the second line is the standout in my memory) but generally thought the level was good and had interesting stuff throughout. I do have a couple of specific things to note though.

Going through one of the packets, this tiebreaker question (not used in our game) doesn't look right to me:

The Ext functor is defined by taking a resolution of modules with this property and producing a cochain complex of hom classes. A group representation is faithful if the map from the group to the endomorphism group of a vector space has this property. Homomorphisms that have this property are called monic and have a trivial kernel. Linear transformations with this property must have an image with the same dimension as the domain and are described as “full rank.” Embeddings of sets trivially have this property. A surjective map that has this property is bijective. This property is possessed by functions that pass the “horizontal line test.” For 10 points, name this property of functions that map different inputs to different outputs.
ANSWER: injective [or injectivity or injection or one-one or one-to-one; accept injective resolution or injective modules; reject “one-to-one correspondence”]
<Other Science>

Unless I'm being really dumb, I don't understand how buzzing in and saying 'projective' on that first line is not also correct; indeed, I and most other people I know who work in homological algebra usually think of Ext in terms of projective resolutions instead of injective resolutions (ime it's usually algebraic geometers who prefer thinking about injective resolutions).

The 'pencil and paper ready' chem bonus on whatever the hell was going on there was weird. I didn't think ACF tournaments had those at all. And I'm not sure I can speak for the entire UK quiz community, but I'm sure there are a number of teams here who didn't even know such bonuses exist and so were unprepared to actually do such pencil-and-paper bonuses. Maybe the lead-in was just a joke, but I don't think you can expect every team to know that such questions exist in e.g. NAQT high school tournaments.

ETA: I loved the PhD student toss-up - thank you for saying "this occupation" because afaic being a post-graduate researcher absolutely is a job.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

14. Linda Schele notes how the appearances of Venus as the evening star coincided with several wars between holders of this position that led to the fall of Naranjo (“na-RAHN-ho”). A stairway in Dzibanche (“dzee-BAHN-chay”) marks the first appearance of Kaan (“kah-AHN”) snake heads used to identify holders of this position. Isotopic analysis of a “goggle-eyed” holder of this position suggests that he was unlikely to be a descendent of Spearthrower Owl. A tomb lid in the Temple of Inscriptions depicts a holder of this position under a world tree that resembles a rocket ship. The word k’uhul (“koo-HOOL”) or “holy” often preceded the title of ajaw (“ah-JOW”) given to holders of this position. An elaborate jade mask belongs to Pakal the Great, a holder of this position in Palenque for 68 years. For 10 points, name this position of power over Mesoamerican city-states such as Copán and Tik’al.
ANSWER: Mayan kings [or kings of the Maya or queens of the Maya; accept Mayan rulers or Mayan lords; accept k’uhul ajaw or k’uhul ahau before mention; accept kings of specific cities including Calakmul, Caracol, Teotihuacán, Palenque, or Copán until “Copán” is read; prompt on Mayan leaders; prompt on Mayans or Maya by asking “what was their position in Mayan society?”]
<Other History>

I would have been also frustrated as a player at the first line dropping the name of a notable Maya site, and the second line dropping a commonly used name for the second most notable Classic Maya site (Kaan/Calakmul), in a question where "Mayan rulers" was acceptable and at a difficulty where no other Maya position would have plausibly been tossed up.

[Jem Casey]

Copying some comments from the Discord to preserve them for posterity:

Thanks for doing this, Kevin! I'd love to see something like this become common practice for set discussion threads (until the longed-for day when everyone simply posts their thoughts on the forums themselves, anyway).

On the topic of the set itself, wanted to second the praise for the approachability and "general interest" factor of Joel's philosophy--seems like a great model for the category at this difficulty (especially the very well-chosen Wittgenstein anecdotes, since all sets should have more of those).

[Gene Harrogate]

This was a quality set that especially shone in its controlled difficulty -- I was happy to see a range of teams at a very large mirror enjoying themselves and getting quality buzzes on a 2 dot set. The commitment (especially in the literature) to simple answerlines with straightforward clues was also a major highlight that I think kept tossups playable for the less-experienced half of the ACF Winter target audience. Some of the art did seem less polished than other categories -- the shark attack tossup is a good example of a too-clever answerline that the set otherwise did a good job avoiding, and confusing clues like Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl for tap dancing probably would have been caught with more playtesting.

