2019 Penn Bowl - General Discussion Thread

[mtebbe]

This thread is for general discussion related to Penn Bowl 2019.

First of all, I would like to thank all the writers involved in this project: Nitin Rao, Jaimie Carlson, Aaron Rosenberg, NourEddine Hijazi, Sam Botterbusch, Aseem Keyal, Sarah Potts, Ayush Parikh, Margaret Tebbe, Jerry Vinokurov, Antonio Jimenez, Eric Mukherjee, Adam Robbins, Paul Lee, Jacob Dubner, Athena Kern, Ankit Aggarwal, Zach Jacobs, Kevin Liang, Jonathan Mui, Will DiGrande, Jordan Brownstein, and Gabe Ajzenman. A huge thanks also goes to our editors Nitin Rao, Aseem Keyal, Jaimie Carlson, Aaron Rosenberg, Eric Mukherjee, NourEddine Hijazi, Jerry Vinokurov, Ankit Aggarwal, and Jinah Kim.

Literature was written by Jaimie Carlson, Sarah Potts, and Margaret Tebbe with contributions from Jacob Dubner, Aaron Rosenberg, and Athena Kern. It was edited by Jaimie.

Chemistry was written by Ayush Parikh, Sam Botterbusch, Eric Mukherjee, and Paul Lee, with contributions from Jaimie Carlson and Jacob Dubner. Physics was written by Ayush Parikh, Jaimie Carlson, and Aaron Rosenberg, with contributions from Sam Botterbusch, Paul Lee, and Jonathan Mui. Biology was written by Sam Botterbusch, Paul Lee, Eric Mukherjee, with contributions from Jacob Dubner and Ayush Parikh. Other Science was written by Ayush Parikh, Jaimie Carlson, Eric Mukherjee, Sam Botterbusch, and Aaron Rosenberg, with contributions from Paul Lee, Jonathan Mui, Antonio Jimenez, and Kevin Liang. Aaron Rosenberg edited Physics and Eric edited Biology, Chemistry, and Other Science.

History was written by Nitin Rao, Antonio Jimenez, and Adam Robbins, with contributions from Jacob Dubner, Jaimie Carlson, Kevin Liang, and Will DiGrande. History was edited by Nitin.

Aaron Rosenberg wrote and edited the Music, with contributions from Sam Botterbusch. Aseem Keyal wrote and edited Painting with contributions from Will DiGrande. Aaron Rosenberg and Aseem Keyal wrote Other Arts with contributions from Jaimie Carlson and Zach Jacobs. Other Arts was edited by Aaron Rosenberg.

NourEddine Hijazi and Athena Kern wrote Belief with contributions from Sam Botterbusch, Jonathan Mui, Aseem Keyal, and Antonio Jimenez. Belief was edited by NourEddine Hijazi. Jerry Vinokurov wrote and edited Philosophy, JinAh Kim also contributed to editing Philosophy.

Social Science was written by Ankit Aggarwal, Sam Botterbusch, Margaret Tebbe, and Kevin Liang with contributions from Will DiGrande, Paul Lee, Adam Robbins, and Zach Jacobs. Ankit Aggarwal edited. CE, Geography, and Trash were written by various members of writing team and edited by JinAh Kim and Nitin Rao.

Feel free to discuss how you felt about the tournament and the set.

[Justice William Brennan]

I see Penn Bowl as a set where we can really experiment and pull out our most creative ideas--though it seems that we let the difficulty really run away with this year's iteration. Beyond overshooting the "regular difficulty" designation, I hope everybody who played enjoyed some of the fresher answerlines we put out.

I want to echo Margaret in thanking our editors Aseem, Jaimie, Aaron, Eric, NourEddine, Jerry, Ankit, and JinAh. Aseem and Aaron in particular went above and beyond to guide our set to the finish. Aseem helped me out hugely as a first-time head editor and took the lead in the final week with packetizing and stats to get everything ready for the tournament. Aaron shouldered the editing of an extra 1/1 subcategory to help us meet deadlines despite only signing on to edit Music and Other Arts, which was a huge blessing.

Our writers Sam Botterbusch, Sarah Potts, Ayush Parikh, Margaret Tebbe, Antonio Jimenez, Adam Robbins, Paul Lee, Jacob Dubner, Athena Kern, Zach Jacobs, Kevin Liang, Jonathan Mui, Will DiGrande, Jordan Brownstein, and Gabe Ajzenman also did a fantastic job. Our external writers pitched in some awesome stuff and I'm definitely hyped that our Penn writers are developing into a solid corps for future Penn Bowls.

Margaret did a killer job as Tournament Director--I know people I talked to at the Penn site appreciated that playoffs wrapped up a bit after 5:00(!).

I've also got to thank JinAh and Jordan, among other people whom editors sought out, for looking over the set and playtesting a bunch of categories. They sunk a ton of time into listening to our questions and their comments were invaluable in the editing process.

I had a ton of fun writing this tournament and I hope you all enjoyed playing it as much as I did writing it.

