Summa contra potestates

[theMoMA]

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I think powers at difficult open events do more harm than good. The harmful effects are that powers (1) are inevitably at least somewhat unfair (because of unavoidable inconsistency in clue structure and powermark placement, especially between editors of different categories) and (2) encourage bad play by creating an incentive for the individual (powering or powervulching) that is misaligned with what's best for the team (having the best chance at getting the tossup). I think these effects outweigh the benefit of powers, which is that they're (1) fun to get, (2) to some extent an illuminating measure of individual performance, and (3) occasionally the cause of strategic intrigue.

I think powers are appropriate and fun at events where both difficulty and length are fairly standardized. For example, I think that NAQT events are well-suited for powers, because the questions are all roughly the same length and have roughly the same intended difficulty structure. Although there are unavoidably questions that play easier or harder, for the most part, about the same amount of each question is in power, and players have a pretty good feel for where the tipping point is. This consistency of format, and thus player expectation, minimizes potential unfairness and maximizes the strategic aspect of going for powers. Powers are similarly well-suited for difficulty- and length-controlled circuit events. In my experience, powers are the most fun at regular-difficulty events, because they provide an extra layer of competitiveness for teams that are proficient at (or have mastered) that difficulty level.

At an event like Chicago Open, where questions are difficult and often unconfined to a particular length, it seems to me that powers are likely to be much less consistent. I've edited CO (I didn't include powers in the set), and the majority of tossups were on things I wasn't well-equipped to powermark, simply because most of the clues (and many of the answers) were beyond my ken as a player. I would have had to delegate the powermarking of whole swaths of the distribution to others who perhaps held widely differing ideas about what deserves power. And even though I controlled the length of tossups at that tournament to within a line (which is not typical for CO), I had no real feel for whether a powermark should go in any particular place. (Look at an NAQT packet and you'll see that, in an SCT or ICT tossup, there's a specific range where almost all of them go.) At an event where difficulty and length often sprawl well beyond the confines I set during my iteration, it seems difficult to me to say that powering a given tossup at CO has any consistent meaning.

My opinion--and it's simply an opinion--is that events like CO should not have powers. Part of it is based on my above-stated belief, which I think is warranted, that powers have less consistency, and thus are less consistently meaningful, at an event like CO, with its very difficult clues and answers and sprawling tossup length. But it's also based on a purely subjective feeling that, at very high levels of play, simply answering a circuit-style tossup before the other team should be the meaningful thing. It's bizarre that the first instinct after you nail an absurdly difficult tossup a few words out of power is to be disappointed. Yet I've felt this way many times. It's frustrating to see players bungle powervulches when the smart play for their teams would have been waiting for absolute certainty. Yet despite knowing how stupid this is, I've done it myself.

Powers have benefits at all levels of play. Obviously, they're fun to get. It's undoubtedly cool as hell to buzz in early and destroy an absurdly difficult tossup. But thinking back to the buzzes I'm proudest of, I mainly think of a few first- and second-line buzzes at 2010 and 2011 ACF Nationals (not powermarked, obviously) and a few just-after-power buzzes on things that'd never come up before, inevitably in an Ahmad Ragab packet somewhere or another. The point is, it's cool as hell to destroy a tossup early whether you get 15 for it or not.

I think the main benefit of powers is statistically documenting just how often those awesome buzzes happen (and a not-unimportant side effect: allowing other people to see who's powering questions). But to me (and for all I know, no one else shares this opinion), the mere fact of getting a CO tossup is impressive enough--and I respect the people who are on the points leaderboard (or scoring meaningful tossups on good teams) for the simple fact that they can answer such difficult questions at a high clip. I don't think that powers tell you much about a player's CO performance that you wouldn't already know from looking at points or team performance. At Penn Bowl, for example, powers tell you something very meaningful about a player or a team's mastery of regular-difficulty material; it's possible to score 100 PPG with 1 power a game, or with a half-dozen. But at an event like CO, no one has mastered the material; few are even proficient at it. Powers don't serve as an additional layer of competition to the same degree they do at regular-difficulty events, and don't tell you as much about player skill. To the extent that powers do have something to say about player skill at CO level, creating the incentive for players to play strategically unsound quizbowl--or giving players a reason to feel annoyed about an amazing buzz on a difficult tossup--doesn't seem worth it to me.

