ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

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ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

INTRODUCTION

My immense thanks to everyone involved with ACF Nationals--players, writers, editors, organizers, moderators, etc.! What follows is a quick post about the tournament that just happened. This post is in two parts. In the first, I acknowledge the amazing work of the many people who made this tournament happen. In the second, I lay out the basic philosophy of this tournament that I set as head editor. In a future post, I'll lay out some of the philosophy of my particular categories. But I wanted to get the ball rolling, and I suspect that before my next post, other members of the production staff will have posts of their own to make.

I want to preface all of this with another comment: As has been noted many times, forums discussion of sets is now in decline. People who have strong opinions on sets nonetheless refuse to post. Although the decline in acrimony that results from this is good for quizbowl, the decline in posts themselves is bad for quizbowl. Sets such as this one do not merely uphold firmly entrenched norms; they also stake out particular positions in live debates or try out things that are entirely new. Forums set reviews are somewhat important for past-facing reasons (to let the editors know how you feel), but are very important for future-facing reasons. I guarantee that some of the people who are going to edit future important tournaments (including national ones) are going to read this thread. I guarantee you that many of those people are not going to scroll up in the Discord chat to read what you wrote there; or will forget your Discord comments shortly afterwards, even they do read them.

If there are things you thought that this tournament did well, the chances of those things happening again greatly increase if you write a post specifically saying what you liked and why. Telling us in private that you liked something is very gratifying. (I'm always pleased when that happens!) But it won't make other tournaments do the things that you liked. Constructive criticism is also very useful. If there are things you didn't like, which aren't just gripes about an individual mistake, but actually reflect a more general trend or practice, it is useful to post to identify the problem and propose a potential way to fix this. Otherwise, the thing you don't like will keep happening!

THANKING PEOPLE

I suspect that this ACF Nationals involved more people than any prior iteration did. This is a great thing! I like the idea that ACF is continuing to move away from the model in which major tournaments are the supposed work of a few pseudo-auteurs towards a more communal/collaborative model, which allows so many voices to resound within the set. It also means that I have an awful lot of people to thank:

I must begin with my five co-editors: Will Alston, Stephen Eltinge, Stephen Liu, Eric Mukherjee, and Adam Silverman. Additionally, Taylor Harvey provided welcome supervision in his role as ACF editor-in-chief. This was the most long-term quizbowl project I have been involved with. It could have been a nightmare, but all five gents were excellent to work with--hard-working, flexible, communicative. Process-wise, this was far smoother than many lower-stakes tournaments I've been involved with. But as my future post will state, balancing creativity and accessibility is really damned difficult! All five subject editors were all unflagging in their commitment to maintaing that balance. I won't say what I thought about each editor's individual approach (although I liked all of them), as I'm sure they'd like to speak for themselves. I'd therefore like to devote the rest of this section to people whom I'm less confident will speak for themselves in this thread.

People may disagree who the unofficial "Fifth Beatle" was but there is no doubt who the unofficial "Seventh Editor" of this set was. It was Matt Jackson, who wrote 150 (!!!) questions for this tournament. It was my original hope that he would be an official editor for this tournament. The first and last time I co-head-edited a non-NAQT set was with him (2011 MAGNI and 2016 CO respectively), and so this would have brought things full circle. But the arrangement we struck worked out even better for everyone. He wrote questions in basically every humanities category, allowing his influence to be felt throughout the entire set, rather than being confined to the few categories he would have been editing. And he ended up writing far more than he would have as just an editor! I wish to thank him not merely for the quality and quantity of his contributions, but also for his flexibility and imagination. Basically, whenever Will Alston and I spotted a gap in the tournament, we knew we could turn to him to fill very specific subdistributions, he would immediately come up with a creative yet workable idea, and produce a pristine question more quickly than seemed possible. If you liked this set at all, chances are that's in large part because you liked Matt Jackson's questions.

One of the nice things about contemporary quizbowl culture is that we've collectively grown to appreciate roles that can't quite be fully defined. There is no one name for Olivia Murton's role in this set, because it spans all areas of production. She was at once project manager, proofreader-in-chief, vice principal, pit boss, occasional technician, and frequent co-pilot during choppy weather. I consulted with her about almost all of the major decisions I made about the nitty-gritty of set production. She was either the source of or sounding board for any idea that made the process smoother. And half the time that I poked people with a stick to keep things moving forward, it was because Olivia had poked me with a stick to keep me on top of my stick-poking. In addition to these logistical matters, she contributed valuable insight for matters of difficulty control in her areas of expertise.

While I'm sure there were still typos and whatnot in the set, the reason the set was as readable as it was is because we did two-step proofreading. The first step, performed by Olivia and by Ganon Evans, focused on grammar and clarity. The second step, performed by Eddie Kim and Will Nediger, focused on pronunciation guides, interpuncts, etc. Of course, each of these teams did a little bit of the other team's work too, but I hope the fact that these roles were more clearly defined meant that both aspects of readability were improved. Additional pronunciation guide and formatting was provided by Cody Voight via a code that he contributed that we used. Ganon's boundless enthusiasm and willingness to do any production task needed at a moment's notice (including running some playtesting sessions in my absence), was a huge boon to the set. Having Eddie and Will do the pronunciation guides removed a lot of the amateur guesswork that almost always comes with this thankless task when done by the subject editors themselves. They were both brought on very late in the production process, but worked with remarkable speed and accuracy. Finally, although I've already mentioned Stephen as an editor; I have not mentioned his role in doing a lot of the coding that helped us throughout the feng-shui-tagging / packetization process, which would have been unimaginably agonizing absent his solutions.

Although the editing team was relatively small, the writing team was relative large. Our writers were: Austin Brownlow, Jaimie Carlson, Ganon Evans, Zach Foster, Taylor Harvey, Matt Jackson, Nick Jensen, Michael Kearney, Shan Kothari, James Lasker, Jonathan Magin, Olivia Murton, Will Nediger, Jonathen Settle, and Jonathan Suh. In some ways, the production of this set was closer to an NAQT set than to a traditional ACF set. I will let the other editors speak for their categories, but the writers in mine were absolutely essential, not just for keeping the set on track, but also for the wealth of outlooks they brought. Ably editing an entire category by yourself is an exercise in simulating a variety of perspectives on a discipline. It is often easier when one doesn't need to simulate those other perspectives, when they are already represented by the intellectual diversity of the people contributing questions.

It's also for this reason that I should list the writers of the packets: Sarah Benner, Matt Bollinger, Geoffrey Chen, Vincent Du, Karan Gurazada, Henry Goff, William Golden, Natan Holtzman, Ryan Humphrey, Alex Li, Bradley Maclaine, Lalit Maharjan, Stan Melkumian, Tim Morrison, Chinmay Murthy, Dan Ni, Shehryar Qazi, Hari Parameswaran, Kevin Park, Grant Peet, Quynh Phung, Patrick Quion, Chris Ray, Bailey Runyan, Matt Schiavone, Ashwath Seetharaman, S. A. Shenoy, Jaskaran Singh, Pranav Sivaram, Clark Smith, Ethan Strombeck, Roxanne Tang, Kevin Thomas, Jonathan Tran, Pranav Veluri, Allen Wang, Raymond Wang, Eric Wolfsberg, Rosa Xia, Jisoo Yoo, Nathan Zhang.

We received very few packets and were therefore greatly appreciative of the ones we got. Each editor uses their submissions differently, but my preference has always been to take strong inspiration from them, even when I don't necessarily keep most of the original clues. That is, people always submit tossup ideas, bonus themes, individual bonus hard parts, etc. that I never would have come up with on my own. Finding a way to turn these into playable questions is one of the most challenging and yet rewarding parts of being the editor of a packet-submission tournament. Regarding the writers of submitted packets, I would particularly like to single out Kevin Park, who wrote the entire Claremont packet by himself! I am singling him out not merely for the effort that that takes, but also because the questions were of high quality.

Next, I need to thank the set's playtesters: Mike Bentley, Austin Brownlow, Jaimie Carlson, Ganon Evans, Zach Foster, Halle Friedman, Matt Jackson, Nick Jensen, Hasna Karim, Eddie Kim, Aseem Keyal, Rahul Keyal, Shan Kothari, Emmett Laurie, Jonathan Magin, Will Nediger, Tejas Raje, Jonathen Settle, Jon Suh, and Matt Weiner

It's startling to remember that once upon a time, there were some editors who considered it a point of pride that the were too self-sufficient to playtest their questions. Now, this seems unimaginable to me. (To you as well, I hope.) The difficulty control within this tournament--for tossups and bonuses alike--and the clarity of prose would have been significantly worse without all of our hard-working playtesters. They brought us down to earth time and time again when our heads were in the skies. And we editors generally had the good sense to listen to them whenever they told us something was too hard and to ignore them about half the time that they told us something was too easy. The playtesters were ultimately as important to this set as any individual writer.

Lastly, there are the people who handled the logistical side of the tournament, rather than just the set. I know that this involved many people whose efforts I don't know about it, but most of my experience of that side was refracted through Michael Kearney. He was extraordinarily communicative, solicitious, and organized about all aspects of this tournament. I never had a sense that the production hand didn't know what the logistical hand was doing, or vice versa. And his efforts to make this tournament run smoothly despite all of the travel disasters, the last-minute packetizing issues, etc. were nothing short of heroic. (I hope someone who was there firsthand to witness the extent of this heroism will narrate this.) During the day, most of my non-Michael contact with the logistical side came through Em Gunter, who did an excellent job presiding over all of our staff meanings and aiding poor technically incompetent souls such as myself.

GENERAL PHILOSOPHY

Will Alston wrote and edited more questions than I did and (as stated before) Matt Jackson wrote an enormous chunk of the set. So, their posts in this thread will be quite revelatory about the mindsets behind many of the questions. But before that, I want to say some words about the set's general philosophy, which I was responsible for establishing:

Our starting point was the feeling that the two most recents Nats (2021 and 2019) were simply too hard, both in terms of bonus conversion and buzz points. You could watch top-bracket matches where most tossups went to their giveaways, and the highest PPB in the field would sit around 18. The chief culprits were bonus medium parts and tossup late clues. Reforming these was a lot of our focus. Our goal was to return Nats to the models of 2016 and 2018, in particular.

For medium parts, we used the following standard: Something that has been a medium part in another hard set in the past couple of years can still be a medium part now. You don’t need to make it harder. (Difficulty creep takes longer than that.) Something that has been a medium part in a three-dot set can be a medium part at Nats too, if you withhold sufficient information. Something that has been a hard part at a two-dot tournament is often a good candidate for a medium part. There are some cases in which something that has never been an answer before can become a medium part, but those are rare.