[CPiGuy]

This tournament had *way* fewer pronounciation guides than were needed. The moderators at our site had pretty much universal complaint about the lack of pronounciation guides for things like Welsh names, "acetylsalicylic", and "Kngwarreye". It was clear that *someone* cared about pronounciation guides, because some questions had them -- one moderator noted that "ragas" got a pronounciation guide (so if the problem was "we didn't have enough time to add all that were needed", the priorities were pretty whacked). I'm disappointed that the (obviously highly experienced) editing team didn't think it was necessary to include pronounciation guides for words that are not easy to pronounce. Not every moderator has been playing quizbowl for five years and knows the default pronounciation of words in seven different languages. Pronounciation guides should be one of the easiest things for a set to do right.

This tournament also suffered from some really wild difficulty swings. I'll let more experienced players do the full-scale autopsy (as people told me they planned to when the tournament was over), but Nitin talked about overshooting regular difficulty -- this happened, but there were also tossups and bonuses that wouldn't have felt out of place at ACF Fall; the bonus on Ragusa/Venice/Vienna was an example of that that particularly stood out to me. A quick scan of the advanced stats for the Penn site (the largest) indicates that there were bonuses where the modal score was 0 and bonuses where the modal score was 30 or which were 20'd or 30'd in literally every room.

Overall I thought the set was really enjoyable to play, especially the tossups, because there were a lot of cool, creative, interesting ideas, but it also felt much more high-variance than other tournaments, which was especially unfortunate with the bonuses, because high bonus variability leads to feelbad moments easily.

[a bird]

This years Penn Bowl struck me as very mixed set. There were many good parts, but there were many not so good parts. More importantly there were huge difficulty and stylistic swings between categories and within categories.

Bio and biochem were pretty hard (as we have come to expect from Penn Bowl) and geared very heavily toward things med students learn/care about. The number of times disease clues in bio questions was probably too high. The number of biological pathway clues in chem questions was also probably too high. When people talk about writing philosophy they often talk about trying to reword knowledge. These distributional choices, whether conscious or not, were heavily skewed toward rewarding knowledge of the kind of biology doctors and medical researchers study.

In general I was a little disappointed with some of the physics writing. There were good points like the delta function and metric tossups, and the laser bonuses. I definitely think there is a place for electrical engineering in the distribution, but this set went a little too far with using EE clues in physics tossups. Maybe I'm just bad, but I also thought the power making was inconsistent and often stingy; it looks like I had first buzzes at the Penn site on junctions and the metric that only got 10 points.

In general I thought the bonuses were somewhat better, focussed on important, well known topics than the tossups (at least the early clues). Many of the physics tossups felt like standard quizbowl fare with early clues drawn from wiki and inspired by old questions. There were also a few bonuses that had a random history of science thing as the hard part (lines of force)--this caused some cognitive dissonance with me. Some subjects like philosophy did a really good job using things that a philo grad student would learn about for early clues, but this was less common in the phys tossups (again, the delta functions tossup and the metric tossup had good early clues, and I imagine an EE grad student would know the early clues in the junctions tossup).

There were definitely some improvements from last year, like the sub distribution for other science, but there were some awkward distributional choices, most notably four (4) poetry tossups in Finals I.

[Lagotto Romagnolo]

I edited music, other arts, and physics. My thanks to the other editors, particularly Aseem for all his feedback and his work getting advanced stats together, and to Eric, for helping me finish up the physics. I also thank my playtesters Benji Nguyen, Alex Damisch, Ophir, Jordan Brownstein, and Adam Silverman, the last of whom provided excellent feedback on many of the physics questions on very short notice.

In general I was a little disappointed with some of the physics writing.

In general I thought the bonuses were somewhat better, focussed on important, well known topics than the tossups (at least the early clues). Many of the physics tossups felt like standard quizbowl fare with early clues drawn from wiki and inspired by old questions.

Yes, and I can tell you why. I was asked to take on the physics editing about 5 weeks before the tournament. For the sake of the tournament, I agreed. At the time, most of the remaining answer slots in the category had been staked out by other writers, while I had claimed most of the remaining music/other arts answer lines. So, I decided to focus on finishing the arts stuff first, and then turn to the physics. That was a mistake; I underestimated how much time I would spend working on the physics. Or perhaps there was only so much quality I could cram into the questions in the remaining time I had. I'm not blaming anyone here or shirking responsibility, just stating what happened. I would also note that this is the second time in 2019 I've taken on physics editing duties late in a tournament's writing process (ACF Nats being the other).

Anyway, I was pretty pleased with how the arts turned out (yes, the Renaissance music and Bartok bonuses were way too hard). I will edit the physics significantly before the next mirrors, because it needs work. I'm not inherently opposed to tidbits of science history like lines of force, though science history has been endlessly abused in the past and in general it should remain on the periphery of the science canon.

In the meantime, let me address a pet peeve. QB veterans: please cut down on using "standard" as a pejorative, particularly for regular-difficulty sets with lots of new writers. I like creative questions as much as the next guy but they don't grow on trees and they're particularly hard to write in science while still maintaining accessibility. At national tournaments, yes, you need fresh ideas 1.) to distinguish between top teams, and 2.) because it's nats. There were many such standard tossups in the ACF nationals submissions this year which I threw out without a second thought. At regular difficulty, I think it would behoove the community to temper expectations. I did have a fun time writing that tossup on the metric tensor, but it only got converted in 40% of rooms at the Penn site (and Dirac delta in 60%). Any more tossups like that and the category would just make half the field miserable.