The main issues are that the first line is linguistically fraudable (and possibly quite disputed? would need someone who knows more than me to weigh in here), the second line is unbuzzably vague, the Hobbes clue is not really historically relevant, and if you're mentioning Kagan it is probably worth cluing something distinct he wrote rather than just a namedrop on its own. The democracy clue is similarly vague and quite possibly non-unique, and the giveaway makes it sound like the war centred around Athens and Sparta fighting for control over the Peloponnese in a similar way to what Sparta and Argos (and other powers of course) did in the Archaic period - "named for" would be perfectly sufficient here. In general several clues are just unbuzzably vague and the ones that aren't don't really tell the player anything substantial. A first line clue on the plague is probably just going to be too transparent at this difficulty but moving that down a line, replacing some of the vaguer clues with more famous sections that are buzzable, and a different choice of first line historiography clue would probably make it play much better.

The Hobbes translation of Thucydides is often brought up to trace a certain strand of hard-headed realism in the history of ideas and seems to me both interesting and appropriate here.

[modernhemalurgist]

I enjoyed this set! Though some people I've mentioned this to have disagreed, I thought it successfully brought down the difficulty of winter a little, while keeping plenty of "zest." Here are some assorted comments I had.

• With regards to
  

  For what its worth, the r tossup was social science... did the early clues seem very math-y? Interesting if so.

  I presume Richard meant the tossup on correlation coefficient, not r in linguistics!
• Really confused by the Dark Lady not having at a prompt on "(my) mistress," since that's the word that goes in the blanks that are asked for. Was disappointed to be negged on a tossup about poems I have memorized (even saying Dark Lady immediately after filling in those blanks).
• The solutions to differential equations tossup is not a good idea, because those are not kinds of functions. If I hadn't seen the PACE tossup with this conceit before, I'd have assumed it was looking for the regularity class of the solutions to these problems. Also, why has Arzela-Ascoli become a clue for this? That's a super general theorem used to show the existence of lots of things by convergence within some family.
• Buzzing on
  

  “Simple diagonal” and “twisted wreath” are types of these operations’

  felt a bit unfortunate since " operations' " is not auditorily different from " operations, " so I assumed you wanted the kind of operation that the twisted wreath is, which is a product.
• The tiebreaker AFA tossup on the U.S.A. is, in my opinion, a great tossup that has no business being in a 2-dot set. I love that Florence Price has become so incorporated into the canon, but is a score clue from her piano concerto really appropriate in the second line? (I know it comes from Dvorak, but still - it's much more prominent and memorable in the concerto.) The score clue from American suite also seems quite difficult at this level. But I do love the ornithological correction being introduced to quizbowl!
• The Italian tossup was well done (if a bit disparate in focus). Score clues felt unique but very memorable.
• The music education tossup is a fun idea but feels hard to do well at this level. Putting things like "PBS" and "conservatories" early on made it just feel like a game of chicken for who would buzz.

[Protean]

• Really confused by the Dark Lady not having at a prompt on "(my) mistress," since that's the word that goes in the blanks that are asked for. Was disappointed to be negged on a tossup about poems I have memorized (even saying Dark Lady immediately after filling in those blanks).

Hi Jeremy - you're completely right, that should've been addressed in the answerline. I don't have an excuse or an explanation, it just didn't occur to me for whatever reason and I'm sorry that you (and anyone else who said the same thing) were penalized for my mistake.

[Restitutor27]

15. In this text, a mind responds to a question that begins “If man had no eternal consciousness…” with the word “despair” rather than, “Like the donkey, feeding on the roses of illusion.” A Thomas Nagel essay analogizes a central concept of this text to skepticism because both are enabled through “the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.” This essay equates a central concept to “sin without God” in a section that references its exploration by Lev Shestov and Søren Kierkegaard. This essay’s introduction argues that we must judge “whether life is or is not worth living” to answer the “one truly serious philosophical problem.” This essay posits the absurd as an alternative to suicide before arguing that we must imagine its title figure happy. For 10 points, name this essay by Albert Camus (“al-BAIR kah-MOO”) titled for a man who is condemned to eternally push a boulder up a hill.
ANSWER: The Myth of Sisyphus [or Le mythe de Sisyphe]
<Philosophy>

Also don't really want to nitpick too much but thought it was worth mentioning the first clue here is unreasonably negbaity for Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard (if someone buzzes at "consciousness" or earlier), which appears in the "Speech in Praise of Abraham" section of that work which can definitely be said to feature a "response" in the following paragraph; the usage in Camus is a response to the question in that work so the first part of the sentence needs a clarification that it is responding to another work.