For tossups, we gauged difficulty primarily by clues rather than by answers themselves. In my first e-mail to the tournament's writing staff, I wrote, "This tournament recognizes two kinds of tossups: (1) those that produce buzzes at multiple points in the tossup, including before the giveaway; (2) bad tossups. If everyone buzzes on the giveaway, including the top players in the country, it was not a good tossup (no matter how structurally sound its construction was), because it didn’t do its job." I stand by that assessment. If you're old enough, you've probably heard me say that tossup answerlines are merely vehicles for buzzes and the means by which we tie clues together; answerlines do not constitute the point of tossups. Our chief emphasis, therefore, was on making sure that the last three lines of each tossup had solid buzzpoints throughout, mostly drawing upon already-established clues. Right now, my evidence is still too anecdotal for me to be able to proclaim anything too confidently, but my general impressions is that the average top-bracket buzzes did not cluster at the giveaway as frequently as they have in some past years.

In terms of subject matter, I will re-iterate my adage about how to negotiate the quizbowl canon, namely that the twin goals of "canon expansion" and "canon maintenance" are equally important. That in addition to figuring out what completely new thing to ask about it, you also need to figure out what really old thing (that has stopped coming up) to ask about. Some of you may have noticed some clues and answers from the early 2010s surfacing again. That's not because we editors were pining for the answerlines of our youths. This was a deliberate decision to selectively revive topics that we felt were of genuine importance and that people continue to meaningfully engage with outside of quizbowl. Some people claim that canon maintenance benefits older players. And sometimes it does. But I strongly believe that it benefits younger players too, sometimes even more. Otherwise, you (a young player) can be stuck wondering why some really important book you've read never gets tossed up in collegiate quizbowl, until you're told it's because it was tossed up too many times when you were in middle school, which made people decide that they never wanted to toss it up again.

I haven't seen any player remark on this yet (in-person or in the Discord), but this Nats also had the shortest questions of any in the past 10+ years. I have long claimed that hard quizbowl questions are too long. (In my ideal world, Nats tossups would be only 7 lines long, but of course I couldn't and wouldn't mandate that.) The tossups were hard-capped at 8 lines, as ACF rules mandate, but I added an additional requirement that 75% of tossups needed to be 875 characters or fewer, which is about 7.5 lines, sometimes even less. Bonuses were hard-capped at 750 characters. I capped the bonuses as a whole rather than each individual part, as I feel there are many instances in which you need a three-line bonus part to explain a technical concept. But that needs to be balanced out by having a shorter eaiser or medium part. This is something it would be particularly valuable to hear feedback about.

Okay, more from me about my categories in a later post. For now, fire away.
Last edited by ThisIsMyUsername on Mon Apr 11, 2022 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by meebles127 »

This tournament was the most exhausting yet exciting experience of my quizbowl career and I couldn't be more proud of it. I truly feel like I've finally proved myself and I am so happy to hopefully be able to continue in this role going forward. Y'all are incredible.

This year I had the honor of being selected as Assistant Tournament Director under Michael Kearney from whom I learned so much. Thanks to Rob Carson, Bernadette Spencer, Harry White, Olivia Murton, Ganon Evans, Ryan Rosenberg, Mia McGill, and Theresa Nyowheoma for being part of that experience on the logistics team.

My contributions to this tournament included a lot of technical elements which I believe quizbowl has generally not adopted as well as they could. This weekend we had a Slack server for the tournament which acted as the main hub of the event. This allowed staffers to easily communicated any problems that arose during the tournament as well as submit protests. I also developed a new protests form, allowing staff to quickly submit blind protests without the need for paper forms and running up and down stairs and hallways. Any tournament using Slack in the future is free to reach out to me to learn how I did this. For the staffers who still haven't figured this out, the packet password theme this weekend was "Shit that Em likes or is interested in through an academic lense."

On Sunday afternoon, I was responsible for the live stream which was hosted on Twitch. I have the video files and these will be released eventually, once ACF has concluded their post-processing. I apologize that they are not available on Twitch. I hope that people were able to enjoy the livestream and I have great plans for the future regarding A/V in quizbowl.

There are a few people who I would like to thank specifically:

Thanks to Michael Kearney for having faith in me and trusting me to help run the tournament and providing me with the opportunity to learn under you. Thanks to Bernadette Spencer for always being there for me and supporting me as a person and logistician. Thanks to Will Alston for your friendship, immense kindness, and for giving me my first logistics experience - without it I probably wouldn't be writing this. Thanks to Eric Mukherjee for helping me to troubleshoot the A/V system before going live on stream - without his help, the livestream wouldn't have happened. Thanks to Rob Carson for helping me to tear down the A/V set-up yesterday, I was far too tired to do it on my own. Thanks to Matt Jackson for an extremely engaging conversation about anthropology when I needed to do anything but think about the tournament. Thanks to John Lawrence, for your kind words above and your support during the duration of the tournament (and the best brownies I've ever had in my life). Thanks to Ryan Rosenberg for always being a great mentor and sounding board for ideas. Thanks to Harry White for coming in at the last minute to get stats up and running, he is the truly MVP of the tournament. Thanks to Blake Andert for driving all over Minneapolis on Sunday to help get hardware needed for the tournament. Thanks to Mike Sorice for running our protest committee, a truly thankless job. Thanks to Andrew Hart for your kindness even when I thought things were falling apart. Thanks to Connie Tzeng for listening to my partially deranged instructions as I panicked to set-up the finals livestream. Thanks to Dylan Minarik for babysitting a camera for me. Thanks to Alex Damisch for being a wonderful friend. Thanks to Ryan Ritter for traveling with me this weekend - I'm sorry we couldn't get Waffle House together last night. And finally, thanks to Mia McGill for being the absolute best friend anyone could ever ask for, you're the best. I've probably forgotten some people. and I apologize for that.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Hi all! Thanks for playing ACF Nationals. It was a privilege to get a chance to edit one of the year's most prestigious tournaments and watch you all get excellent buzzes.

I edited this tournament's History, Religion, Geography, and Current Events questions and ended up writing and editing the most of any of the contributors. I also handled the majority of the Other Academic questions and most of the non-Psych/Anthro social science (splitting these tasks with John) though Matt Jackson wrote so much of the Social Science that he might as well have been an editor as well. Even if the readers of this thread aren't familiar with me personally, you've probably interacted with some of my work before - to think of recent tournaments I head-edited or had major contributions to, PACE 2019, EFT 2019, STASH 2020, IKEA 2020, and Chicago Open 2021. I don't think I had a fundamentally different content approach to this set than in any of those tournaments.

Basically, I signed on to John's ideas from Day 1 about making Nats an easier tournament where teams are able to compete throughout the tossup and playoffs are not decided excessively by late-in-tossup buzzer races. The main visible metric of difficulty reduction is bonus conversion, which did go up a little bit, but I think much more tangible was the distribution of buzzes. Alas, we lack any way to track this for this event, given that we didn't have powers or advanced stats, but I agree with John that subjectively, there were a good number more pre-FTP buzzes at this tournament than at other nationals in recent memory. In particular, I was absolutely delighted to see very early buzzes on answerlines/concepts that I didn't see a whole lot of canon precedent for, both in my own areas and in those of others.

The biggest lift in this tournament for me, by far, was working on the History questions. Over the years, I've personally branched out into learning more and more about different areas of history that didn't really touch my fancy as much before - social history, US history, and more recently, 20th century history and learning the context behind the much-memed Named Operations distribution. My writing and editing, prosaically and content-wise, reflects my learning process: using a little word space to tee up context behind why you might care about things, weaving in aspects of social, textual, military, and political history where appropriate, while disaggregating these areas when I think a specific theme is worth driving home. Among things I wrote from scratch, you can think of the Delhi Sultanate, Rastafarians, and rifles tossups as examples of the former and the East Germany, Mycenae, and wood tossups as examples of the latter. As I've matured as a writer, I think I've become more able better treat these topics equally well, as they deserve, to be part of a monument to humanity's past and the lessons worth learning from it - I sincerely hope that impression is shared.

I don't have much to say on Religion and Social Science. My main goals were to make sure there were good sub-distributions in each of these areas and write stuff that would be learning about. I do think quizbowl has mined the well of religious practices pretty deep, so given that this tournament had somewhat less myth than normal, I put a bit more emphasis on stories for several edits of religion tossups. As for social science, I just wanted to make sure no subdistribution (especially political science) went under-appreciated. There was probably a bit less psychology and economics than John and I would have liked to see and the Social Science was overall quite hard, but I'm very confident that we offered up a set of topics that are worth knowing and building some precedent on.

For Current Events and Geography, I farmed out a lot of stuff to Matt Jackson and Taylor Harvey, two writers I trusted to bring in intriguing content and who produced questions that were a breeze to edit, mostly me making things easier. Broadly speaking, Matt's more "politics-and-law" questions (Sherrod Brown, Jim Justice, farms, and the Lina Khan and APA bonuses to name a few) balanced out with my trademark "wide-trend-Modern-World" type questions (nuclear submarines, semiconductor fabs, etc). Geography ended up with a pretty wide range of topics, with Matt and Taylor contributing a lion's share there to represent physical, cultural, "tourist," and other kinds of geography very well.

For Other Academic, I mostly just filled in stuff where I thought "hey, this is a fun topic that doesn't fit neatly in other parts of the distribution." Some amount of this ended being more Social Science, that being the most constrained part of the distribution, so Wade Davis and George Zipf ended up as Other Academic questions (though both questions had plenty of crossovers outside "Pure SS"). The rest, I hope, was an enjoyable smorgasboard - even that bonus on Ben Burtt, the sound designer behind Star Wars.

Per the second bonus you heard in this tournament, a little bit of self-criticism is in order here:
  • I think we as an editorial team did a good with medium parts, but we could have done with some more work on the hard parts. In particular, John and I shaved a lot of "hard individuals" answerlines throughout the tournament production process, but we both agreed were still too many of these and more needed to be cut.
  • There was a bit less Judaism and Christianity in the submitted packets than ideal. A lot of this reflected wanting to honor good submissions, though there were enough editor questions lying around that I could have made some swaps to balance out the tournament.
  • As with any editor, I was a bit too wedded to a few specific ideas and time-constrained to make a few cuts/changes that were probably the right call ultimately. I'll discuss more of these when a Specific Question Discussion thread pops up.
Watching this set play live made every bit of struggle, research, and late night contemplation worth it. Thanks again all!
Last edited by naan/steak-holding toll on Mon Apr 11, 2022 5:46 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Thanks to John et al. for having me on board the writing team.