Aaron Rosenberg: Actually, I have one more thing I want to add to the discussion of writing for the first time, and that's the fact that these days standards have gotten so high, and especially at the top level, there's the expectation that you'll be more creative. So, how do you address that if you're just starting out as a writer, how much emphasis should be put on that. Matt and Olivia, would you like to speak to that?

Matt Bollinger: Well if you have a great idea go for it, but like, I think that should not be your priority as a starting writer if you're writing for a high school tournament or for a packet submission or something. What Jonathan Magin told me when I was just starting out was, like, just write a good question and you're like 70th or you're like 80th percentile already. If the clues are all true, and then the right order, and useful---not just like "this painting has a red square in the top left corner" or something like that---then the editor who sees your packet will love you. So, focus, spend all your energy if you're starting out on that and writing, like, competent good question on an answer line that's difficulty-appropriate. If you have a great idea, again go for it, but I wouldn't stress about that if you're starting out.

[a bird]

In general I was a little disappointed with some of the physics writing.

In general I thought the bonuses were somewhat better, focussed on important, well known topics than the tossups (at least the early clues). Many of the physics tossups felt like standard quizbowl fare with early clues drawn from wiki and inspired by old questions.

Yes, and I can tell you why. I was asked to take on the physics editing about 5 weeks before the tournament. For the sake of the tournament, I agreed. At the time, most of the remaining answer slots in the category had been staked out by other writers, while I had claimed most of the remaining music/other arts answer lines. So, I decided to focus on finishing the arts stuff first, and then turn to the physics. That was a mistake; I underestimated how much time I would spend working on the physics. Or perhaps there was only so much quality I could cram into the questions in the remaining time I had. I'm not blaming anyone here or shirking responsibility, just stating what happened. I would also note that this is the second time in 2019 I've taken on physics editing duties late in a tournament's writing process (ACF Nats being the other).

Given the short time you had to work on the set, I think the physics turned out pretty well. I am a little disappointed that the Penn Bowl organizers didn't look for a physics editor earlier. This seems like something that should have been nailed down several months before the first mirror.

I should have been a little more precise with my words earlier. I'm not really complaining about a lack of creativity, but specific type of clue I thought was over represented at this tournament. My main issue was with early clues that a) you probably wouldn't encounter in a physics course and b) aren't very buzzable unless you've read a specific paper or wikipedia article. Yes, it's hard to write questions that have interesting buzzable early clues. My plea the future writers and editors would be to try to draw more of your clues from course notes and big picture research summaries.

Specifically, I thought this was the present in the muon question before the muonium clue, the diffraction question before the sinc clue, the friction TU, the non-Newtonian fluids TU (I've never taken a class related to this so maybe it's fine), the compton scattering TU (the issue here more that the early clues could potentially apply to lots of things), the insulators tossup was mostly fine (you should be careful using the referent "these materials," because it strongly implies that Topological Insulators and Mott insulators are more related than they are).

I thought the delta function and metric tossups did not suffer from this issue; in contrast they drew from buzzable, relevant material for their early clues (I assume the metric TU would have been powerable to someone who's taken grad GR).

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

I'd second the comment Graham made about the skew in the distribution of the biology; in the 11 packets we played I can't remember any plant bio related tossups e.g., and a lot of the tossups felt very laden in disease content.

I thought that the computer science bonuses in this set was well done and had fairly interesting clues, and I really liked how diverse the topic selection was for them (despite my dislike for tossups with the pronoun "this programming paradigm" ).

Overall, the lit felt somewhat heavy in deep quote descriptions (especially in long fiction); while this was done very well in places (the Jim tossup, for instance) it felt like every lit tossup had a few of these clues. While I think these clues helped make the lit feel more like deep cuts of core content overall, to me at least this felt a bit excessive in places; for example, the quotes in the Rebecca and Maggie tossups seemed a bit tough for where they are placed, and this seems relatively reflected in the buzzpoints on those tossups. This trend felt a bit at odds with my perception of the other categories (especially science and thought) which tended to have more difficult answerlines. I quite appreciated the topic selection in lit though; I was glad to see a lot of very cool authors come up, especially in some of the bonuses. In addition, I thought the short fiction in particular was quite well done.

The visual art in this set was very very fun to listen to and play, and felt very airtight.

I felt that were some problems with packetization towards the end of the set; having four poetry in finals 1 seemed especially egregious, and in the later packets there seemed to be a lot of category repeats between the tossups and the associated bonuses. Also, I'm not sure if this was just a quirk with which packets we played, but we only ended up hearing two math tossups, both of which clued quite a bit from topology.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

For what it's worth, I thought that this Penn Bowl was generally more creative and interesting than previous Penn Bowls I've played and our team consensus was definitely that it was our favorite of the tournament's recent iterations. We particularly enjoyed the fine arts questions, but I thought few categories were outright weak - if I had to pick any, I'd say the bio/chem and philosophy were for sure harder than they needed to be, but this is hardly something that was unexpected, so I find it difficult to complain about. Penn Bowl's brand isn't exactly one of a new player friendly tournament - most teams approach it as a tough tournament ala Regionals where you go to really test your mettle. This tournament did that job well and was generally quite enjoyable to play.