In sum, powers are undoubtedly fun and cool, especially at difficulty- and length-controlled events where they serve as a sort of secondary competitive aim for good teams and players and truly expose a level of mastery that otherwise might be hidden. But they have decreasing value as difficulty goes up and question length becomes more varied. At a certain point, the negative aspects of powers--incentivizing bad play and decreasing enjoyment of good (but not power) buzzes--outweigh the good. My opinion is that this point occurs before you get to the difficult open level. I'd like to see tournaments like CO avoid powers.

[Sima Guang Hater]

tl;dr andrew hart hates fun

[theMoMA]

tl;dr andrew hart hates fun

I realize this is obviously in jest, but I actually think that powers diverge from my conception of what's fun somewhere just above regular difficulty. Before that, I'm pretty satisfied that the best quizbowl I can play will also roughly maximize the number of powers I have. After that, however, I think the best strategy involves a lot of care, strategy, and patience, which doesn't necessarily lead to powers. The fact that I might be momentarily disappointed that a great buzz didn't result in power, or the fact that I might feel a strong urge to buzz in ways that don't help my team, aren't very fun to me, and are the big reason I don't like powers at more difficult events.

[Cheynem]

I'm not a big fan of powers, but I actually think CO (and other hard opens) is a fun place to have powers because the questions are so hard and the stakes, while important, are somewhat low.

[Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock]

Your first point, I totally agree with. Your second, I see where you're coming from, but I'll provide my side to that.

Obviously I can't speak for these extremely high difficulties, since I've never played them, but I've never found power-vulturing to be something I would do for the sake of self-aggrandizement. If I ever do power-vulture, it's because I'm 100% sure I know the answer and it's a close game where those points might be valuable. I remember one game where my team won by 5 points that we wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't vultured a power. I know that's just one, admittedly unlikely example, but I think it shows that power-vulturing can be motivated by a desire to help the team as a whole rather than by the desire to say "look at me I'm so fancy powering this."

And at CO, I'd wager that buzzing a few words after power is still a pretty darn good buzz. It's just natural to feel that way when you missed something extra by just a little bit. It's like that whole thing about bronze medalists generally being happier with their performances than silver medalists, since the silver medalists can often only think about what they could have done to reach gold. But hey, silver's quite nice too. Now go answer your bonus.

[DumbJaques]

1) Powers are fine.

2) Making the decision as an editor that you don't think you'd do a consistent or good job powermarking a given set (depending on difficulty/the editorial team/your competence) is also fine.

In short, the current systems seems to me, well, just fine. I don't see any clear reason why we need an all-or-nothing dictum about this, since I'd imagine by definition the mileage will vary quite significantly by editor. It's also by no means clear to me that editors should be compelled to protect players from their own lust for power(s); we'd have to make a pretty strong philosophical argument for why that should be true. Also if someone did make that philosophical argument, we'd probably just ignore it and go back to power-marking, because clearly if there are enough of us who will be swayed by a 5-point bonus into illogical decision-making, then logical argument is not going to disabuse us of our maddening need for 15s.

On the other hand, many harder sets are often powermarked inconsistently; this is a perfectly appropriate critique, and it's one we ought to take seriously. In fact, I think Andrew's all-or-nothing presentation only obfuscates some more useful (and likely to be accepted) advice - you really need to devote some time to talking to your editors about power placement.
So what can you do? If nothing else, find a language you can share - talk about conversion numbers you want to see, for instance. Of course, it may be that you lack confidence in your editor to hit conversion numbers because they like to abuse players with tossups on the Reptile Fund. If that's the case, find a tournament you know had the right kind of power marking for their subject, and point them to that.
Bottom line: In the madness of tournament construction, it's very easy to let some sort of conversation about power-marking fall by the wayside. Don't do that! This will go a long way toward alleviating the problems Andrew describes (or at the very least, it's necessary to prove that the problem can only be remedied by power-banishment).