Here’s the full list of what I wrote for ACF Nationals 2022 -- I've hidden the rounds that not everyone played, to facilitate later readings of those rounds:
  • 1 Purdue: Istanbul (in Pamuk); Salò Republic; Soweto; stereotypes || Sula / Song of Solomon / Connie Sosa; Luang Prabang / elephants / 1640s; garbage can model of organizational decision-making / anarchy / learning; kwashiorkor / Ghana / Plumpy'nut
  • 2 Stanford: Seascape; Clark family; history (in Nietzsche) || democracy by cell phone (Navalny / Argentina / Audrey Tang)
  • 3 Claremont: Bennet family; Jim Justice || Ragamuffin War / slaves / quilombos; Vanport / A. Philip Randolph / Henry Kaiser
  • 4 UNC A: Oxford philosophy || Satyricon / Quartilla / cannibalism; women's strike / Althing / Vigdis; tarpon / Tampa Bay / Cape Coral
  • 5 Cornell A / Cornell B: partisanship || Algerian Civil War / Gaddafi / Salafism; Miami Freedom Tower / Castro / Cox; Jaipur religion (Parvati / bhakti / Karni Mata); dawn / Tane / Maui; Singapore / Rafflesia / Batam
  • 6 Texas A: The Dream of the Rood || incarcerated / Alaska / GEO or CoreCivic (reworked submission)
  • 7 Texas B: Francois Mitterrand || Ireland / loneliness / Anne Enright; Nadine Gordimer / “Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black” / “Something Out There”; philosophy of games / Wittgenstein / family resemblances; new trauma treatments (eye / The Body Keeps the Score / prolonged exposure); converting to Baha'i / 10 / Acre
  • 8 Georgia Tech: Honduras || Jolof empire / Kongo / Abubakari II OR Mohammed ibn Gao; inverted spectrum problem (Locke / functionalism / Shoemaker); Tides Foundation / Charles Koch / Open Society
  • 9 OSU A: Harry Mulisch; Brazil (women authors); South Vietnam || Alcman of Sparta / dactyl / strophe; Habermas / lifeworld / social pathology
  • UNC B (Tiebreak into playoffs) (select to reveal): Georgia; Confucianism; gender; amrit (nectar) || savings and loan crisis / John Glenn / Irvine; demand characteristics / hypnosis / Clever Hans; Birute Galdikas (orangutans / Leakey / Simon Fraser); North Carolina / Durham / High Point.
  • Editor 1: Tarski; professionals || Sedgwick / Gothic / reparative reading; Marguerite Duras / piano / China; Chingiz Aitmatov / epics / cosmonaut; Jasanoff family / Harvard / Ramses II
  • Editor 2: Idaho || Native Guard / Mississippi / Fugitive poets; The Blind Owl / New Zealand / Omar Khayyam; Charles Mills / Rawls / ideal theory; Slovic / risk / smoking; Lina Khan / FTC / consumer welfare standard
  • Editor 3: Denmark (philosophy) || Hanya Yanagihara / Jack London / Muroyama; “On Not Knowing Greek” / Woolf / Jacob Flanders; Mary Elizabeth Lease / Populists / merging with Democrats
  • Editor 4: Aurora Leigh; Laurie Anderson; al-Farabi || A System of Logic / names / Mind; Piaget / assimilation / meaning maintenance model; Korah / Numbers / widows; car parking / Edmonton / distillery
  • Editor 5: ujamaa; Chicago (civil rights) || Antal Szerb / Hungarian / Venice; Port-Royal / Descartes / enthymeme; word order / X-bar / specifier; getting nothing done (WWII / Fukuyama / The Tyranny of Structurelessness)
  • Editor 6: Wizard of the Crow; Morocco religion; Cape Town || Odets / Awake and Sing! / Adler; Vienna Circle / Princeton / assassination of Moritz Schlick; dialectical behavior therapy / Kubler-Ross / borderline; Hillsong / Pentecostalism / Nigeria; FOIA / ProPublica / Administrative Procedure Act
  • Editor 7: Gustave Flaubert; social networks; Sherrod Brown || Heroes of the Fourth Turning / Wyoming / Rankine; Palgrave / Oxford / Clough; Lazarillo de Tormes / blind / squire; Combahee / Tubman / consciousness raising; Rwandan genocide philosophy (just war / Agamben / necropolitics); wicked problems / Ostrom / management; Zagros mountains / hyenas / Karun river
  • Editor 8: summer (in Tennessee Williams); Catalan language; doors (in behavioral science) || Coward / normal / Ayckbourn; Petrarch and Dante (Good Friday / Virgin Mary / siren); Branting (SDP / Norwegian ind. / Lafargue); Neo-Confucianism / Gojong / Silhak; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy / Frege / John Perry; Lammas Day / first fruits / Patrick
  • Editor 9: Chinese Australians; epistemic justification; Zygmunt Bauman; farms || Marie de France / Brittany / werewolf; Polynesian expansion / canoes / Mau Piailug; aquatint / Goya / chairs; Hermann Cohen / pure / noumenon; superforecasting / experts / Penn; Jain / Chandragupta Maurya / shravaka; Cairo genizah / Aramaic / Amitav Ghosh
  • Editor 10: Halldor Laxness; social trust || Rossum / Capek / Radius; Fugger / copper / Luca Pacioli; Muiscas / Humboldt / Chibchan; wet nurses / Hammurabi / pietas; Knights of the Golden Something-Or-Other (Cuba / Baltimore / Alexander Spotswood); Hutcheson / self-interest / Bishop Butler; Marilyn Strathern / New Guinea / universities
  • Play-in / UG Finals 1 (select to reveal): Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim; Theodore Roosevelt; Mary (in 18th-century philosophy) || Bruno Schulz's father / Metamorphosis / Street of Crocodiles; Nicolas Guillén / Cuba / White Rose; Toronto / St. Lawrence Seaway / Alouette-1; the biggest electoral losers (Socialist / Michigan / Coxey); Alice Goffman / Philadelphia / Digby Baltzell; Schechner / Victor Turner / Sanskrit
  • Finals 1: Garrison; sick people in Judaism || Zelda Fitzgerald / Save Me the Waltz / The Jelly-Bean; Silvia Federici / witch / encomienda; Huey Long / telephone / deduct box; LDS / single people / General Conference
  • Finals 2 (select to reveal): "moral" psychology; "The Laugh of the Medusa"; "early modern"; 1994; Navajo; Fernando Pessoa || Pseudo-Dionysius / five / Iamblichus
  • Extra/Tiebreaker/Replacement (select to reveal): social theory; Minerva || slashed canvases (Velazquez / Newman / Fontana)
Some scattered thoughts:
  • I didn’t have an ideological manifesto or unified approach behind most of these questions; they’re a melange of stuff I find interesting, questions I’d want to play, “pursue the overdue,” sub-distributional gaps the editors wanted filled, and things I knew I could write quickly for impending deadlines.
  • Exception: As a longtime Politics Person, I wanted the current events questions to reward engagement with substantive policy issues and “real world civics,” not media stunt behavior. My questions on farms, Sherrod Brown, Lina Khan’s antitrust work, Honduras (early clues on “charter city” projects), Tides/Koch/Open Society philanthropy, and FOIA (as well as Will’s bonus on CHIP and our edit of Texas A’s submission on mass incarceration) are among those that took this tack. I made one exception for a Twitter feud clue honoring Jim Justice’s adorable dog (#DoItForBabydog). I also drew heavily from “Voxplainer”-type articles for the social science questions on legitimacy, partisanship, and social trust.
  • The Mulisch tossup was my most “Westbrookian” / “artificial” canon expansion attempt in a while, in that it built directly off prior tossups (mostly common links on “Dutch” that go from him to Multatuli and/or Anne Frank). Though I only clued his two most famous novels in English translation, I gather it still played quite hard; if it was a missed shot, I hope teams can forgive it as a shot that was worth taking.
  • Thanks to John and Will for indulging my Religion score clue (from Debbie Friedman’s “Mi Sheberach,” in the tossup on the sick in Judaism); I was ecstatic to see Natan buzz on it in the finals. More generally, I appreciate that Will and Stephen Liu often explored the blurry borders of their categories; even under ACF’s strong norms of category purity, it’s possible for good questions to show how phenomena we often split into, e.g., “history,” “the arts,” “legends,” “religion,” “social science,” “geography,” and “current events” are enormously interrelated.
  • This was my first experience writing directed prompts. They are cool and good and improve gameplay immensely.
  • John’s length caps definitely spurred me to write crisper, clearer prose. In particular, it was nice to rediscover the joys of single-line “Yaphe-style” easy parts and occasional jaunty, to-the-point harder parts. As a reader, I definitely felt this make a difference, both to the subjective sense of “pace of gameplay” and to the empirical runtime of rounds.
Last edited by Adventure Temple Trail on Sat Jul 02, 2022 4:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Big fan of length caps, glad to see they were strictly enforced.

Agree with Will that those questions on Rastafarianism, wood and nuclear subs were cool.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, it's hard to provide an objective assessment of a set as a playtester. But was glad to see the editors treating playtesting really seriously and making lots of great improvements based on that feedback.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by adamsil »

Hi all,

First, I want to echo John’s thanks from the OP: this set was a huge team effort, with indispensable contributions across the board from editors, playtesters, freelancers, and proofreaders. I’d like to especially echo the shoutout to Olivia Murton, who provided countless improvements to the wording in my questions (and some content, too!); Nick Jensen, who submitted a few questions for the editors’ packets in some inspired “chem-adjacent” areas (more on this later); plus Bradley Silverman, Victor Prieto, Billy Busse, and Andrew Wang, who patiently sat through several supplemental playtesting sessions and provided me a ton of good feedback (mostly: on what was too hard. I should have listened to you more!)

I am amazed at the volume and quality of the work that Stephen L., John, and Will (plus Matt Jackson and the other freelancers) put out. Between them, they covered 16/16. Whereas the 4/4 science was split among three people. And although I was nominally the one editing chemistry, I really ought to give co-editing credit to Stephen E. and Eric, who provided preliminary feedback on basically every single question I wrote. In most of my previous editing experiences, science editing has been the prerogative of one or two people, and there was very little communication or feedback between them. Instead, this was an intensely collaborative experience where I received regular comments from two of the absolute best-ever science-category players and writers. You guys were awesome. I hope the players found that our efforts made the category feel unified.

It feels stupid to have a lot to say about 1/1 of a distribution that, frankly, almost nobody likes. And that’s kind of the point. My principal goal in this set was to repeatedly hit applied chemistry topics that I hoped people who aren’t scientists would find interesting and relevant -- in the literature, in the lab, in industry, to society -- which meant an emphasis on materials science, energy, catalysis, molecular modeling, and, yes, lots of biochemistry. I kept some meat-and-potatoes answerlines to reward coursework, and hopefully let people show they had Real Knowledge. But the questions I was proudest of in this set were the bonuses on things like biodegradable polymers, carbon dioxide photocatalysis, and in silico drug design. Frankly, it upsets me when the extremely smart people playing quizbowl don’t engage with science questions at all. The best feedback I could get is if non-scientists come away from this tournament with at least a general sense of why things like PETases or zeta potential or photoresists or the Suzuki reaction matter.