It felt similar to previous iterations of the tournament, which were always regular-plus-ish, and had a similarly high level of bonus variability compared to the past few iterations - but in general it felt like clues were a lot more fresh and interestingly written (this is probably the main reason it played out harder, IMO) and more attention was paid to using clear language. In particular, I didn't notice a ton of mechanical cluing issues in areas where I'm knowledgeable. The big exceptions to the latter were a few literature tossups, where you'd have several lines with no pronoun. [EDIT: Upon reviewing the packets, I have removed a previously inserted comment about evocativity.]

A word on bonus variability: there are literally zero tournaments with no bonus variability. If your tournament is a bell curve with relatively low standard deviation in conversion, then that's fine. I think this tournament's bonus standard deviation was higher than normal and it'd be worth some time using advanced stats to scrutinize bonuses. However, I'm not sure how useful the ever-present statement "there was some variability in the bonuses" really is at this point, because that's pretty close to a statistical truism. Similarly, there are no tournaments without transparent questions.

[aseem.keyal]

I want to thank Nitin and the Penn team for bringing me on to edit Painting for this set, especially after some dumb comments I made in last year's discussion forum. My general approach for the painting was: a little less visual description clues, a little more contextual clues, and a decreased emphasis on giving the title of paintings for the hard parts of bonuses. Any feedback on the painting is very much appreciated!

I've heard the "nature" in Rococo tossup in Round 8 confused people. For future mirrors, I'll be swapping it with another question in the later rounds that hits a similar era while I try to see if I can make the question any clearer.

EDIT: I forgot to thank Jordan, JinAh, and Benji for playtesting the Painting. Jordan in particular had some very helpful feedback re: difficulty and read the Painting to JinAh, catching numerous issues in wording in the process. This was immensely helpful in retooling some problematic questions and polishing the others.

[excessive dismemberment]

As others have said, this set was quite fun, and the questions were often quite creative. I really enjoyed how the set was challenging without being oppressive. However, I don't think this tournament felt like it had a coherent idea of what difficulty it should be. I understand that not every question is going to be the same difficulty in any tournament, but this did seem like I was playing at least 3 very distinct difficulty levels at times. That shouldn't take away from it being a lot of fun, but there were questions that wouldn't have been out of place at nats/ict (sometimes on nats 2019 answerlines) and some that would have been great at acf fall, and that made for a really weird experience at times. There seemed to be a few packetization issues as well with certain packets rewarding certain spheres of knowledge much more than others (packet 6 seemed to have considerably more classics than any of the previous packets, packet 12 had 2 tossups with hindu myth clues, etc.). Some of the creative answerlines also seemed to make it so that the answers were guessable without any actual knowledge of the subject, and could have done with being more "standard".

Minor note: There seemed to be at least a few occasions when the moderators seemed to struggle with the grammar of clues, so that could probably do with being cleaned up.

[Justice William Brennan]

Given the short time you had to work on the set, I think the physics turned out pretty well. I am a little disappointed that the Penn Bowl organizers didn't look for a physics editor earlier. This seems like something that should have been nailed down several months before the first mirror.

I should clarify that there was an editor responsible for physics as early as January of 2019, but because of some concerns on my part with the assigned editor (which were borne out) I decided to reshuffle and asked Aaron to take on the additional 1/1 and edit Physics.

[Jack]

As a whole, I think everyone at Princeton really liked Penn Bowl, as usual. The one observation we all mostly agreed on was that the Philosophy was too hard. Both of our teams saw a few answerlines go dead/negged, then go dead. Looking at the advanced stats at the Penn site, it seems that Philosophy had the lowest bonus conversion and tossup conversion (e.g. Monism, 2/7/8 ; bad faith, 0/5/6 ; mathematical realism 1/3/2 ; counterfactuals 1/6/7). Other than that, the tournament was really fun and felt to be an appropriate challenge, perhaps a bit harder than last year. Thanks for working on it, everyone!

[vinteuil]

This set had many good ideas, clues, and questions—Aseem's visual art was an especially bright spot. For the most part, the questions were intelligibly worded and the clues were/seemed accurate.

That said, there were a lot of problems, and I thought this was by far the weakest Penn Bowl I've played. Off the very top of my head:

• Others have pointed out the gigantic difficulty swings, even within the same category.
• There were major subdistributional problems (how much Japanese religion/mythology was there in this set?) and packetization problems (a tossup cluing Gonggong's flood in the same packet as a bonus on Nüwa!).
• A number of bonus parts suffered from a failure to clearly indicate the generality of the answer being sought ("race records" and—much worse—"ethnography," which was somehow made to sound like a form of participant observation).
• Finally, a number of the hard parts utterly failed to justify their status as answerlines. I'm thinking of the slew of literature hard parts on secondary characters with fairly generic names. Who cares? Why should people be spending their time sorting out and memorizing minor character names instead of literally anything else more significant about the book?