Oh, and don't power-mark shit all at the last minute! This might seem counter-intuitive, but I'd argue that it's actually a recipe for
for haphazard power-marking:
-You're rushing, because doing things all at the same time means doing them at the last minute.
-Doing tasks in a rote, mechanical way means you're paying much less individual attention to the substance of each iteration (distressingly, I can show you lots of literature to back this up).
-The end result is that you power-mark many questions weeks or even MONTHS after you've edited them, when your working knowledge of and feel for the tossup would have been strongest. Yes, you have an overall sense of "when" power should be, but the question-by-question reality of "when" only depends on the specific tossup, not the one before or after it.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

The incentive to vulch to pad ones own stats is always there, and all that powers do is give the person doing it an extra excuse of "oh, I was trying to get power" - but this is a super flimsy excuse, except in a few close games where this actually creates the strategic intrigue Andrew cites as a benefit.

Anyway, I think quizbowl as it has existed for the last 5+ years more or less understands and accepts the tradeoffs that Andrew lists. High-stakes events (ACF Nats) lack powers for exactly those reasons, while low-stakes events (CO, side events, random one-off tournaments) have powers or even superpowers because people largely find them fun. Put me down as another vote for the status quo.

[Ike]

I've always found the "powers are inherently unfair due to inconsistency of editors" argument incredulous. Bonuses are inherently unfair due to other editors, and it's not like knowledge perfectly fits into three level quanta that makes sense - what I'm trying to say is, some bonus parts are harder than others, and in a theoretical world, a bonus might be worth 8.87 points / 12.20 points / 10.02 points worth of difficulty just due to the way the nature of the subject shifts out. But no one is really calling for the abolition of bonuses because in the long run, bonuses average out and decrease variance - powers do the same. But just you can get boned by getting four science bonuses (should happen rarely!), the variance of powers can hurt at times, though theoretically and practically, they actually decrease variance.

The only real reason I feel that tournaments should not have powers is that people want to remove all the bells and whistles from quizbowl so that it's an intellectual test - i.e. less of a game, and I'm totally okay with that reason. By adding in powers, you sometimes get situations in which you should forego your knowledge base and risk it for a power so that you can win a game. Sometimes, you get yourself into nasty situations in which you have no idea what to do.*

*At CO 2015 this year, we were up by 45 going into the last tossup against Seth's team. It was on physics. The lead-in was relatively easy and misplaced, but our team's two physicists didn't want to neg it, be wrong and have Seth power vulch. If they did so, and Seth vulched, and Seth's team 30'd the associated bonus, we would have lost. If they power and 30, we force overtime; any failure to 30 the bonus, we win. The dilemma is, game theoretically, is it better to wait until you are 60/95/100% sure and buzz, since you can always wait for power to expire and play overtime if necessary, or what? It's a nasty situation that isn't entirely obvious what to do, and if you want to reduce these types of situations, getting rid of powers sure helps that!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'm in favor of keeping powers out of ACF tournaments for reasons sympathetic to the "pure intellectual experience" argument - ACF Regionals and Nationals in particular, I feel, should be quizbowl distilled down to its basics - but I generally like seeing them everywhere else (including in mACF sets) and I'm not even entirely averse to putting them in ACF Fall, assuming that set continues to not be relevant for qualifying for ACF Nationals. Powers provide a rough, but somewhat useful metric of how early teams are buzzing and most players (including myself) find them highly enjoyable.

So yeah, like Chris Ray, I'm pretty content with the status quo.

[Cheynem]

I actually really would be opposed to powers at ACF Fall; I think younger teams can get hung up pretty easily on the number of powers they're getting (or not getting).

On the other hand, I remember back in 200dickety doo when my HS team first encountered powers: it was the first time we read NAQT at practice, and our coach who was reading said "that was for power" and all of us were like "oooooo," so I think there's a "coolness" element to it too that perhaps shouldn't be ignored (one of my teammates, who I'm still friends with and never played past HS, still speaks fondly about NAQT format and how it rewarded deep knowledge, although this is probably because the only other things out there at the time where Chip and bad league formats).