I absolutely welcome criticism of the consequent distribution; obviously, with these stated goals, I was going to wind up writing questions about things which were already in my narrowly defined orbit. For the editors’ packets, I targeted 2/2 organic chemistry, 2/2 inorganic chemistry, 2/2 analytical chemistry, 2/2 chemical biology, 2/2 physical chemistry, 2/2 materials science and chemical engineering, and 1/1 environmental chemistry. The submissions were largely on more classroom-related topics, which was fine, too.

I apologize that I overshot tossup difficulty in general by a clue or so: there were many buzzes on easy answerlines that came too late. (If you’re going to find the early clues to write a tossup on diffusion for ACF Nats, you may as well write the bottom of that pyramid correctly!). And yes, many hard parts in this set were mined from things that show up every week in JACS tables of contents, rather than old tossups. But, I hope that they were informative, and conveyed why I thought these were important, interesting topics to ask about.

I am happy to provide feedback on individual questions by email, just shoot me a message. I really liked the Purdue’s aluminum oxide submission and UNC A’s basically-perfect-as-written DFT bonus submission.

Thanks again to the players, and to John for giving me the opportunity to work on this set and assembling a great team. I had sworn myself out of quizbowl editing after really burning out of ideas during PIANO; by contrast, this was a joy to work on.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

I edited the bio (surprise) and contributed to the other science subcategories. I'd like to thank quite a few people specifically, and if I forget to thank you don't be offended please. I'll blanket co-sign all the thanks above to start.
- First, my co-science editors, Adam and Stephen, who offered excellent, specific feedback on my questions. Like Adam said the collaboration here was invaluable. I'm also really happy with how they edited my contributions to their categories. I think the three of us produced an excellent set of questions. Like Adam I felt a little burnt out on ideas, but working with this group really helped re-invigorate my interest.
- Shan Kothari was very kind to offer a few ecology/ev bio questions to round out the distribution. His expertise is always wonderful to have on any set.
- I'd particularly like to thank Olivia Murton for her excellent proofreading of my often technically-dense questions - she really improved the flow and intelligibility of many of my questions, and provided excellent content feedback on the facial recognition and uterus questions in particular.
- Eddie Kim and Will Nediger's work on PGs was excellent and made the set much more readable. As did Ganon Evans' proofreading.
- I'd also like to thank John, Will, and Taylor for their input. The generalist input on science questions is always helpful to fine-tune clues and difficulty.
- The playtesting corps for this tournament was truly stellar, and were very good about providing actionable feedback. I'd particularly like to thank Nick Jensen, Aseem Keyal and Hasna Karim for their comments, but all of the playtesters were nothing but helpful

My editing philosophy hasn't really changed - I'm still seeking to reward science as it's practiced in the classroom, laboratory, and clinic, and I think I largely met that goal. I also tried to sub-distribute across all of the sub-categories (ecology, genetics, cell bio, immunology, microbiology, biochemistry, medicine, neuro/cognitive, etc), and I think I hit most of them. I also made the point of having one women's health question in this tournament, as usual, for social engineering reasons. Funny story, and to prove the necessity of such an effort, it was made easier in playtesting, because originally it ended "For 10 points, name this organ, benign smooth muscle tumors of which are called fibroids" but Will Alston was the only male editor who could get it by the end.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by caroline »

I don't really have anything too detailed to say, but I really enjoyed this set! In particular, I thought its mechanics and playability were excellent; sentences were very clear and the proofreading seemed quite good (obviously the moderators were fantastic in themselves, but I was really impressed by how little they stumbled / how smoothly the reading flowed). As someone who's a really, really shy buzzer unless I'm very confident (I've clocked 0 negs in my last 3 tournaments combined), I always felt like I knew what a question wanted, in terms of 1) clear pronouns on more creative answerlines (for example, the use of "this punishment" later in the tarring and feathering TU rather than something vaguer let me buzz with more confidence), 2) specific and evocatively written clues (I often catch myself thinking "okay this could describe X but it's so vague what if it's actually something else," but that didn't really happen here), and 3) helpful context in narrowing down the answers + clear, sensible conceits (i.e. if I felt like if I buzzed on a clue, it would make sense for not only that clue, but also all the clues I didn't know as well). This didn't really happen in lit so I don't know how helpful it actually was, but I noticed a lot more "You may give..."-type instructions, which seemed good in giving the player a clear sense of what was wanted. I also really appreciated the length caps—except for the last few games of a pretty long Day 1, this tournament didn't really feel like the slog I expected it to be.

I don't think I have much to say about the lit—it seemed well-balanced with regard to time period, genre, region, type of answerline, etc., with a fair amount of creative and entertaining stuff (off the top of my head, I was pretty amused by the lead-in of "The Overcoat" and the Q about O'Connor's peacock obsession) without venturing into unplayable territory. I thought it did a pretty good job with representing minorities (women, POC, etc.) as well.

Also, shoutout to Matt for the doors TU, specifically the clue from The Design of Everyday Things—I work as a user experience designer and the doors anecdote has come up in multiple design classes I've taken, so it felt great to get a question from a passion that's usually pretty useless with regard to scoring points.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

I had a great time playing this set. A couple of preliminary thoughts:

- I appreciated having the directed prompts at several points as a player. Along with other welcome changes, like more concrete answerlines and notes before the tossup, they made for questions that produced much more satisfying outcomes. The recent philosophical shift towards player empathy has been a very positive development.

I do think we need to theorize the directed prompt significantly further. As far as I know, there's no public, agreed-upon standard for what merits a directed prompt and what doesn't. This lack of standardization raises some issues of fairness; whether a player receives a directed prompt or not depends as much on the whim of the question-writer as it does on the facts of the case. When the question-writer is stingy with prompts, it means, of course, that players will flounder and neg even though they've demonstrated the relevant knowledge. I would add, as well, that some sets have been overly generous with the directed prompt, which can result in one team basically being given extra clues after buzzing.

That said, I think this tournament was pretty consistent with its standards for prompting, and I rarely felt frustrated at an answerline.

- I thought the difficulty structure of the bonuses in the editors' packets was pretty exemplary. Writers for hard tournaments usually underestimate how much harder it is to produce a name than to recognize one. Something that's an appropriate middle clue in a Nationals tossup can be an inappropriately hard third part to a bonus. As a result, hard tournaments often end up with the best teams all clustered around 18 ppb, even if there are significant differences in their ability. Although the third parts in the prelims were a little rough, I thought the third parts in this tournament's playoffs were usually pretty optimal for this difficulty level, which is an impressive and much-appreciated achievement.

More to come later!
Last edited by The King's Flight to the Scots on Tue Apr 12, 2022 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Aaron's Rod »

Thank you so much for producing this set! Both players and I really enjoyed it.
Adventure Temple Trail wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 5:21 pm This was my first experience writing directed prompts. They are cool and good and improve gameplay immensely.
Agreed!
ThisIsMyUsername wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 4:10 pm One of the nice things about contemporary quizbowl culture is that we've collectively grown to appreciate roles that can't quite be fully defined. There is no one name for Olivia Murton's role in this set, because it spans all areas of production. She was at once project manager, proofreader-in-chief, vice principal, pit boss, occasional technician, and frequent co-pilot during choppy weather. I consulted with her about almost all of the major decisions I made about the nitty-gritty of set production. She was either the source of or sounding board for any idea that made the process smoother. And half the time that I poked people with a stick to keep things moving forward, it was because Olivia had poked me with a stick to keep me on top of my stick-poking. In addition to these logistical matters, she contributed valuable insight for matters of difficulty control in her areas of expertise.

While I'm sure there were still typos and whatnot in the set, the reason the set was as readable as it was is because we did two-step proofreading. The first step, performed by Olivia and by Ganon Evans, focused on grammar and clarity. The second step, performed by Eddie Kim and Will Nediger, focused on pronunciation guides, interpuncts, etc. Of course, each of these teams did a little bit of the other team's work too, but I hope the fact that these roles were more clearly defined meant that both aspects of readability were improved. Additional pronunciation guide and formatting was provided by Cody Voight via a code that he contributed that we used. Ganon's boundless enthusiasm and willingness to do any production task needed at a moment's notice (including running some playtesting sessions in my absence), was a huge boon to the set. Having Eddie and Will do the pronunciation guides removed a lot of the amateur guesswork that almost always comes with this thankless task when done by the subject editors themselves. They were both brought on very late in the production process, but worked with remarkable speed and accuracy. Finally, although I've already mentioned Stephen as an editor; I have not mentioned his role in doing a lot of the coding that helped us throughout the feng-shui-tagging / packetization process, which would have been unimaginably agonizing absent his solutions.
I don't read a ton of sets anymore, but the proofreading on science questions was the best I have ever seen. It's not even close. I appreciated the use of interpuncts (and was positively delighted by their appearance in non-science questions! like the tossup on Sweeney). But I was especially impressed with the pronunciation guide coverage on acronyms and initialisms, something I've been harping on for years.

I also noticed that many (most?) tossups on people did not note their gender until roughly halfway through the question.

I noticed that the set had several questions that strung or nested dependent clauses, which created longer sentences that might have been harder to parse. Stringing together clauses is often considered quizbowlese. Strict length caps are good, but I wonder whether they also contributed to this, since the remedy is usually to break things up into multiple sentences. I'm also apt to chalk this up to length caps because I've noticed NAQT sets, which have very strict length caps, seem to have more of this than (m)ACF sets.

This is is just a smattering of examples.
Round 3 (Claremont Colleges) wrote: NASCAR entrepreneur Bray Cary was a senior advisor to this politician who, in a Twitter-incited feud, told singer Bette (“bet”) Midler to literally kiss the exposed “heinie” of his pet bulldog Babydog. This governor defeated Ben Salango to get reelected in 2020; before taking office in 2016, he was the only billionaire in his state.
Round 5 (Cornell A+Cornell B) wrote: The protagonist’s opium-addicted soldier brother writes a “Moonflower Journal” and a novelist nicknamed M. C. or “My Chekhov,” is loved by Kazuko, who takes care of her dying mother, in this author’s novel The Setting Sun.
Editors 6 wrote:
This man, who was the target of On True and False Ideas, declared that God mostly works through general, rather than particular, volitions in the seventeen “elucidations” to his major work.

The ceremony officially marking this action was [emphasize] not attended by sitting president Bill Clinton, but rather by a former U.S. President, who stood on a machine called a “mule” in the presence of Juan Carlos I (“the-first”) of Spain and Mireya Moscoso.

This book’s narrator is always called “Tatie” by his wife, and is one of two men who are promised a prize from the magazine The Quarter by a deceitful Irish poet who is repeatedly described as being “marked for death.”
Just something to keep in mind!
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by cwasims »

Thanks very much to all the editors and writers for a great tournament - I'm pretty confident in saying this is the best ACF Nationals I've played: the questions were excellent and well-subdistributed and the logistics were extremely smooth given the high number of rounds and teams.