[The Ununtiable Twine]

Unless I'm being really dumb, I don't understand how buzzing in and saying 'projective' on that first line is not also correct; indeed, I and most other people I know who work in homological algebra usually think of Ext in terms of projective resolutions instead of injective resolutions (ime it's usually algebraic geometers who prefer thinking about injective resolutions).

Not dumb at all. Usually you just find Ext(*, *) by using either/or. Sometimes one is easier than the other. This question could have used either an "it's not projective, but" or an "accept projective early". You might be able to get away with the former due to the set's target difficulty, but the latter is probably the better option. (Personally I'm okay with "do you know literally anything at all about homological algebra? then here's some points" at this difficulty level.)

If "and producing a cochain complex of hom classes" hasn't been said then the editor can't expect for the player to know whether we're working with chain complexes or cochain complexes, so both should be acceptable until before then.

[rhn26]

I’ll add some comments about the classical music.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the questions and appreciated the variance in stuff that came up (and appreciated the inclusion of cello content, but I am clearly biased in that regard).

I especially liked the tossups on Stravinsky, Britten, and C major (at least all those years of toiling through Hanon in middle school paid off for something after I quit piano). We didn’t play the US question and I think the ideas in it are great, but I agree that overall the Price clues are a bit difficult for this level, but I suppose that now that she’s (deservedly) coming up more and more, players will be more exposed to her, and there are still early Dvorak 9th symphony/12th string quartet clues. I agree with Jeremy’s comment about education; I don’t know much about Young Person’s Guide so when I heard the third line about conservatories, I didn’t really know what else it could be but was too scared to buzz. William is a fun idea but spending two lines on Shakespeare songs seems difficult for this level, although I am told that non-music players recognized those songs.

I thought bonuses was unilaterally done well and contained fun ideas. As I mentioned earlier, seeing Popper’s High School of Cello Playing mentioned was great, although the bonus seems to have played a bit easy overall at our site (which had many strong music players, so take that with a grain of salt). I especially liked the hard parts on Moments Musicaux, Ernest Bloch, and sonata da chiesa/sonata da camera. Plus sign was also a fun hard part, but also seems to have anecdotally played easy. Debussy’s flute/harp bonus was tightly themed but I also think played slightly soft overall.

[Jcm48]

Also don't really want to nitpick too much but thought it was worth mentioning the first clue here is unreasonably negbaity for Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard (if someone buzzes at "consciousness" or earlier), which appears in the "Speech in Praise of Abraham" section of that work which can definitely be said to feature a "response" in the following paragraph; the usage in Camus is a response to the question in that work so the first part of the sentence needs a clarification that it is responding to another work.

Yeah, you're probably right. When I was writing that tossup I did not fully internalize that Camus was directly quoting from Kierkegaard at that point in the essay and thus failed to fully distinguish between the two passages early in the clue. If anybody negged this tossup on the leadin with Kierkegaard I apologize for the inexactitude.

[forrestw]

Thanks to everyone who helped make ACF Winter an absolute blast to play. I really appreciated this set's willingness to stick to well-known clues about easily convertible answerlines--it seems to have made the tournament experience not as punishing as normal for new teams while still providing fresh questions experienced players could enjoy.

I thought the classical music was generally done very well, balancing new takes on canonical topics with more fringe questions that were still approachable. I really liked the tossups on Stravinsky, Argentina, and Britten--the latter two got firstlined against me so they clearly spoke to many people. In terms of bonuses, I also loved the Kaddish/Poland/Bloch bonus, and the theming of the bonus on cats was very fun :) The plus sign/trill/augmented bonus did a great job of asking about things people could encounter simply by playing music, without having to learn so much history, which is nice to have. I do agree that the tossup on William was a little suspect, since for anyone who hasn't studied Shakespeare's music career but does study music it cliffs precipitously at My Lady Nevylls Booke. I think it should have had some deeper clues about Byrd before then, a bit less Shakespeare content at the beginning, or both. That being said, it was a really cool idea.

I don't have too much to say about the science. The one question that seemed off to me was on solutions to ODEs, as others have said. Two of my teammates had each learned every single clue in class, but none of us could figure out what the tossup wanted until the mention of initial value problems, which was like the second thing that all four of us knew. Quizbowl seems to have a general issue where it wants to ask about ODEs content but there's no natural answerline for this--"this task" as an indicator with the answer "solving ODEs" seems to have worked in the past, though. I understand the desire to improve upon what itself is a kind of weird construction, but I don't think this question did.