[theMoMA]

I'm confused about what Chris means by saying that I have an "all or nothing" position on powers. I think that, at higher levels of play, powers are more problematically inconsistent, less illuminating of players skill, and less intrinsically fun; in my opinion, by the time you get to the CO level, powers do more harm than good. At levels below that, especially when question length and difficulty is rigorously standardized, powers add a layer of competitiveness, strategy, and fun that I don't think translates the higher up the chain you go. I would prefer that CO and similar difficult, full-distribution academic tournaments no longer have powers, yes, but I hardly think that's an "all or nothing" position. I agree that it would be nice to have more thoughtfully implemented powers in the future, at CO and otherwise, should editors continue to insert them.

I agree with Will that circuit-style tournaments without powers (such as ACF Nationals) feel like some of the "purest" quizbowl experiences. Maybe this is another minority position, but I think that CO is one of the closest things to a purist's vision of quizbowl that we have--I disagree pretty strongly with Mike that CO is a more "low-stakes" tournament. To me, powermarking the set diminishes the purism of CO and takes out some of the joy of simply answering ass-hard questions in a competitive environment.

Again, this is simply my opinion, but the reason I share it is (a) because it's taken me a while to think through exactly what intuition led me to avoid powers when I edited CO, and now that I've thought through those ideas more carefully, they seem worth sharing; and (b) because it surely betters the neoliberal market of quizbowl ideas that Bruce and Will invoke above when people question and discuss previously unquestioned and undiscussed features of tournaments. Perhaps the status quo (some editors like powers and have them, some don't and don't) is the best way to proceed, but I hope we can all agree that a status quo driven by thoughtful and informed editors is preferable to the blithe repetition of past practices for its own sake.

[sonstige]

One question I did want to ask was whether or not there exists a sort of "Guide to Proper Power Marking".

In context, I've alluded a few times in the past that I'm working (slowly) on reviving Sun n Fun. I'd like to power mark the set, and am using my best judgment for doing this --- but I wasn't sure if anyone had written something that people should be trying to follow.

[Cheynem]

We might be defining phrases cross purposes, but I think the stakes are pretty low at CO. Despite its prestige, it lacks the institutional components that makes ICT and ACF tournaments important and it lacks issues of retention/appeal to new teams or players that most regular difficulty and below tournaments have. The only people who are playing it are generally people pretty plugged into the circuit who have familiarity with quizbowl and who, if they are perniciously influenced to behave differently because of powers, have only themselves to blame (and I certainly have done this too). There is something inherently satisfying about getting a good buzz, sure, but a power magnifies that--hey, you actually know details from, say, Feast of the Goat, and not that it is simply that "Vargas Llosa book about Trujillo." I understand the arguments about powers as a negative thing in general or as it being bad because it is inconsistently applied (but this is true of every tournament--I'm surely not the only person to have thought that an ICT or SCT had inconsistent power markings at times?), sure, but I don't see how a hard tournament is inherently more problematic when it comes to powers than not hard tournaments. You're still gradating knowledge.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

So depending on your view of powers, the detailed conversation of game theory above is either proof that they provide, as Andrew put it, "strategic intrigue", or that they distract some of the best and brightest in quizbowl away from learning facts and cause games to be decided by non-knowledge factors.

In my view, I'm skeptical of the idea that using the correct power-vulching algorithm is going to make much of a difference in reality, and even if it does, to get to the point where buzzing early at just the right time is going to win you an ICT playoff game, you already need to know a lot of stuff.

[theMoMA]

One question I did want to ask was whether or not there exists a sort of "Guide to Proper Power Marking".

In context, I've alluded a few times in the past that I'm working (slowly) on reviving Sun n Fun. I'd like to power mark the set, and am using my best judgment for doing this --- but I wasn't sure if anyone had written something that people should be trying to follow.

Powermarking definitely depends on feel. I don't know if there's a good guide for it, but I usually try to put the mark before the first word that I think will likely point a player with good, but not spectacular (i.e. not deserving of power) knowledge of the topic to the answer. I realize that's a somewhat elliptical guidepost, so perhaps it's more helpful to say "put it right before the first word you think makes for a big jump in the tossup's answerability."