I agree with a few others that the social science could've maybe used another economics tossup, but I know that small subdistributional tweaks aren't always easy to implement in practice. The economics questions were quite well-distributed though: some more "traditional" topics like the history of economic thought (Fisher) and microeconomic theory (utility) but also questions that touched on diverse areas like behavioural economics (endowment, doors), development economics (endowment), cultural economics (trust, even if my reading too much Tabellini lately led me to neg with morality) and the kind of macro that's widely used in the field (TFP). I assume it was CE rather than econ, but the bonus on Lina Khan also touched on debates that people in industrial organization are deeply engaged with. In the past many QB sets have treated economics as merely consisting of micro theory and macro theory while not acknowledging that the field has significantly branched out in terms of subject matter and has also become much more empirical, so I'm glad this tournament presented a more holistic view. I don't have as many thoughts on the other areas of social science, but they seemed well-written as well.

I think the history in this set was very good overall and don't have any major critiques. I've mentioned this before, but I do think that history questions, especially at this difficulty level, could try to engage a bit more with the social science literature on history - there are a lot of economists, political scientists and sociologists that have done a lot of fascinating research relating to history that's qualitatively quite different from what historians focus on. Cluing some social science content in history could also relieve a bit of the burdens from a category that's widely considered to be quite underrepresented. This lack of clues about social science history research probably also translates into a relative lack of questions (not limited to this tournament) about extremely important developments like the Great Divergence, which is largely studied by social scientists.

The auditory arts in this tournament were, predictably, outstanding and I think the topics were very subdistributed including in areas like opera where the small number of questions can make this task more challenging. I mentioned this to John Lawrence during the tournament, but I was particularly happy to finally get some QB points from singing Choral Evensong every week for three years (the "Hear My Prayer" clue in the Mendelssohn tossup and the bonus part on the composer we probably programmed the most frequently, C.V. Stanford). Despite that fact that choirs are one of the major ways that people engage with classical music, both as performers and listeners, choral music has often been neglected by QB so I was happy to see this representation here.

I'm not such a great visual arts player, but I did find that this category tended to be a fair bit more extracanonical than the classical music at least, with me having never or barely having heard of a number of the answer lines. I'd be curious if better VA players felt this way, or if my knowledge just doesn't really scale to this difficulty.

Thanks to whoever wrote a tossup on one of the few novels I've read in recent years, Exit West, which allowed to me to get at least one good literature buzz. I will say that I did find the literature questions pretty interesting overall as someone who doesn't engage much with the category in general.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I'm very pleased to hear that comment about economics subdistribution! At higher levels of quizbowl, I sometimes find the opposite of what you said to be true, that people go really deep on applied areas or specific economists without doing much of the basics; at lower levels of difficulty, people focus on the basics, as they should. I wanted this tournament to be a blend, offering up servings of basic macro (TFP, money supply bonus) and micro (utility estimation, contract curves bonus) that people could get solid buzzes on from low-level college classes, with a few other questions rewarding more expansive areas. Naturally, economics crept into other areas of social science as well, as it should - Matt Jackson and I very much share this interdisciplinary mindset.

EDIT: As a further aside, I deliberately pushed the "quantitative" aspect of social science with a lot of editing and was pleased to get submissions and freelance questions that helped me do this. The utility tossup started out as a tossup on conjoint analysis, which was much too hard, so I blended it with a question that Eric Mukherjee freelanced on revealed preference theory. Matt's original draft of the social networks tossup was a delightful mix of quant clues and more "traditional" quizbowl SS clues; I figured that topic would be prime material for a more "full quant" approach, since quantitative network analysis is something that crops up in a ton of different fields (I was unaware that Matt was planning to enroll in a Quant SS grad program at this time, but in retrospect, how appropriate!) Finally, UNC A submitted a (hard, but very well-written) bonus on structural models; I judged that structural models would be a fine hard part (econ grad students getting an instant 30 doesn't bother me) and put in a middle part on factor analysis, something that is omnipresent across quantitative social sciences.
cwasims wrote:I think the history in this set was very good overall and don't have any major critiques. I've mentioned this before, but I do think that history questions, especially at this difficulty level, could try to engage a bit more with the social science literature on history - there are a lot of economists, political scientists and sociologists that have done a lot of fascinating research relating to history that's qualitatively quite different from what historians focus on. Cluing some social science content in history could also relieve a bit of the burdens from a category that's widely considered to be quite underrepresented. This lack of clues about social science history research probably also translates into a relative lack of questions (not limited to this tournament) about extremely important developments like the Great Divergence, which is largely studied by social scientists.
I agree with this philosophically, though I've found that when I've written such clues, not a whole lot of people get a lot of buzzes on them. In general I tried to take a bit more of a conservative approach with this tournament's tossup cluing than, say, CO, sticking more to "facts of the matter" and using my own words to offer some interpretative context, while having a decent number of dedicated questions on historiography and archaeology in the "Other History" distribution. Admittedly, the historiography tended much more "literary" than "social sciencey" which, to a degree, reflects more of what I've been engaging with recently.

I must say, though, I find your example amusing since Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence has come up at least twice in recent memory! Also, there's a fun surprise waiting for you in Finals 2, courtesy of Matt Jackson, whenever you get a chance to see it :wink:
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by gyre and gimble »

cwasims wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 5:15 pmI'm not such a great visual arts player, but I did find that this category tended to be a fair bit more extracanonical than the classical music at least, with me having never or barely having heard of a number of the answer lines. I'd be curious if better VA players felt this way, or if my knowledge just doesn't really scale to this difficulty.
As the visual arts editor, I'm curious what folks thought, too.

I didn't attend the tournament, but judging by the few recordings I was able to listen to, the visual arts might have skewed slightly harder than the rest of the set on average. Though I would resist the characterization that the visual arts was actually extra-canonical, I can see how it could have felt that way. One of my objectives with this set was identifying (hopefully important) things that quizbowl used to ask about more often but have for one reason or another faded out (the Merode Altarpiece), or famous things that for some reason just hadn't been tossed up yet (Gassed, The Human Condition). (I may have more to say on this later, but thought I'd let any discussion play out first.)

There were definitely some extra-canonical things (Tibet, and what I think was the hardest visual arts question in the set, Peter/Jenny Saville). And I guess it's a matter of interpretation what is canonical or not. But my hope is that overall, I succeeded in keeping the amount of truly out-there things under control.

(By contrast, I think I was quite aggressive, and intentionally so, with asking about extra-canonical things in mythology, continuing with the flavor of my mythology questions for 2018 ACF Nationals.)

I did still hear a lot of fantastic buzzes in both categories, though!

Congrats to all who played, and especially to Georgia Tech and Stanford.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

I enjoyed this set overall and found the length caps (which I didn't know about at the time, it just felt that things kept moving) very useful. Questions were interesting and on important things (in the categories i pay attention to at least) even when I didn't actually know much about the topic in question, which was true of most of the tournament.

I'm not sure if I agree with Chris that the visual fine arts content was extremely extracanonical/difficult, but there were several harder answerlines and I personally found much more success on bonuses (over 19 ppb across 12 vfa bonuses) than tossups (only got a few at most). I will say that while it may have been subdistibuted well overall, I thought this category was quite poorly distributed in the prelim rounds/submitted packets, with a heavy skew to the renaissance and before (off the top of my head, tossups on Guido Reni, da Vinci, the Merode Altarpiece, and an ancient art tu on cows all in the first 6 packets). In general I didn't remember hearing much content on art made from ~1700-1945.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

I promised a discussion of my editing philosophy for my categories. But I've written a lot of posts on "quizbowl theory" over the years; so I can afford to keep this relatively brief.

I announced my retirement from non-NAQT all-subject editing in 2016. But I'd always fancied the idea of head-editing an ACF Nats, and this seemed like exactly the right time in my life for me to do it. I did not want to edit my categories as if quizbowl-writing practices have not changed in the six years during which I was off writing side events. I have always been frustrated by older editors who think they have no obligation to adjust to changing standards (much as I have always been frustrated by younger writers who are uninterested in the large body of existing theory). This problem tends to plague national sets, in particular, since they are necessarily written by disproportionately senior writers. Therefore, I made an effort to read the work (especially posts) of my younger peers to see what they were doing. (The younger playtesters were extraordinarily useful in aiding me in this endeavor, as they were able to point out gaps in my understanding of how things have changed.)

The easiest way to explain my approach is to build on this editors-as-composers comparison post from 2016. (Note: I did not write it.) It reflects a common perception: that among the writers of my generation, my style was the most Classical, rather than Romantic. If I may extend this analogy, ACF Nationals 2022 was my attempt to write in a Neoclassical style--in which a fundamentally traditional, "back to basics" approach to "core" canon and concepts is married to contemporary technical and aesthetic principles. The narrower focus of the common-links, the use of current scholarship to thematize bonuses, the willingness to selectively draw upon aspects of popular culture, the much greater attention paid to more marginalized figures in artistic and philosophical history--all of these elements of my categories came from contemporary writing trends and would likely have been minor or absent in a set that I edited five or six years ago. But, of course, there were also things I would have written at any stage in my life, tossups on: an individual Beethoven symphony movement (e.g. the funeral march from the Eroica); a specific scene from a long novel (e.g. the birth scene from Tristram Shandy); a gimmick-free, frills-free summary of a super-core text (e.g. Of Grammatology); etc. Put another way, this was always going to be the kind of tournament in which I served you a lightly spiced bowl of frumenty in Victorian literature. For all of the off-the-beaten-track stuff I tried to weave into the set, I wanted players' most consistent source of points to be a solid grasp of the material that shows up on 100- and 200-level college syllabuses in my disciplines. If you're someone whose knowledge of e.g. World Lit comes heavily from the Fall/Regs canon, I wanted you to still be a functional player at this difficulty; but if you're someone whose tastes are more capacious, I wanted there to be plenty of additional material (some of it hopefully new and exciting!) to keep you interested.

All of this comes from a basic conviction: in the world outside of quizbowl, there is no such thing as the canon; instead, there are many canons. They vary according to how and why one comes to each discipline. Thus, even in something as narrow as classical music, there are concertgoers' canons, the players' canons, the music majors' canons, the scholars' canons, etc. My aim, therefore, is to focus primarily on things that would be highly canonical to someone, but to vary who that someone is from question to question. The only way I know how to do this is by subdistributing the living hell out of the set, which is what I did, with a bunch of spreadsheets and a long checklist of "essential topics" in hand, to make sure I hit as many little pockets of knowledge as possible.