I was also a huge fan of the philosophy, which asked about a lot of important topics that people are likely to know and find interesting and did a great job of hitting the target difficulty. Some tossups that sparked joy for me were the ones on colonies, gender, death, and contradictions. The latter two were especially fun because I got to buzz on clues that my friends taught me, which was super rewarding. I also really enjoyed the bonus on deep ecology and ecofeminism, which is an area of philosophy I've been waiting to see come up since I started playing. I will say that I think the Wittgenstein tossup also contained some moderate negbait for Kierkegaard with the ladder clue--I don't know too much about this area but Google tells me that Wittgenstein's ladder is a reference to Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postcript. I know the fact that it's his first work technically disambiguates the clue, but for a stock monster like myself who had randomly osmosed that clue something acknowledging that it was a reference to an earlier philosopher (or even a reference to Kierkegaard himself) might have been nice. Also, I thought that the bonus parts on Gödel Escher Bach, pain, and Marx were a little too hard to be mediums at this level. In all of these cases, they could have had another piece of information and still been difficulty-appropriate, especially the part on Marx which was quite short.

Some other miscellaneous questions that I enjoyed: redox potential tu, bonus part on Demuth, Brazilian music tu, condors/lightning strike/pachamama bonus, c rossetti/christmas/winterson bonus, phase transitions tu, bonus part on the bonaparte family, annie ernaux bonus, ofa tossup on drag, precession/newton/LRL bonus, chekhov short stories tu, graphene tu (which really belonged in physics), suburbs tu, grad students tu, marin alsop bonus part, lewis and clark tu, bonus part on eric foner

[Fisher]

If "and producing a cochain complex of hom classes" hasn't been said then the editor can't expect for the player to know whether we're working with chain complexes or cochain complexes, so both should be acceptable until before then.

But if you're replacing the first variable with a projective resolution of it and then taking homs, you still have a cochain complex (since the hom functor is contravariant in the first variable), so both should be acceptable even at that point.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

To clarify, "Full Fathom Five" etc. are songs included in Shakespeare plays, not pieces he composed separately.

[raytonlin1]

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I feel like the question on "victory" should've at least given a prompt on "Double V" since Double Victory was acceptable.

[amundhe]

Just wanted to say that I really liked the visual/other art and thought it did a good job of rewarding lots of different ways of engagement -- one of my teammates had a great buzz on Dior from a random Instagram post and one of my opponents had a fantastic firstline on the visual art tossup on doctors. I also really liked the angle of Louis XIV as an art patron, the bonus part on The Disquieting Muses as being a cool intersection of categories, the part on Marie de Medici in fashion for being super interesting, and the La Jetee film bonus for being about a pretty cool film. (Edit: My one complaint is that the "this type of person" cluing Migrant Mother seemed to draw a lot of negs with "migrant" -- perhaps this could have been disambiguated better). In general, I found myself learning a lot, but I felt that difficulty was by and large controlled superbly -- the questions really rewarded a lot of the deeper areas that our team had in art.

I liked the philosophy a lot and got to learn about a lot of areas that I had very little knowledge in; I think that this set really broadened my view of what modern philosophy is (the TUs on gender and death, as well as the bonus on ecofeminism, stand out as giving some cool reading recommendations). I've been trying to learn more about Indian philosophy, and when learning about the Nagasena/Milinda chariot, I kind of thought of the Phaedrus chariot soul allegory -- happy to see someone else kinda had the same association! I also liked the other minds hard part as being particularly cool for rewarded the knowledge of my teammates, who are much more likely to know things about Plantinga than I am. Did want to second Forrest's comment about difficulty; in addition to the aforementioned bonus parts, I also thought the Vienna Circle tossup was too hard for this difficulty, but this is a pretty small complaint compared to how much I enjoyed this set.

Wanted to shout out those particular categories since I'm particularly interested in learning more about them, but I thought that in general the set had a good difficulty and good topic choices -- thanks to all the editors for their hard work!

[eygotem]

After this event, the directive to “lock ‘em up” followed LaToya Cantrell’s controversial statement that “there is no widespread looting.” ...
ANSWER: Hurricane Katrina

Doesn't this sentence refer to the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2021?

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

So, sorry it has taken so long to get round to this, but there's a question that needs some work and to stop misunderstandings creeping into the canon

Description acceptable. According to Jean Ducat, an unclear term denoting the final stage of this system is first mentioned in the Gortyn law code as a variant of hēbōnte (“hay-BON-tay”). Pyrrhus of Epirus allegedly launched a 272 BCE siege to take advantage of this system for foreign trophimoi. Participants in this system deliberately stole cheese from the altar of Orthia and joined syssítion (“suh-SIT-tee-un”) dining groups after its completion. Supposed victims of this system revolted after an earthquake struck Mount Taygetus. The Crypteia was supplied by this system, which Ephraim David argued instilled “laconic silence” in its participants’ speeches. Plutarch claimed that this system was meant to keep the rural helot population in check. For 10 points, name this system of militaristic training for boys in a Peloponnesian city.