In an NAQT-length question, it's pretty easy to figure out in roughly which sentence the powermark should come; start just after halfway through and read until you find something that the average "good" team will almost certainly know. In circuit tournaments, where the questions are often longer (as mentioned above), it's a bit more difficult. I think the powermark should usually come in around 2/3 of the way through, although set editors can obviously make the conscious decision to consistently place them earlier or later. The process is probably about the same; skip to 60% of the way through the tossup and read until you find a clue that you think most good teams will know, then place the powermark somewhere in that sentence. If it seems like there's a clue that shouldn't be in power in the first half of the question, or if it seems like power extends all the way to the end of the question, it's probably best to rethink the construction of that particular tossup; the clue structure may be too easy or the answer may be too difficult.

Once you find the clue where the powermark should be, it's not that difficult to figure out where to place it. The word immediately after the powermark should be something specific, like "scale of (*) electronegativity" or "Battle of (*) Omdurman" or "The (*) Importance of Being Earnest. It generally shouldn't be something like "the" or "but" or "man," unless that word provides a major jump in answerability ("This figure from Greek mythology was born a (*) man, but was changed into a woman for seven years...")

Powermarks can break up titles or proper nouns, and often should. For example, above, "Battle of" provides no additional information to the player, but "Omdurman" does. "The" provides nothing, but "Importance" does. The mark should directly precede the word that provides the biggest jump in answerability, regardless of whether that word is in the middle of a title or proper noun. (For another example, you might put the powermark in the middle of a name like James (*) Buchanan, because there are many Jameses; you'd probably put it at the beginning of a name like (*) Ichabod Crane, because there aren't that many Ichabods.)

Let's take another example. Say you've decided to put the powermark somewhere in this sentence of a high school tossup on Linus Pauling: "A theory of the structure of DNA based on a triple helix was devised by this man, who assigned fluorine a value of 4.0 on his namesake scale of electronegativity." In my mind, the acceptable places to put the powermark here are before the words "DNA," "triple," "fluorine," "4.0," or "electronegativity." I'll provide a rationale for each below.

* DNA vs. triple: It's pretty notable that Linus Pauling came up with an incorrect triple helical structure of DNA. If think a player doesn't deserve power for anticipating that the question will soon talk about the triple helical theory (which is pretty doable, considering the real structure for DNA was devised by multiple people), you might want to put the powermark before DNA. If you think that such anticipation deserves power, put it before triple. Don't put it before "structure," because a player who hears "A theory of the structure of" doesn't really get any additional piece of information (other than the weak ability to extrapolate that we might be talking about DNA); putting the powermark there is thus akin to putting the powermark in the previous sentence.

* Fluorine vs. 4.0 vs. electronegativity. This is the same sort of balance above. A science player can likely anticipate that a discussion of a "value" coupled with "fluorine" is going to be about electronegativity. Once you hear 4.0, this is confirmed, unless you know very little about electronegativity. Of course, it's totally spelled out once the word "electronegativity" is read. These three words represent the three places where gradations of knowledge are tested in this clue, so if you're putting the powermark in this clue, it should go before one of them, rather than a word like "namesake" or "assigned."

[Cheynem]

You get better at powermarking as you see more questions being played and you get a better feel of what people know. I think it's natural for new editors/writers to be stingier in powers than overly generous, although that happens too. This is because you get gunshy about lots of people (usually stupidly) complaining "wait, big hill was in power for Battle of Dien Bien Phu?!" or things like that. There's obviously dangers here, with the two most prominent being:

1. In power clues are insanely hard and usually rather vague. The point of a power is to reward knowledge, not stump the experts. Look at questions on topics you know well. You should be able to power most of them, assuming appropriate difficulty.

2. Out of power clues are frequently perfunctory and abruptly cliff because there's a psychological assumption that "well, nobody can complain the power clues are too easy..." This is dangerous because you probably will just produce buzzer races for most teams.

I don't like powermarking that requires some degree of "figure out where this is going," which you saw in old NAQT all the time. We've moved away from that I think for the most part.

[grapesmoker]

As a fellow fun-hater, I think Andrew Hart makes good points.