Okay, enough abstract pontificating from me. My next post will respond to some of the comments we've received already, which actually hit upon exactly some of the issues I wanted to address!
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

Now, I swear that I did not know that Chris Sims was going to post in this thread, but I was actually about to talk about the Mendelssohn and Exit West tossups in my post above, and lo and behold, I found that he mentioned them!
cwasims wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 5:15 pmI mentioned this to John Lawrence during the tournament, but I was particularly happy to finally get some QB points from singing Choral Evensong every week for three years (the "Hear My Prayer" clue in the Mendelssohn tossup and the bonus part on the composer we probably programmed the most frequently, C.V. Stanford). Despite that fact that choirs are one of the major ways that people engage with classical music, both as performers and listeners, choral music has often been neglected by QB so I was happy to see this representation here.
I can't tell you how happy I was when you came up to me during the tournament to tell me this, because this epitomizes exactly the reaction I strive for and what I think about with clue selection! The Mendelssohn repertoire I chose is not in the concertgoers' or players' canons. (I had enough other questions doing that.) The clues about his oratorios and the St. Matthew Passion are from college music history survey courses. (Luckily, they've come up enough in quizbowl that I can still use them in late clues.) But the rest were on hymns one is most likely to know from participating in Protestant church choirs. I had no idea how many people might be in the field might has this kind of experience. But I had 23 packets to work with, and so I decided to throw in a few such clues--tucked in among the completely standard stuff--in the hopes that someone would be rewarded for a part of their musical lives that prior questions don't really touch. The same goes for the Charles Villiers Stanford bonus part, which was part of my "pursue the overdue" motto that Matt Jackson quoted. I've had to review a lot of choral concerts over the years and Stanford keeps appearing on programs, and so I decided he was in that "overdue" category.
cwasims wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 5:15 pmThanks to whoever wrote a tossup on one of the few novels I've read in recent years, Exit West, which allowed to me to get at least one good literature buzz. I will say that I did find the literature questions pretty interesting overall as someone who doesn't engage much with the category in general.
That was mine. As I hinted above, in my description of the World Lit, I'm often wary of tossing up a contemporary novel for which there has been insufficient "preparation" (in the form of earlier questions). I don't like how those usually play. But when that novel came out, all kinds of family and friends who would suck at quizbowl literature told me that they were reading it, and so I took a gamble that there would be enough people in the field to make for good conversion / buzz distribution. Chatter on the Discord suggests that this might be true. And if some of those people weren't self-defined "literature players," all the better!
caroline wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 12:49 amAs someone who's a really, really shy buzzer unless I'm very confident (I've clocked 0 negs in my last 3 tournaments combined), I always felt like I knew what a question wanted, in terms of 1) clear pronouns on more creative answerlines (for example, the use of "this punishment" later in the tarring and feathering TU rather than something vaguer let me buzz with more confidence), 2) specific and evocatively written clues (I often catch myself thinking "okay this could describe X but it's so vague what if it's actually something else," but that didn't really happen here), and 3) helpful context in narrowing down the answers + clear, sensible conceits (i.e. if I felt like if I buzzed on a clue, it would make sense for not only that clue, but also all the clues I didn't know as well).
Thanks for the kind words, generally, Caroline. But this part of your post particularly pleased me, because I too have always been someone who is hesitant to buzz unless lead-in descriptions are very vivid and specific. So, knowing that I succeeded in giving you the necessary confidence in some places is very heartening.
Aaron's Rod wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 3:36 pm I also noticed that many (most?) tossups on people did not note their gender until roughly halfway through the question.
Yes, as head editor, I dictated that, length requirements permitting, tossups should remain gender-neutral for their first half (especially in fields where gender imbalance is more notable.) I'm glad that you appreciated it.
Aaron's Rod wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 3:36 pmI noticed that the set had several questions that strung or nested dependent clauses, which created longer sentences that might have been harder to parse. Stringing together clauses is often considered quizbowlese. Strict length caps are good, but I wonder whether they also contributed to this, since the remedy is usually to break things up into multiple sentences. I'm also apt to chalk this up to length caps because I've noticed NAQT sets, which have very strict length caps, seem to have more of this than (m)ACF sets.
I hear you on this. But I would like to see what the wordier tossups would look like if we tried to chop up the long sentences--how much longer the tossups would be, how many more times we'd have to repeat the pronoun phrases, how much harder it might be to perceive the relationship between the bits of information being clued, etc. Even if some of the specific sentences you cited might be too complicated, I'm not sure I believe that this general style of sentence-writing is avoidable.
Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 6:04 pmI will say that while it may have been subdistibuted well overall, I thought this category was quite poorly distributed in the prelim rounds/submitted packets, with a heavy skew to the renaissance and before (off the top of my head, tossups on Guido Reni, da Vinci, the Merode Altarpiece, and an ancient art tu on cows all in the first 6 packets). In general I didn't remember hearing much content on art made from ~1700-1945.
Sorry about that. That was my fault. I did the packet assignments for the visual arts, and I was trying to control for too many factors at once and missed how bad the pre-1700 clumping was.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Shahar S. »

As someone who was mostly paying attention to the science, I don't have much to say other than that I really enjoyed playing it and nearly everything I heard within biology, chemistry, and other science was executed really well.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Sam »

caroline wrote: Tue Apr 12, 2022 12:49 am Also, shoutout to Matt for the doors TU, specifically the clue from The Design of Everyday Things—I work as a user experience designer and the doors anecdote has come up in multiple design classes I've taken, so it felt great to get a question from a passion that's usually pretty useless with regard to scoring points.
This happened in my room, too. Unfortunately I forget the player who buzzed in (pretty sure it wasn't Caroline and will feel pretty silly if it was) but that seems solid evidence of a good question, that you can introduce a new, interesting clue people will organically get.

I don't want to comment on content as I didn't play, but the question lengths in this tournament felt near ideal. If there is any discussion of a shorter tournament--and there may not be, I was frankly surprised how spirited everyone was even at 8:15 Saturday--I think the margin to work with would have to be number of rounds. More tossups probably went dead than a Fall set but the buzzes on the others were well-distributed, not post-FTP heavy at all. And the tossups that did go dead were still short enough it didn't feel like a morass. This was my impression as an observer/scorekeeper/reader, maybe players felt differently.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by henrygoff »

I thought this set was excellent, and really enjoyed playing it - many thanks to the writers and editors for putting together a thoroughly entertaining set of questions for such a monumental tournament! Each tossup and bonus, at least in the categories I pay attention to (literature), was evocative, eloquent, straightforward, and succinct--qualities that were essential for a two-day, 19-round tournament. Contentwise, I found the vast majority of answerline choices to be refreshing (e.g. Wizard of the Crow), charmingly eccentric (e.g. Mr. Ripley), well-clued core canon (e.g. Lesbia, Dorothea Brooke), or often some combination of these three. All in all, an incredibly fun and challenging assortment of ways to test literature knowledge!
Outside of lit, I have to give props to Matt and Will for the real knowledge™ they included in the tossup on partisanship - literally every paper or statistic clued in that question has been assigned or taught to me at some point in my time as a poli sci major (unfortunately, my mind went completely blank and I couldn’t pull the term until the penultimate line--reflective of my abilities as a student, I suppose). Also, even as someone who couldn’t convert a science tossup on a middle school packet, I could still appreciate how cool that sound pollution tossup was.

Re: the editors’ espoused philosophy on difficulty control, I certainly noticed the conscious decision to use more canonical late clues. There were multiple tossups where I felt like I or an opponent was buzzing on the same clue we’d buzz on that tossup at a Regionals-level tournament (off the top of my head, the Sebastian Venable namedrop in the “summer” TU and the “hope your road” quote in the Cavafy TU were both examples of this). It’s hard to say empirically how many buzzer races this sort of cluing produced compared to that of tossups the editors strived to avoid, so I won’t comment on that; but it certainly gave some tossups a disjointed feel, and a rather pronounced cliff. Curious if others felt the same way.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by The Blind Prophet »

I thought this set was really fun to play. As someone playing nats for the first time, it was far more enjoyable than I had anticipated. The philosophy in this set in particular was overall a blast- the tossups on Gorgias, Tarski, and al-Farabi were some of my favorites and the SEP and Kyoto School bonuses were very cool as well. We did notice that there didn't seem to be much non-western philosophy, though, which we were a little disappointed in. It seems like in a set of this size Chinese, Africana, and/or Indian philosophy could use a bit more representation.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by vydu »

This set was wonderful. I think the effort to heavily hit core canon/classroom content made questions feel really rewarding, without sacrificing the excitement and sense of horizon-broadening that ACF Nationals usually has. The succinctness and precision was appreciated -- it was rare that I was unsure what type of answer a question wanted. A few scattered thoughts:
  • I appreciated the careful choice of tossup answerline in physics to be able to mix harder and easier material and hit multiple subdisciplines in each question: Liouville’s theorem in qm and classical mechanics, the “inertial” tu drawing from relativity and navigation systems, coherence in quantum optics and qm, pressure drawing from astrophysics and e&m, etc. It helps keep things convertible, and highlights connections between sub-areas of physics. it did feel like a few physics tossups gave away a little too much too early: the mentions of B-field and propagation in the plasma waves tossup, the mentions of singularities in the equations of motion in the collisions tossup, the Bose-Einstein tossup. But certainly these are deductions that still take knowledge to make, and sometimes you just get lucky with your vibe -- these just stood out to me as possibly being easier than other science tossups
  • Adam’s more applied approach to the chemistry was definitely noticed and appreciated, especially the range of topics. I also appreciated the smattering of more fun things (the microwave clue in the Suzuki coupling tu, the capsaicin bonus part, the quinine part that Grant got off history knowledge). I remember being a little confused by the pronoun to the “radicals” tossup, though
  • The anthro/socio answerlines seemed to place emphasis on difficult thinkers: Appadurai, Harris, Bauman, Davis, etc. Not an issue in the abstract, but I wonder if this limited the range of content that came up in that subcategory. Really liked the SS overall
  • loved the inclusion of online sources that a person interested in x topic would likely have engaged with, e.g. the hyperphysics bonus, IMSLP, the SEP, etc. I think parts like these are a great way to reward engagement. As a broader/more abstract point, the longer I play quizbowl the more I find that the clues I am most excited by in science are the ones about “science culture,” broadly speaking (really replace science with any quizbowl category, but science is where it resonates most for me, as a science student): ways of knowing, stories about people and institutions, etc. Stories of discovering science, learning science, and doing science are human stories, too. It feels like bonus parts like these capture that ethos for me. I love questions that talk about how people learn science and engage with science, and especially in times and milieus unlike the contemporary Western university
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Muriel Axon »

I encountered most of this set as a moderator rather than a playtester, so my perspective is more about the questions' aesthetics than how well they played. From that perspective, I thought this set was consistently among the most clever and interesting I've seen. Over the past few years, I've enjoyed the much-theorized trend towards writing questions on 'major' writers/works/ideas with a deliberate choice to clue from one (often lesser-known) aspect of those subjects. (To take a couple rather simple examples that come to mind: the Mendelssohn TU and the Baldwin TU on his short stories.) I thought this tournament made a particularly strong use of the constraints (and attendant opportunities) of that style of writing, and at least sometimes managed to shed new light on old answer lines.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Tejas »

As a moderator, I wanted to say I appreciated the extra effort put into things like pronunciation guides and the consideration given to answerline instructions. There were very few cases where I struggled to figure out how to rule on a given answer. This was also the first Nationals with difficulty markers, which I think helped me as a reader get a better feel for the bonus.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

A couple more notes:

Definitely think John's comments on difficulty inflation are correct. A significant pitfall for Nats editors is thinking a topic is more "canonical" than it really is, when it's come up a handful of times at harder events. While striving to ask about novel material and test extra-quizbowl knowledge is good, I think I've underestimated how much even players with ""real knowledge"" rely on what's come up before. It's just harder to remember a name in a quizbowl context that you haven't had to produce in the past, even if you've encountered it often elsewhere. Being more conservative there was a good choice.