I don't want to detract from the work the writers and editors put into this set, and I will reiterate that I heard good ideas, solid questions, and fun clues in basically every category. And I even think it's possible to polish out a number of the problems I listed above before the next mirror!

[benmillerbenmiller]

I generally enjoyed myself playing this set, but I feel obliged to bring up how comically easy the US history was. In the 11 games I played, the US history tossup was powered in 10 of them, and typically because the questions dropped very, very well-known things early on. For instance, the Jimmy Carter (Three Mile Island) and Triangle Shirtwaist (memorized statements) tossups included clues that should barely be in power in a regular high-school set.

This issue was exacerbated by the difficulty of the rest of this history, which was typically at regular college difficulty or shading a hair above. It is extremely jarring to go from a world history tossup on Tupac Amaru (and a rather hard one at that) to a US history tossup on Booker T. Washington whose in-power section indicates it is looking for a black activist from the late 19th/early 20th centuries who was very much into education and economic uplift. While some difficulty variation within categories is obviously fine, the stark disparities between the US and Euro/World content left me feeling like I was playing history from two different sets in any given game.

For future Penn Bowls, additional playtesting might help to catch some of these issues before mirrors start.

[Justice William Brennan]

I generally enjoyed myself playing this set, but I feel obliged to bring up how comically easy the US history was. In the 11 games I played, the US history tossup was powered in 10 of them, and typically because the questions dropped very, very well-known things early on. For instance, the Jimmy Carter (Three Mile Island) and Triangle Shirtwaist (memorized statements) tossups included clues that should barely be in power in a regular high-school set.

The advanced stats corroborate this. It seems that I did a poor job of reconciling the difficulty of questions that I wrote from scratch with questions that I edited (e.g. Booker T. Washington, Triangle Shirtwaist, Second Bank of the U.S.) in American History. I wrote the Jimmy Carter question from scratch though, and I'll admit that I did not know that the Three Mile Island incident happened during his presidency and thought it was a cool connection with his career as a nuclear submariner--and resultantly misplaced the clue (it seems that ctrl+f "three mile" when searching Jimmy Carter in QuizDB only gives you one hit, though I probably should have checked more than one DB).

[t-bar]

This set had a lot of interesting questions that I enjoyed reading. I was bothered, however, by a number of long, complex sentences that were difficult to process. Many of these sentences parse correctly if you have the time to sit down and read them on paper or screen, as I imagine the editors of this set did, but are difficult to understand when read out loud. In particular, I found the part of speech or verb form of some words hard to nail down live (see "published" in the first example, "identified" in the second, "arches" in the sixth, and "inspired" in the ninth). I cannot back up this impression concretely, but I felt that this set suffered from these sorts of sentences more than the average set. I include a few examples that I noted while reading the set on Saturday, but I suspect there were more.

[10] This second-oldest American continuously published literary magazine underwent significant changes in the 1980s brought about by then-editor Lewis Lapham.
ANSWER: ​Harper’s​ Magazine

The start of this sentence easily slips to "This [second-oldest American] continuously published [a literary magazine]...," which leaves the player searching for an extremely old person in the publishing business. This issue can be rectified by not stacking five modifiers in a row on "magazine."

[10] Give this name. A leader identified a man this name “the Mede” proclaims that no one should worship anyone but him for thirty days.
ANSWER: ​Darius

In principle, there is a clear typo in this question that can be fixed pretty easily. As written, however, it sounds like you're asking for a leader who identified (simple past, not past participle) a different person as "the Mede," which would lead you to answer, I dunno, Daniel?

Vidblainn separates from a region named for these beings which the ​Grimnismal​ claims was given to Freyr as a “tooth-gift.”

The dependent clause here presumably attaches to "region," but since it comes right after "these beings," it's easy to think that the beings themselves are being given to Freyr.

A column in the newspaper ​El Espectador​ described how a man who nearly died in this manner and "Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens...and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time."

This one is just a straight-up typo, and should be resolved by removing either the "how" or the "and" that are marked. However, it has the same playability issue as some of the set's confusing but technically-grammatical sentences, in that you get most of the way through the sentence and are still waiting for a predicate.

[10] When hydroxylamine undergoes condensation with a carbonyl, the result is this one of these compounds, a derivative of imines in which the nitrogen is bonded to a hydroxyl group.
ANSWER: ​oxime​ [accept ​aldoxime​; accept ​ketoxime​]

Similar issue here, but exacerbated by the fact that the typo involves the key word "this," whose correct usage in quizbowl questions is especially important.

Lettering arches around a seated God the Father in that painting by artists with this surname, which also depicts the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in the bottom panel of its open view.

I seriously doubt that anyone listening to this sentence will realize that "arches" is a verb until at least the position of the comma, unless the moderator themselves anticipates the ambiguity and inserts a tiny pause between "lettering" and "arches."

The New York Times​ wrote that this author’s message matched Auden’s “we must love one another or die” about a book that chronicles the lives of Gerald, who adopts a horde of feral children, and Emily, who has a beloved cat-like dog.