So. Jean Ducat, great idea for a first line, the go-to scholar du jour for Spartan education. However, the rest of the sentence is garbled - most of all by some complete misunderstanding of Greek. There is no such Greek word as "hēbōnte" (and the pronunciation guide is wild - particularly in the rendering of the omega) - the singular is ἡβῶν, and to be honest I'm surprised that someone thought you could form an english singular form by removing an s from a transliterated Greek word. The point of Ducat's argument is our sources are not great as to what the Spartan term for the class of men between 20 and 30 was, but that we should trust Xenophon that they were the hēbōntes (literally, "the ones who are in the prime of youth"), noting that there is an age class using the word ἡβῶν (or strictly, ἡβιῶν in the local dialect) attested throughout the Gortyn Law Code.

Therefore something along the lines of "According to Jean Ducat, the term for those in the final stage of this system may have been the same as that found in the Gortyn law code, hēbōntes (""Heh-BONE-Tez")" would I think be much clearer.

Line 2 could be clearer as well - the point is that Pyrrhus used it (falsely) as a reason for moving against Sparta (according to Plutarch), while I think currently it sounds like someone else has claimed that this is why he did it. i.e. It's not that he allegedly did this, but he did this for this alleged reason.

Line 3 - There were children's syssitia, before they graduated to/were adopted into an adult syssition - and they entered the latter when they become one of the hēbōntes, the last stage of education.

Line 4 - Introducing the Krypteia (a painfully complicated/confused topic because of the variant traditions in our sources) as "this system" rather than "part of this system" seems likely to confuse. Saying the earthquake struck Taygetus is a bit weird - we don't know for certain which fault caused the Great Earthquake, but probably one in the eastern foothills of Taygetus - it certainly affected Taygetus, but the reason it caused the revolt was that it devastated Sparta town and the Eurotas valley.

Line 5 onwards - Lovely stuff gradating down to a good giveaway, "Kosmos of Silence" is a great bit of scholarship, excellent way of dropping "Laconic" into a later clue. We do jump again between using "this system" to refer to the agoge as a whole and the Krypteia, which as I said above is not ideal.

[cwasims]

Also quite late (apologies) but I had a few thoughts on the social science in this set. Although Winter is of course a lower-difficulty tournament, I think the tossups could have used a bit of a broader conception of the fields in question, especially for economics. The tossup answer lines were, as I recall, "income" (more on this one below), "interest rate", "capital", and "risk": all core topics but not ones that collectively convey of the breadth of the field as they all were largely on macro or finance. I think the other subcategories were generally a bit more expansive than this, although there were also a lot of tossups on pretty well-trodden topics like "r" sounds. The bonuses generally seemed to clue some more novel topics, although this tends to be easier to do.

At the risk of being pedantic, I think there are also some issues with this particular tossup (which I have also seen before in other questions with these sorts of clues):

The weighted sum of this quantity times elasticity is equal to 1 in Engel aggregation. The Lakner–Milanović graph depicts this quantity’s growth due to globalization, which gained its common nickname because of its resemblance to an elephant. A hypothetical change in this quantity given by the Hoover index is represented as the longest distance between the 45-degree line and the Lorenz curve. This quantity’s increase due to industrialization is plotted on the x-axis of the inverted U-shaped Kuznets curve. The Slutsky equation predicts that total changes in demand consist of this quantity’s namesake effect and the substitution effect. Demand for inferior goods decreases as this quantity for a consumer increases. For 10 points, name this quantity measuring an individual’s earned money.
ANSWER: income [or wealth; accept the income effect; accept income per capita or income share; accept income inequality; prompt on inequality by asking “what is that inequality measuring?”; prompt on Gini coefficient by asking “what quantity does that measure?”]

This question leans far too hard on the "throw everything someone might say in the answer line" by having clues on a variety of completely distinct concepts that all happen to include the word "income." In fact, the primary answer of "income" is incorrect for many of these clues: certainly the lead-in and the clue about Kuznets, and the clue about Lakner-Milanović omits the critical point that it plots the growth of income depending on percentile. This question probably should have just been on inequality, or if on income then several of these clues should have been changed or clarified. Although I understand it's tempting to try and clue all these various important concepts in one tossup, this just ends up being confusing.