One bit of constructive criticism: I agree with Henry that some of the tossups felt cliffy. In particular, I remember Cavafy, "sheep," James Wright, and "endowment," among others, having some very surprising early clue-drops. Typically this meant having a clue that would be a fair Winter, or maybe Regs hard part in the first half of the question, after preceding clues that felt much harder.

Besides the early clue drops, there were also some number of questions that felt cliffy by virtue of being too difficult most of the way through. I've read The Master of Go, for instance, and really could not place the descriptive clues in the "go" tossup; I ended up just buzzing on the name "Otake." They were the types of clues that might have been helpful to me as context in an 8 line tossup on "The Master of Go," but as the only descriptive clues for that book in a common-link question, they didn't seem evocative enough to really get most players there. For many questions, I think we could actually go even further with making the earlier clues accessible at the Nationals level.

I appreciated how often it seemed like editors took answers that could, technically, pass as Nationals tossups and downgraded them still further. For example, you could very plausibly toss up Dream on Monkey Mountain or (maybe less plausibly) The Entertainer at ACF Nationals, but this set instead asked about Derek Walcott and John Osborne. It was a nice touch that showed a more holistic approach to answer difficulty and I think really improved the set. I will say, though, that the accessibility of most of the answers made some of the truly hard answers feel more jarring than they usually do, sort of in the way people said VCU Open 2015 could feel uneven. I would probably recommend capping the difficulty of the outlier questions if the median answer is going to be at the level it was in this tournament.

Stephen (L)'s categories may have felt more difficult than some of the others but I very much enjoyed them. I kept finding myself wishing I had the same myth knowledge I had ten years ago so I could properly appreciate some of the questions. I also specifically enjoyed the tossups on Hippolyta (with helpful Argonautika content) and L'Avventura.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by AlexLi »

I would like to express my profound thanks for those who wrote and edited this tournament. The difficulty level and mid-late clues felt more accessible and consistent across categories than comparable sets in the past, and there was a good balance between what has come up before and "canon busting" answerlines. The set certainly met the objectives laid out in the opening post IMO. Some of the questions I especially enjoyed include coral reefs (DHW is a very important variable for susceptibility to bleaching used by the NOAA among others), partitions, sampling, and inertia (especially the inertial navigation clue).
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

This set was excellent. In an era of consistently immaculate Nats sets, this might be my favorite. I liked the easier tossup difficulty even if it occasionally led to a few more cliffs and transparent tossups. Thanks for everyone who made this happen!
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island »

I thought this set was fantastic; probably the best I’ve played in my time in college. I especially liked the CS; it covered a lot of different topics well and rewarded classroom knowledge (I really loved the GMM vs K-means clustering clue even though I blanked at game speed.) As Vincent mentioned, I really hope the style of clues/answers that rewards you for knowing “how people learn things” stick around, as imo they’re a great way to connect with real knowledge and push the canon out organically.

I will agree with some of the above points about cliffiness, which was the main issue I noticed; besides the tossups mentioned that cliffed in clue difficulty (like Cavafy), there were a few tossups that that I thought cliffed because they dropped a lot of context or narrowed the answer space very suddenly towards the end. E.g. "Upper and Lower Egypt" got clearly Egyptian very quickly, "the Christianization of the Kievan Rus" became clear it was about some choice in religion on the clue about what Islam forbade, the tossup on breathing just felt like it could only be breathing around when it mentioned reverse breathing (nonwithstanding it being negged with “ejaculation” in our room), and the pronoun choice for Ways of Seeing felt like it contracted the answerspace a lot. Most of those tossups sparked big buzzer races (or would have, were they live) in rooms I played.

I also thought there were a few literature questions where the cluing or quote selection made it clear who the author was early; the tu on "The Overcoat" felt extremely Gogol, ditto the summer tossup for Williams and An Ideal Husband for Wilde around halfway through the question (to a much lesser extent, also tigers from the early Borges clues, which were all I heard.) Of course, being able to discern an author’s style is a skill that can be rewarded pyramidally, but those cases in particular felt jarring given how well read their authors were and how evocative the clues were for their position in the tu. I guess my main thought is that it’s a hard balancing act for those sorts of characteristic quotes from well-read authors, and though it’s ultimately on the player to follow through and know when to buzz, there’s potential for those clues to be frustrating when you don’t know if you’re getting the context to make a deeper cut easier (like summer) or in spite of the answer already being easy (like Overcoat). Anecdotally, both summer and An Ideal Husband were negged with works by the same author on those clues by another team. I don’t mean to say this was done badly necessarily, but in the cases I mentioned it did feel to me like the context was given up a bit too easily.

Anyways, I want to make clear my gripes were pretty few and far between and I loved the majority of the set - unfortunately it’s much easier for me to write paragraphs discussing my least favorite 1% of a set than my favorite 99% of it, but that doesn’t detract from how much fun I had on these questions and how frequently I was amazed by the cool ideas in the set. Tossups like “the master’s tools” and “the center line of the body” were great ways to talk about well known things in fresh and exciting ways, and I’m overall really thankful to all of the editors for this experience.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I trust some of quizbowl's data scientists to do some more analysis on this, but here's some statistics on bonus conversion that I put together using some janky Excel and excluding all bonuses which had 10 or fewer teams play them:
  • Easy parts with 100% conversion: 26.6% in prelims, 19.4% in playoffs
  • Hard parts with 0 gets: 20.3% in prelims, 20% in playoffs
  • Middle parts with >66% conversion: 13.3% in prelims, 12.6% in playoffs
  • Middle parts with <33% conversion: 33.5% in prelims, 38.3% in playoffs
While it's tempting to conclude that this means the playoff bonuses were harder than the prelims, I don't think this is the case. As has been noted before, since the playoffs separate teams by skill level demonstrated in the prelims, the best teams get to hear fewer bonuses overall since they're playing each other, which depresses average conversion on each bonus. However, if you average the PPB scores at the team level, rather than the average conversion by round/bonus, you find that overall PPBs went up slightly in the playoffs, from 13.24 to 13.47.

Rather, I think the main thing to conclude from this data is that our hard parts were reasonable most of the time and our easy parts were usually on point and rarely find-your-ass (especially once they were really going to work differentiating the weaker teams in the playoffs - for overall statistics, easy part conversion was 89% in prelims and 87% in playoffs). However, our medium parts still skewed too hard much more often than too easy. If you restrict to more extreme criteria (<25% is too hard, >75% is too easy), still almost a quarter of medium parts were too hard and only 5% were too easy. Hard parts are often a guess, but medium parts are something that strong editorial instincts can more easily help tune. I might suggest "PACE 2019/EFT 2016 hard parts" as a target (i.e. the easier side of two-dot and harder side of PACE) to aim at for medium parts in the future.

Maybe I'm super off-base here and 42% overall medium part conversion is fine for nationals, especially for one with such a large field and many weaker teams. The majority of medium parts were indeed in the sweet zone. But at the very least, I'd say editors should definitely err on the side of caution. In my categories the bonuses with too-low conversion were, with one exception, exactly the bonuses I was most concerned about. If you're the editor and think something is likely too hard, you're almost certainly right.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island wrote:E.g. "Upper and Lower Egypt" got clearly Egyptian very quickly, "the Christianization of the Kievan Rus" became clear it was about some choice in religion on the clue about what Islam forbade
Just taking these two examples - the late clues, indeed, were intended to narrow the answerspace. At the risk of sounding dismissive, I think narrowing the answerspace is exactly what late clues should do, especially in a field like history where knowing time period and context is very important! Clues that allow this kind of inference aren't everybody's cup of tea and I appreciate that, but on the flip side, I think people able to make inference buzzes (especially late in questions) - or "fraud" if you will - are showing historical and cultural knowledge worth rewarding.
Editors 3 wrote:14. Two answers required. A major site in one of these two regions, Buto, provides evidence of the early cultural dominance of the other of them after the northward spread of the Tasian and Badarian cultures. Consolidation of power in one of these regions, and a subsequent invasion of the other, marks the beginning of the Thinite era and the end of the Naqada III (“three”) period. They were represented by a white vulture and a snake wrapped around a stem, symbols associated with their two respective “ladies.” One of them had a name meaning “Land of the Reeds,” the other was called the “Land of the North,” and the two were collectively called Tawy (“tah-wee”). A crown of red and white symbolized the unification of these two regions, an event which is depicted on the Narmer Palette. For 10 points, what two regions, named for their respective positions along the Nile River, are the primary divisions of Egypt?
ANSWER: Upper Egypt AND Lower Egypt [or Ta-Mehu AND Ta-Shemau, or Miṣr as-Ṣaʿīd AND Miṣr as-Suflā, or Mares AND Tsakhet; accept equivalents such as Upper and Lower Egypt; accept Upper and Lower after “Egypt”; accept Misr or Kemet for “Egypt”; prompt on synonyms for “Upper” and “Lower” such as Southern Egypt and Northern Egypt; reject any answers containing “Nubia”]
<Ancient History>
For this tossup, I ordered clues based on how much Egyptian history and culture I thought you'd have to know in order to figure out what was going on and make an inference buzz (either that or, of course, outright knowing the clues). I think the sentence with "Land of the Reeds" and "Tawy" (beginning late in line 5 and ending in line 6 in ten-point TNR) is where things start to get more clearly Egyptian for a reasonably wide part of the ACF Nationals audience; the previous sentence signals that less strongly, but nonetheless is a cultural hint if you're pretty familiar with Egyptian symbols and mythology; the one before that has some specific Predynastic terms and place names. At that point, you've still got a few plausible answers - Upper/Lower Egypt and some neighboring regions like Punt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Libya, the Levant, etc. So, if you're thinking "this is some Egyptian region" then the tossup is doing what I intended. I'd much rather have this than fill the entire tossup with dense clues on an area that, historically, I've found quizbowl to not be very good at (c.f. the tossup on Intermediate Periods from IKEA, which I think was fine but definitely one of that set's hardest history questions).

