Bakery, State, and Utopia wrote:I agree that it would be good to include a 22/22 packet with extra subjects no represented.
Andy Watkins wrote:stuff
everyday847 wrote:I've always been personally tickled by the notion of an "academic thought" distribution, largely because social science is often restricted, at the majority of tournaments, to the same old subjects. I think it would be interesting to experiment with liberating philosophy from RMP and creating 4/4 SS/phil. There's certainly the room to work with (tons of things with names) and there would be much more potential for exploring interesting subfields (having a literary criticism tossup or whatever no longer means that your social science is half literary criticism, so you're not risking too much, so to speak).
While RMP is usually edited down to 2.5/2.5 or 2/2, I'd be pretty happy if the resultant RM category stood at a true 2/2. As for subdistributing that, I would actually classify a lot of the religion people write as mythology, so I'd be happy with 1.5/1.5 being myth. (The only myth/religion distinction I think is meaningful is the distinction between questions on beliefs, practices, ritual observances, et cetera and questions on stories. A tossup about stuff that happens in the book of Joshua is as much mythology as a tossup on stuff that happens in the Eddas; a tossup about samsara is as much religion as a tossup about transubstantiation.)
everyday847 wrote:I've always been personally tickled by the notion of an "academic thought" distribution, largely because social science is often restricted, at the majority of tournaments, to the same old subjects. I think it would be interesting to experiment with liberating philosophy from RMP and creating 4/4 SS/phil.
uga_chris wrote: Heck, if someone wanted to run a regular tournament (i.e. not a super-tough side event) that emphasized a certain distribution (like 5/5 RMP, 4/4 social science, 3/3 US History, etc.), I'd be interested to play in that too since it would force me to bone up on a particular part of the canon and introduce new answers to a wide audience.
Woody Paige wrote:uga_chris wrote: Heck, if someone wanted to run a regular tournament (i.e. not a super-tough side event) that emphasized a certain distribution (like 5/5 RMP, 4/4 social science, 3/3 US History, etc.), I'd be interested to play in that too since it would force me to bone up on a particular part of the canon and introduce new answers to a wide audience.
My $.02...
I tried this for a middle-school tournament I ran last year (declaring the literature questions would be Caudill Award Winners and current nominees) and I was blistered by posters on this board for limiting the literature answer space. I did this because non-Harry Potter lit goes dead too often at the MS level and figured this could motivate kids to, you know, read. Of course, others criticized any inclusion of middle school lit on the basis that it's, well, middle school lit. Apparently, some feel that middle schoolers as young as 6th grade should be reading Catcher in the Rye and Pierre et Jean to prepare them for the rigors of varsity.
My $.02...
I tried this for a middle-school tournament I ran last year (declaring the literature questions would be Caudill Award Winners and current nominees) and I was blistered by posters on this board for limiting the literature answer space. I did this because non-Harry Potter lit goes dead too often at the MS level and figured this could motivate kids to, you know, read. Of course, others criticized any inclusion of middle school lit on the basis that it's, well, middle school lit. Apparently, some feel that middle schoolers as young as 6th grade should be reading Catcher in the Rye and Pierre et Jean to prepare them for the rigors of varsity.
rylltraka wrote:Current Events continues to be a headache. My question is "What does it reward?" Scanning CNN each morning? Matching senators to states?
rylltraka wrote:CE tends to include ephemeral, unimportant things
uga_chris wrote:This is similar to Bruce's idea of a "modern world" distribution and isn't too far away from simply "Modern History," but I'd argue that we should know a good bit more about the world that goes on around us right now than stuff that happened in the distant past.
AlphaQuizBowler wrote:uga_chris wrote:This is similar to Bruce's idea of a "modern world" distribution and isn't too far away from simply "Modern History," but I'd argue that we should know a good bit more about the world that goes on around us right now than stuff that happened in the distant past.
My question is, where does history end and CE begin?Couldn't a TU on Hamas be counted under the appropriate history subdistro. I guess my contention is this: the non-"ripped from the headlines" CE that you talk about is, in fact, "Modern History", and should be counted as such.
AlphaQuizBowler wrote:My question is, where does history end and CE begin?Couldn't a TU on Hamas be counted under the appropriate history subdistro. I guess my contention is this: the non-"ripped from the headlines" CE that you talk about is, in fact, "Modern History", and should be counted as such.
Matt Weiner wrote:Bad ideas in this thread: The concept that anything written in book form is "literature" (the distributional issue with the proposal to write all of your literature questions on the stuff that gets young readers awards is that almost all of those books are actually part of the "trash" category), the idea that ACF doesn't ask about computer science, the idea that the current line between religion and mythology is unclear to most experienced writers (if it's a story about deities and their antics, magic possessions, or cool halls, it's mythology even if people still believe it; if it's ethical theology about how one should behave, questions about scriptures, questions about holidays, or the history of religious conflicts and such, then it's religion even if it's on the Popul Vuh or something else from a belief with no more adherents).