This one is almost comical. I don't mean to be harsh, but did the architect of this sentence (don't know if it was writer or editor) expect any person to be able to parse the relationship in this sentence between the Auden work, the Lessing work, and the NYT article without re-reading it on paper at least twice? Maybe people can still buzz on the plot clues in the back half of the sentence, but I don't think that absolves the crimes of the first half.

[10] Al-Farabi was part of a school of philosophers known as mashsha’un, which translates roughly into this English term and also names the school of philosophy founded by Aristotle himself.
ANSWER: ​Peripatetic​ school

A sentence structure failure here means that the question is asking for a school of philosophy founded by Aristotle that was literally called mashsha’un. I imagine that most people would have unraveled this sentence correctly, but I'm sure the editors can empathize with the experience of a single typo or misheard word introducing enough ambiguity that you get confused and screw up a question you should have had.

A lunette by this artist inspired a ceiling fresco in the Villa Albani by a German Neoclassical artist who was friends with Johann Winckelmann and partly named for this artist.

I suppose the sentence structure here is technically correct, but again, it's hard to understand in real time where "and partly named for this artist" attaches to the parse tree of this complex sentence. And again, it's easy to assume that "inspired" is a past participle and sit there waiting for the sentence predicate.

[aseem.keyal]

This set had a lot of interesting questions that I enjoyed reading. I was bothered, however, by a number of long, complex sentences that were difficult to process. Many of these sentences parse correctly if you have the time to sit down and read them on paper or screen, as I imagine the editors of this set did, but are difficult to understand when read out loud. In particular, I found the part of speech or verb form of some words hard to nail down live (see "published" in the first example, "identified" in the second, "arches" in the sixth, and "inspired" in the ninth). I cannot back up this impression concretely, but I felt that this set suffered from these sorts of sentences more than the average set. I include a few examples that I noted while reading the set on Saturday, but I suspect there were more.

[10] This second-oldest American continuously published literary magazine underwent significant changes in the 1980s brought about by then-editor Lewis Lapham.
ANSWER: ​Harper’s​ Magazine

The start of this sentence easily slips to "This [second-oldest American] continuously published [a literary magazine]...," which leaves the player searching for an extremely old person in the publishing business. This issue can be rectified by not stacking five modifiers in a row on "magazine."

[10] Give this name. A leader identified a man this name “the Mede” proclaims that no one should worship anyone but him for thirty days.
ANSWER: ​Darius

In principle, there is a clear typo in this question that can be fixed pretty easily. As written, however, it sounds like you're asking for a leader who identified (simple past, not past participle) a different person as "the Mede," which would lead you to answer, I dunno, Daniel?

Vidblainn separates from a region named for these beings which the ​Grimnismal​ claims was given to Freyr as a “tooth-gift.”

The dependent clause here presumably attaches to "region," but since it comes right after "these beings," it's easy to think that the beings themselves are being given to Freyr.

A column in the newspaper ​El Espectador​ described how a man who nearly died in this manner and "Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens...and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time."

This one is just a straight-up typo, and should be resolved by removing either the "how" or the "and" that are marked. However, it has the same playability issue as some of the set's confusing but technically-grammatical sentences, in that you get most of the way through the sentence and are still waiting for a predicate.

[10] When hydroxylamine undergoes condensation with a carbonyl, the result is this one of these compounds, a derivative of imines in which the nitrogen is bonded to a hydroxyl group.
ANSWER: ​oxime​ [accept ​aldoxime​; accept ​ketoxime​]

Similar issue here, but exacerbated by the fact that the typo involves the key word "this," whose correct usage in quizbowl questions is especially important.

Lettering arches around a seated God the Father in that painting by artists with this surname, which also depicts the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in the bottom panel of its open view.

I seriously doubt that anyone listening to this sentence will realize that "arches" is a verb until at least the position of the comma, unless the moderator themselves anticipates the ambiguity and inserts a tiny pause between "lettering" and "arches."

The New York Times​ wrote that this author’s message matched Auden’s “we must love one another or die” about a book that chronicles the lives of Gerald, who adopts a horde of feral children, and Emily, who has a beloved cat-like dog.

This one is almost comical. I don't mean to be harsh, but did the architect of this sentence (don't know if it was writer or editor) expect any person to be able to parse the relationship in this sentence between the Auden work, the Lessing work, and the NYT article without re-reading it on paper at least twice? Maybe people can still buzz on the plot clues in the back half of the sentence, but I don't think that absolves the crimes of the first half.

[10] Al-Farabi was part of a school of philosophers known as mashsha’un, which translates roughly into this English term and also names the school of philosophy founded by Aristotle himself.
ANSWER: ​Peripatetic​ school

A sentence structure failure here means that the question is asking for a school of philosophy founded by Aristotle that was literally called mashsha’un. I imagine that most people would have unraveled this sentence correctly, but I'm sure the editors can empathize with the experience of a single typo or misheard word introducing enough ambiguity that you get confused and screw up a question you should have had.

A lunette by this artist inspired a ceiling fresco in the Villa Albani by a German Neoclassical artist who was friends with Johann Winckelmann and partly named for this artist.