Conversely, some players may have been frustrated by this tossup because they didn't realize it was going for multiple regions within Egypt itself. Which is unfortunate, but is core to what the question is testing, the importance of the distinction between the two major divisions of Egypt, especially in predynastic times.
Editors 9 wrote:1. To convince a ruler to begin this process, a scholar claimed that earlier ambassadors brought the message of people who moistened their excrement and put it on their beards. The commander Putyata (“poo-t’YAH-tuh”) helped put down opponents of this process who torched the house of the elderly Dobrynya (“duh-BRIN-yuh”). To mark its beginning, a statue was tied to a horse’s tail, beaten by twelve men with sticks, and thrown into a river. According to the so-called “Korsun Legend,” this process began after a ruler agreed to end the siege of Korsun and marry princess Anna Porphyrogenita (“POR-fih-roh-GEN-ih-tah”). Apocryphally, the decision to undergo it was made after a king deemed that his people could not tolerate fasting, teetotaling, or forgoing pork. Throngs waded into the Dnieper (“d’NEE-per”) river in a ceremony marking, for 10 points, what process in which Vladimir the Great’s realm adopted a new faith?
ANSWER: christianization of the Kievan Rus [or conversion of the Rus to Christianity; accept the baptism or the people of Kiev, or baptism of the Rus; accept Orthodoxy or Orthodox Christianity in place of “Christianity”; accept Russians or Varangians or Kievans in place of “Rus”; accept Vladimir the Great converting to Christianity or equivalents before “Vladimir”’ prompt on conversion or christianization by asking “what people are converting?”; prompt on christianization of the Slavs]
<European History>
In this tossup, the clue about "forgoing pork" is right before FTP. So yeah, that's clearly signaling something about not wanting to adopt Jewish or Islamic practice. It's also right before FTP. If you can put that together with figuring out that we're in Russia/Ukraine and buzz, I don't see what the problem is - especially considering that the anecdote there is very famous on its own.
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

The King's Flight to the Scots wrote:I will say, though, that the accessibility of most of the answers made some of the truly hard answers feel more jarring than they usually do, sort of in the way people said VCU Open 2015 could feel uneven. I would probably recommend capping the difficulty of the outlier questions if the median answer is going to be at the level it was in this tournament.
So, this brings me to thinking about how we select outlier questions. I don't think we as editors had much of a unified vision for how to pick our harder answerlines. However, we were instructed to not have too many hard answers in each packet.

Here's a list of all the history tossups from the packets - I've indicated who wrote what (if nothing is noted, I wrote it) or where I changed an answerline in editing. I've also color-coded answers according the following scheme:
  • Green: Answer is fine at ACF Regionals and below. I'd expect very high conversion.
  • Blue: Answer is probably not something you should ask as a history tossup at ACF Regionals, but isn't particularly obscure. I'd expect high conversion.
  • Purple: Answer is "standard upper canon" - something not askable at ACF Regionals and is somewhat obscure.
  • Red: Answer is "outlier" - something that doesn't come up much at any level and is somewhat to pretty obscure.

Purdue: Gore family [Sub], Salo Republic* [Matt], Aurelian [Sub], Soweto [Matt]
Stanford: Clark family [Matt], Ausgleich, Open Veins of Latin America [Sub], Umayyads
Claremont: Roger Sherman [Sub], Prussia (heavily medieval), 1972 Chess Championship [converted from sub. bonus], Sejong the Great [Sub]
UNC A: gold standard [Sub], Scotland [converted sub. answerline], Alexander the Great (speeches), Cholula
Cornell A + B: Baker v. Carr, Burgundy [converted sub. answerline], Dacians [Sub], Ecuador [Sub]
Texas A: San Francisco (machine politics) [Sub], Battle of Narva [Sub], Records of the Grand Historian [editor Q, blended w/ sub], wood (trade)
Texas B: American Indian Schools [Sub], Francois Mitterrand [Matt], Netherlands (Japan clues) [converted from sub. bonus], Tashkent*
Georgia Tech: Milwaukee [Sub], Frederick II [Sub], Hittites [Sub], Ayatollah Khomeini [Eric M, inspired by submission]
Ohio State: Loyalists [converted sub. answerline], Lord Palmerston [converted sub. answerline], South Vietnam [Matt], RSS [Eric M, inspired by submission]
Editors 1: New Sweden, Venice (Dark Ages), Wilhelm II (mostly Chinese history), Hausa
Editors 2: Clara Barton [Ganon], Pompey v. Pirates, Disaster Year, Khitans
Editors 3: Robert Moses [Ganon], East Germany, Upper+Lower Egypt, Porfiriato/Diaz government
Editors 4: Battle of Blair Mountain, Levellers, Rastafarians, Japan (corruption)
Editors 5: Chicago (Civil Rights) [Matt], Napoleonic Code, Cambyses II, ujamaa [Matt]
Editors 6: Panama canal handover, Trans-Siberian Railroad, Thomas Carlyle (historiography), Taksin the Great
Editors 7: posses, Greece (20th century protests), Cree**, Delhi Sultanate
Editors 8: San Quentin State Prison, Catalán [Matt] , Mycenae, Khartoum
Editors 9: Glorious Revolution (US Clues), conversion of the Rus, Chinese Australians, Venezuela
Editors 10: rifles, Hanseatic League (England), Carthage (Late Roman Empire), Qaboos bin Said
Finals 1: Garrison (common link), Treaty of Rome, Yue*, Nepal

Overall, we have 41 greens, 15 blues, 15 purples, and 9 reds. That means that just over half of the history answerlines would be something that (I think) you could reasonably see at Regionals!

This color-coding exercise is something I'm doing after the fact; looks like I could probably have balanced all of these out a bit more, but I did hit my main goal, which was making sure there weren't more than two "hard" answers (purples+reds) in any of the main played packets. The outlier/extra-canonical answers are, notably, most concentrated in World History. I wouldn't say this was intentional, but I do think there's a bit more room for canon-pushing there, as it's lumping a ton of different regions into 1/1. With all of these answers, I picked something that I thought the field would have a pretty good shot at knowing from out-of-canon knowledge: Cholula (world's largest pyramid by volume), Qaboos (incredibly influential recently-deceased leader), San Quentin (probably some people getting this from true crime), etc.

I suspect this color-coding distribution looks substantially different for other categories, especially Social Science.

*I marked these as outliers because, while I still think they got good conversion, they probably still "felt like" outliers / were quite hard
**This is probably way easier for Canadians
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Re: ACF Nationals 2022 Thanks and General Discussion

Post by t-bar »

I just realized that I never actually posted anything in this thread. I have a few points I want to raise, and if they revive the now-dormant discussion going on here, so much the better!

I’m glad to see that the set’s reception has been generally positive. If you liked questions in my categories (physics and miscellaneous science), there’s no small chance that input from one of my science co-editors (Eric and Adam), freelancers (Nick Jensen, James Lasker, Olivia Murton, and Jonathen Settle), or playtesters (many) made them better. Generous thanks are due to all of them.

Our team submissions were few but strong. All teams that submitted a packet deserve the thanks of the community for helping this tournament happen. In my categories, every packet had at least one really fun and well-executed idea, but I particularly want to highlight Purdue, who submitted a fantastic set of questions that had the bad luck to clash content-wise with a lot of material I already had; UNC A, whose submissions balanced creativity, immaculate cluing, and solid topic choice in a way that we have come to expect from the Research Triangle gang; and Claremont, whose entire excellent packet, as discussed previously, was written by Kevin Park.

My own science education is rather formal and theoretical, and if left unchecked I think that can sometimes bleed into my questions, especially when compared to the applied approach demonstrated by Adam and alluded to by him upthread. To counteract that, I tried to diversify question content by writing about each topic, as much as possible, “on its own terms.” The inertia tossup (Editors 8) included clues that wouldn’t be out of place in a philosophy-of-science question (and were, in fact, crafted using the SEP); the quantum gates tossup (Finals 1) was very focused on contemporary research in a way that many more well-established topics would not support; and the Sadi Carnot tossup (Editors 10) was, to the greatest extent possible, ripped straight from a plausible thermodynamics problem set. I hope this variety helped keep questions interesting and challenging in a non-oppressive way.

I tried to keep the number of very difficult answerlines low but not zero. Even if ACF Nationals is notionally harder than a set like Illinois Open (which I loved playing), I think there’s somewhat less room at Nationals for super-high variance in tossup answerline difficulty, contra the desire at free-for-all open tournaments to “keep players honest.” To that end, a freelanced submission on time crystals became the time tossup (Play-In, highlight to reveal), and Texas A’s submitted tossup on ram pressure became just pressure. Given infinite time and energy, I might have recrafted tossups like Korteweg–de Vries equation (Editors 5) and wavelets (Editors 10) into something tamer, but I hope the density of answers like that was not too grueling.

I don’t have nearly as much formal training in “miscellaneous science” (to the extent that one could) as in physics, so my main goal in that category was to assemble a fun set of questions that would, as previously mentioned, highlight topics on their own terms. I also tried, whenever possible, to guide questions in this category towards answers that might engage non-scientists while still allowing specialists to feel rewarded; the questions on underwater noise (Editors 8) and eyeball planets (Purdue, to whom I am indebted for this great idea) come to mind. I was thrilled to see one of my favorite questions in this category, space debris, get a fantastic buzz in the finals. As a onetime math major and para-contest-math guy, though, my favorite moment editing this tournament was getting the idea to riff on Texas B’s complex analysis-related submission with the “taking the real part of a complex number” tossup. My room had a bye that round, so I didn’t get to see it played, but I hope that on balance answers like that were more interestingly off-the-wall than frustrating for players.

Self-congratulations aside, I wanted to end on a more practical comment about “miscellaneous science.” Traditionally, misc. science is conceived of as a close-to-equal mix of astronomy, computer science, earth science, and math, perhaps with more emphasis on math or with some engineering or mixed science thrown in. In editing this tournament, though, I found myself struggling to draw a clear boundary (a separating hyperplane, if you will) between computer science and math, what with the ever-increasing significance of data science and allied fields. To that end, I wound up subdistributing roughly half of the tournament’s misc. science along more of a continuum that might read something like:

computer hardware — computer software & pure theory — algorithms — data science — statistics — applied math — pure math

(Pure math was the largest single link in this chain, containing traditional subdistributions like analysis, algebra, and number theory, but that’s not what I want to focus on here.) On top of data science proper, one has the rapidly-growing assortment of computational methods and software packages used in specific subfields of biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, engineering and other scientific disciplines. If questions are well-written and distributed with care, I doubt that tournament-wide considerations like how to handle borderline or novel topics make much of an impact on most players’ qualitative experience. Nevertheless, how we sort and assign computational topics to quizbowl categories is an interesting theoretical question that editors will continue to have to grapple with. My own thoughts are primarily refracted through this and previous editing experiences; I’m curious what others think.
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