Matt Weiner wrote:AlphaQuizBowler wrote:My question is, where does history end and CE begin?Couldn't a TU on Hamas be counted under the appropriate history subdistro. I guess my contention is this: the non-"ripped from the headlines" CE that you talk about is, in fact, "Modern History", and should be counted as such.
One could also feel free to write a Hamas question for history and use some current events clues. I for one would not object to that, as an editor.
Bad ideas in this thread: The concept that anything written in book form is "literature" (the distributional issue with the proposal to write all of your literature questions on the stuff that gets young readers awards is that almost all of those books are actually part of the "trash" category), the idea that ACF doesn't ask about computer science, the idea that the current line between religion and mythology is unclear to most experienced writers (if it's a story about deities and their antics, magic possessions, or cool halls, it's mythology even if people still believe it; if it's ethical theology about how one should behave, questions about scriptures, questions about holidays, or the history of religious conflicts and such, then it's religion even if it's on the Popul Vuh or something else from a belief with no more adherents).
Matt Weiner wrote:Suffice to say that I am not convinced in the least by the actual arguments I have seen for expanding the CS minimum, and am satisfied with the current policy of allowing anywhere between 0 and X questions on CS per packet-submission tournament, where X is the number of packets. Write a good CS question that's not on something like "the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm," so that more than 2 people in quizbowl will be able to answer it, and any science editor will be happy to use it. It's not like there's some surplus of good science submissions out there that people have the luxury of discarding.
AlphaQuizBowler wrote:uga_chris wrote:This is similar to Bruce's idea of a "modern world" distribution and isn't too far away from simply "Modern History," but I'd argue that we should know a good bit more about the world that goes on around us right now than stuff that happened in the distant past.
My question is, where does history end and CE begin?Couldn't a TU on Hamas be counted under the appropriate history subdistro. I guess my contention is this: the non-"ripped from the headlines" CE that you talk about is, in fact, "Modern History", and should be counted as such.
Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote: (sidenote: I don't know that I appreciate the grouping of The Catcher in the Rye, a work that is taught in plenty of schools and is read by a decent number of middle schoolers,
if it's a story about deities and their antics, magic possessions, or cool halls, it's mythology even if people still believe it; if it's ethical theology about how one should behave, questions about scriptures, questions about holidays, or the history of religious conflicts and such, then it's religion even if it's on the Popul Vuh or something else from a belief with no more adherents).
Whig's Boson wrote:I put some folktale clues and even answers in RMPFest, and have not heard any complaints about this. There was a tossup on vampires in the tiebreakers somewhere, a tossup on elves that used a lot of folkloric clues, etc. Also, I think folklore clues come up a lot in common link TU's, especially on animals.
No Rules Westbrook wrote:Contrary to what Yaphe seems to argue in the other thread, I think the typical mACF distribution we have now (as outlined by Bentley above) has done a pretty good job of justifying itself, such that it's not really some arbitrary thing at all. I'm obviously someone who spends a lot of time imagining what new things we could potentially write on...and in my experience, there aren't too many subjects out there which seem to be absolutely screaming with unplowed answer/clue space. In other words, there aren't too many times where I could see myself saying "man, if the distribution were different, we might have really explored these topics in a different manner, in greater depth or breadth, etc." Sure, there are always more topics that we could possibly explore, but I'm rarely convinced that they are at least as academically relevant/important/interesting/workable and feasible/whatever as the topics we're currently exploring. As such, even if the distribution we have today came about through complete serendipity, I think we can still look back and say that we made a wise choice - perhaps wiser than most any other choice we might have made.
I think it's simply not true that the Bach-related things I mentioned are less "academically relevant/important/interesting/workable" than the Henry James-related things I mentioned
Matt Weiner wrote:They're neither less academically relevant, nor less important, nor less interesting, but they certainly are less workable. Writing a tossup on "Bach's English Suites" strikes me as more difficult than writing a tossup on "The Spoils of Poynton," just due to the inherent difficulties in finding good clues for the quizbowl format on instrumental music v. literature. As whatever tempo marking clues or anecdotes about first performances are used up in the first two or three instances of such a tossup, it then becomes even harder to write a question that doesn't boil down to "did you hear the last question on this topic", compared to the easy task of swapping in a fresh plot incident in the leadin of a lit tossup.
It's not music's fault that music is harder to write than literature, nor is it the fault of packet authors or distribution creators; but that is the way things are, and I can't imagine an expanded music distribution would lead to anything but a lot of bad questions. In this particular example, I think Ryan is on the money with his anthropic principle of quizbowl.