I suppose the sentence structure here is technically correct, but again, it's hard to understand in real time where "and partly named for this artist" attaches to the parse tree of this complex sentence. And again, it's easy to assume that "inspired" is a past participle and sit there waiting for the sentence predicate.

Thanks for finding these, these have now all been fixed or marked for fix for 10/26 mirrors!

[cwasims]

I quite enjoyed playing this tournament at the Queen's site and definitely noticed fewer of the difficulty swing issues that people have pointed out - I imagine this is at least in part because some of the more egregious issues got fixed for this weekend's mirrors.

I agree with the philosophy being harder than usual, but I think the more contemporary/20th century-focused distribution at this tournament is something that QB should really strive to work towards, even if it means some growing pains. There's really no reason, in my opinion, to be having half or more questions on the history of philosophy as often seems to be the case.

A very small comment on the social science: I was somewhat annoyed that both economics tossups and the bonus we got were on pretty similar topics (macro/government policy) while essentially ignoring microeconomics. I thought it was somewhat unusual to classify the Qin Dynasty and Indian Constitution questions as social science.

My one main comment is that I found that sometimes the post-power clues for some of the history tossups would become quite easy quite quickly. A good example of this is the Richelieu tossup: mentioning that he was the driving force behind Gustavus Adolphus' entry into the Thirty Years' War resulted in four buzz points at 64, 67, 68 and 74 words respectively. There was a similar very tight cluster on the Parthian Empire and Greece tossups. It was a bit jarring to have these kinds of buzzers races suddenly and pretty much in the middle of tossups as a result of very well-known clues being dropped quite early.

[ErikC]

I half-agree with Chris about the philosophy - I agree that the focus on the work of recent thinkers is probably for the best, but I do think this tournament heavily favoured Anglo-American philosophers over the rest of the world. Perhaps this is just my perspective as someone who has mostly learned philosophy outside of class; after all, it's not surprising that a game played almost entirely by Anglo-American university students might sometimes bias towards this. This also might just be a packetization thing, I haven't looked at the answerlines for the packets we didn't play at the Queen's mirror.

(Side note: in the few times any philosophy was discussed as part of a non-philosophy class during my studies, it was never the modern analytic tradition. Perhaps the interdisciplinary nature of other traditions like the Frankfurt School could mean its exposure to students outside philosophy departments could be higher?)

Looking at the detailed stats from the first mirrors, the conversion rates on some of the phil tossups and the soc sci tossups closer to philosophy were really low. To echo earlier posts, it's a bit jarring for the mathematical realism tossup, which worked out to be one of the hardest tossups of the set, to be in the same tournament as a tossup that uses the words "a priori" and the "dogmatic slumber" clue for Kant that could be in ACF Fall.

I also think that the Qin dynasty being classified as social science really weird - it seemed like a rather regular archaeology question, which I think both fits well in history and doesn't crowd out an already crowded part of the distro that soc sci is.

[i never see pigeons in wheeling]

I also think that the Qin dynasty being classified as social science really weird - it seemed like a rather regular archaeology question, which I think both fits well in history and doesn't crowd out an already crowded part of the distro that soc sci is.

Archaeology in this tournament ended up being distributed into the social science distro, and it is indeed a social science (it also fits in the history distro). The point about it maybe taking up less real estate in history is well-taken, though.

[jinah]

I half-agree with Chris about the philosophy - I agree that the focus on the work of recent thinkers is probably for the best, but I do think this tournament heavily favoured Anglo-American philosophers over the rest of the world. Perhaps this is just my perspective as someone who has mostly learned philosophy outside of class; after all, it's not surprising that a game played almost entirely by Anglo-American university students might sometimes bias towards this. This also might just be a packetization thing, I haven't looked at the answerlines for the packets we didn't play at the Queen's mirror.

A caveat before my response: my editing role in the philosophy was just to trim down some of the tossups and powermark them in the last week or so of editing, and I made some tweaks to bonuses based on the first round of mirrors. That said, as someone with a relatively external viewpoint / who didn't pick the answerlines, I think the emphasis on Anglo-American content you're observing is probably a result of packetization or availability bias. Of the first 10 or so Phil tossups, the hardest and most memorable included some Anglo-American analytic philosophy - monism, Nagel, mathematical realism, counterfactuals. Overall though, I'd classify 8/9 across 15/15 as mainly Anglo-American phil (TUs: monism, Nagel, liberty, mathematical realism, counterfactuals, Dewey, Postmodernism, Roger Bacon; Bonuses: secondary qualities, coherentism, quus, Age of Reason, Shklar, Haugeland, Korsgaard, Will to Believe, Bradley). About 5/8 across the tournament was primarily analytic phil (TUs: monism, Nagel, mathematical realism, counterfactuals, Kant; Bonuses: secondary qualities, coherentism, quus, Haugeland, Korsgaard, Will to Believe, Bradley, arguably Davos). Neither of those strike me as particularly heavily weighted, especially as few of the above bonuses were purely focused on analytic philosophy. To your point about philosophy taught in interdisciplinary settings, I would say there was a fair amount of content you'd encounter outside of pure philosophy classes, including political philosophy (Gramsci, Paine, Plato, liberty, Shklar), religious philosophy (James), "critical theory" / literary theory adjacent (Adorno, Barthes, Postmodernism) and thinkers like Dewey and Nietzsche and Sartre that were quite interdisciplinary.

I do agree that the philosophy was empirically quite hard in this set. I don't presume to speak for Jerry, but I think some of that is due to, to Erik's point, several questions that are much more accessible to people who encounter this stuff in the classroom than people who are casual dabblers in philosophy; the counterfactuals tossup is probably pretty easy for most people who have taken an analytic philosophy class in like, the last 30 years, but is necessarily going to get low conversion at a regular difficulty tournament. On the other hand, "back to the classroom" is a pretty popular movement for other subjects, so "I am going to write/include a tossup that is hard for people who haven't studied modern philosophy" seems like a wholly defensible position.

That's a lot of words to say: I think overall the content of the philosophy was well-distributed, and that people who had taken a lot of philosophy classes, people who encountered philosophical content in other courses, and people who learn philosophy for/through quizbowl should all have been able to get some amount of points, which sounds appropriate.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

My main problem with the "philosophy back-to-the classroom" argument as construed above by Chris is that, unlike science (with perhaps the exception of widely used mathematical formalisms), I do actually think people are more likely to encounter philosophy topics outside of philosophy classes than in them. Quite rightly, there's been a recent push to have more applied math and CS topics, perhaps altering the distribution a bit to do so, to reflect this, as opposed to having almost all of the math and CS be pure, theoretical stuff.

The exact philosophy content you encounter, of course, varies enormously. As a person who took a couple political economy classes, the thinkers in the traditional "philosophy" category I read the most were Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Popper, and Kuhn. A cognitive science major, on the other hand, might encounter philosophy of mind, while a linguistics major would likely encounter a lot of linguistic philosophy, a sociology major might deal with Foucault, a religious studies major would deal with both contemporary and historical theologians, a classics major would read the Greeks and Romans, a literature major would run into Barthes and Derrida, and so on. And of course, we haven't even scratched the surface on the non-Western tradition.

The takeaway I get from this is that, while there's relevant work from the 20th century Anglo-American tradition in all of these fields, there's also a ton of other stuff that just has to come into play because of exposure in other humanities fields "in the classroom." Dismissing this stuff as simply "historical" doesn't make a whole lot of sense, not just because of its continuing appearance in today's classrooms, but also because a lot of historical thinkers are constantly being re-evaluated and re-interpreted (e.g. virtue ethics).

[Zealots of Stockholm]

I plan on giving feedback on all of the rounds I played when I get a chance, but I wanted to say for now that the clueing in the lit tossups felt too hard at times, generally about once per round. Examples off of the top of my head include the tossup on Achebe, which clued mostly from his short fic, Morrison mostly from non-fic (?), and the tossup on The Children's Hour, which I thought was too tough in its clues, while being an acceptable but tougher answerline for this level.

[Sam]

About 5/8 across the tournament was primarily analytic phil (TUs: monism, Nagel, mathematical realism, counterfactuals, Kant; Bonuses: secondary qualities, coherentism, quus, Haugeland, Korsgaard, Will to Believe, Bradley, arguably Davos).

In ACF Nationals 2011, there was a tossup on Hubert Dreyfus that went to the end in our room. I had vague awareness that John Haugeland was a person because he had died recently and I think there was a memorial at Chicago, so I guessed that AND JERRY LAUGHED AT ME for thinking Haugeland would be an answer line at ACF Nationals 2011.

This story doesn't really have a point, though maybe it's revealing that while I remember Jerry laughing at me quite vividly I remember nothing about Haugeland and wasn't able to answer the bonus part.

[jinah]

About 5/8 across the tournament was primarily analytic phil (TUs: monism, Nagel, mathematical realism, counterfactuals, Kant; Bonuses: secondary qualities, coherentism, quus, Haugeland, Korsgaard, Will to Believe, Bradley, arguably Davos).

In ACF Nationals 2011, there was a tossup on Hubert Dreyfus that went to the end in our room. I had vague awareness that John Haugeland was a person because he had died recently and I think there was a memorial at Chicago, so I guessed that AND JERRY LAUGHED AT ME for thinking Haugeland would be an answer line at ACF Nationals 2011.

This story doesn't really have a point, though maybe it's revealing that while I remember Jerry laughing at me quite vividly I remember nothing about Haugeland and wasn't able to answer the bonus part.

Thanks for sharing this story, Sam. I mean that genuinely.

[Carlos Be]

I found the set overall to be pretty fun. I did not like the dramatic increase in tossup difficulty in round 9— fixed action pattern, Jacob Lawrence, Jean-Baptiste Lully, ion exchange chromatography, and Count Basie were all well above the average difficulty of the set. It'd have been nice to have them more spread out.

Also, I don't know if this part was changed between mirrors, but we did not have any confusion on the part about race records.

[sbraunfeld]

I found the philosophy to be the highlight of the tournament, and wanted to thank its editors. This was likely largely due to the amount of analytic content, but I also found the non-analytic content more interesting than usual. I do not intend this as any sort of comment on the philosophy's difficulty-appropriateness.