No Rules Westbrook wrote:Even people who know a lot about classical music often remark on this board about how hard it is to find unique, concrete, identifiable, realistically-buzzable clues for questions on instrumental music pieces...it's even harder for someone who doesn't have much experience with classical music (as opposed to someone who hasn't read a book - they can pretty quickly ascertain who seem to be the major characters/what seems like the main plot of the book through various sources - and then they can quickly find other clues and make a pyramidal question).
No Rules Westbrook wrote:Yeah, I think Weiner's right here - and I should have emphasized how important the workable/feasible part of the equation I put forth was. I don't think it's just that we "don't currently know how to write good questions" on the topic - rather, I think that plenty of experienced writers know very well how hard it is to write such questions, and why it's hard, and that it would be hard no matter what distribution we had chosen for ourselves in the first instance. Even people who know a lot about classical music often remark on this board about how hard it is to find unique, concrete, identifiable, realistically-buzzable clues for questions on instrumental music pieces...it's even harder for someone who doesn't have much experience with classical music (as opposed to someone who hasn't read a book - they can pretty quickly ascertain who seem to be the major characters/what seems like the main plot of the book through various sources - and then they can quickly find other clues and make a pyramidal question).
You can't get around the fact that there are certain limiting paramaters inherent in the structure of quizbowl as a game - it's not an essay examination where you can just pour out every thought that can be expressed in language. Rather, it's a game where you have to realistically be able to buzz off of a finite number of hopefully-helpful clues in a paragraph.
No Rules Westbrook wrote:By the way, on your Bach example - I know I've seen at least a few mentions of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Musical Offering, St. Matthew Passion, and Toccata and Fugue in quizbowl. This isn't surprising to me, because those things have the most distinctive names of any of the things you listed - and they seem like they'd be the easiest to construct a pyramidal tossup on. This would indicate that, under the current distribution scheme, we do usually go into such topics when they prove workable.
theMoMA wrote:I wonder if the music/literature swap thought experiment is actually useful. The distribution represents years of discussion and evolution; the numbers and subsequent ratios actually mean something, so flipping them around and seeing what a whacky world it would be seems unjustified. Maybe that ratio doesn't represent something specific, but I think it approximates this reality: there are more literature answers than music ones, literature sources are more available than music ones, literature clues are more specific than music ones, lit questions are easier to write than music ones, there are more students of literature in academia than students of music, and there is no analogue to character/plot detail tossups in the musical canon.
theMoMA wrote:I'm not sure what the comparison between James and Bach shows. Bach's output is one of the most tossup-able in the classical canon. I think Andrew is mistaken to say that things like the St. Matthew Passion, Well-Tempered Clavier, Magnificat, Musical Offering, and Toccata and Fugue in D minor come up without regularity, and obviously things like the Brandenburg Concertos, Goldberg Variations, Mass in B minor, and Art of Fugue are some of the most common classical music answers at the regular difficulty level. How many composers have a more tossup-able body of work? I would argue only two are on par: Mozart and Beethoven. But even Mozart's askable output pales in comparison to possible Shakespeare tossups. Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, James, Melville, Hugo, Dumas...these guys all have huge bodies of tossup-able answers. Is there a similar collection of classical music stalwarts? Even with giants like Brahms or Mahler, it's hard to get past a half-dozen possible tossup answers. I can think of at least ten answers for tossups based on the corpus of less prolific authors like Garcia Marquez, Conrad, Achebe, Hardy, Twain, etc.
Anti-Climacus wrote:As an alternate thought experiment, I'd like to propose comparing painting and literature. However, the answer range of non-common link tossups are quite limited. For instance, one rarley hears tossups on works of Piero Della Francesca, the Pesaro Madonna, or the Galatea fresco, despite their great siginficance in the history of painting. This may be because there is neither as much need to go deeper to fill 1/1 a packet nor enough incentive for people to study painting in depth for quizbowl purposes. However, if there were 4/4 paintings a packet, it would be necessary for writers to go deeper and for people to study art history in greater depth. Moreover, this does not have the barrier to entry that music has, since it is as easy to write a decent tossup on the Galatea fresco as it is to write a decent tossup on, say The Aspern Papers.
No Rules Westbrook wrote:Well, we can talk all we want about how much a "hypothetical intelligent person" knows about figures like Bach, Twain, and so on - but I don't really see how that's relevant to their askability within the framework of quizbowl (and its inherent limitations as a game). I submit that there are probably lots of worthwhile academic topics underrepresented in quizbowl (topics both inside and outside the current distribution) because there just isn't a very good way to write tossups and/or bonuses on those things.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests