Superb_starling wrote:arguably the most stock clue ever
Either Grignard has just been clued as the son of a sailmaker or the definition of "stock" has changed.
Superb_starling wrote:arguably the most stock clue ever
grapesmoker wrote:Why are people so desperate to invent solutions in search of problems? The current system works fine! It does its job of qualifying teams for the ICT, after which they can do things like go on to play DI like everyone else. But no, let's fuck everything up sideways because three people on the boards are dissatisfied with the difficulty level.
marnold wrote:It should be shouted from the high heavens that D1 is what matters. D2 is great as a way of bringing people into the activity, but all this hand-wringing seems to think that it's an end-in-itself. It isn't. It barely matters, honestly, because the idea is you're supposed to do it it once (or LESS even [shockhorror]) and then move on to real quizbowl. In fact, I propose D2 be made continually easier until it's just 24 questions about George Washington and the Mona Lisa so people will take the hint and play D1.
There is room for everyone in quizbowl. We should try to create maximum opportunity for everyone to enjoy it at their own preferred level of difficulty.
Sun Devil Student wrote:I offered an idea that could make those few dissatisfied people happy without negatively impacting anyone else. What exactly is wrong with that? If you want to argue why my proposal is logistically unworkable compared to the current system, fine. If you want to argue that my proposal is morally inferior to the current system, I'm happy to hear about it. But "the current system is good enough" should not be automatically a defense against all possible improvements.
Sun Devil Student wrote:Just because the current system is not terrible does not mean that it's wrong to even think about the potential for improvement. Can we please recognize the difference between "trying to make an okay system even better" and "claiming that the current system is horrible when it's not"?
I offered an idea that could make those few dissatisfied people happy without negatively impacting anyone else. What exactly is wrong with that? If you want to argue why my proposal is logistically unworkable compared to the current system, fine. If you want to argue that my proposal is morally inferior to the current system, I'm happy to hear about it. But "the current system is good enough" should not be automatically a defense against all possible improvements.
Just as the "perfect is the enemy of the good," so "the good is the enemy of the great" - and we seem to have illustrated both phenomena in this thread.
Here's the problem. Many (I'd guess most) players, unlike you and I, lose their enjoyment of the game when 7 or 8 tossups go dead every round and the bonus conversion drops below about 8/30 (these are estimates based on my observation; the exact cutoffs may vary). And for a lot of players who do quizbowl as a recreational activity on the side and don't have a lot of time to study for it, D1 is "too hard" because it takes a considerable amount of work for a team to reach that level on D1 questions. These people, unfortunately, will never be good enough to really enjoy D1.
Some of you seem to think these people should be unwelcome in the quizbowl circuit. However, I think these casual teams still contribute to the community by being stepping-stone opponents for those D2 players who really do want to improve (and thus start out at novice level but over time get better and move on to D1), and if the "permanent D2 teams" are enjoying themselves and accepting of their place in the bottom half of the rankings, then that should be perfectly okay. Pushing them away from quizbowl with the demand of "enjoy D1-level questions or quit" (which is what you do by kicking them out of D2) is both unnecessarily unkind, and a loss to our community.
Susan wrote:But if those people are just going to quit playing quizbowl as soon as they can no longer play other novice teams because they can't handle losing to people who have put in more work than they have--and, yes, this is sometimes what people mean when they complain about having to play DI!--then, you know, fuck them. Those people aren't going to contribute to quizbowl, they aren't going to write packets for things, they're just going to be free riders and we should not accommodate them.
grapesmoker wrote:No, look, you're still not getting this. In fact, very few of you are getting this. Let me lay it out for you:
It's fine to think of improvements and even advocate for a wholesale restructuring of the game, if you think that that's what it takes. I've been part of those discussions, and sometimes, yes, that really is the correct position. But that was many years ago when people still thought CBI was a legitimate purveyor of quizbowl. None of the people you're arguing with here are naive idiots who (in my mother's words) fell to earth from the moon; we're all people with a lot of experience in both the writing and the organizational aspects of quizbowl, some more than others. What that means is that the current system was actually formed over many iterations of these kinds of discussions, where thoughtful people would select meaningful, concrete changes to achieve, put them forward, and there'd be reasonable, incremental progress. Which is to say it wasn't pulled out of our asses yesterday. People have considered lots of different options and they've settled on this system not because it represents some sort of global optimum but because it achieves a stated purpose (let the majority of newcomers play apart from more experienced teams) in a reasonable way.
This is the part that you and Joseph and Harrison seem not to be able to grasp for some reason, and it gets tiresome to rehash these debates all the time (as does your particular "woe is me" perpetual victim routine, by the way). You guys are coming in and making all sorts of wacky assertions and restructuring proposals which are manifestly unnecessary and may actually be detrimental. You want all these changes (many of which you can't even articulate properly because you're not actually sure what it is you want) and you've got various stab-in-the-dark proposals and you're not going to be restrained by anything so sensible as people with cumulative decades of quizbowl experience telling you that we're at a happy medium and to let it go. Why? Why are you so fixated on this?
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:To be fair, I pretty much get this now, and I think if you actually read my last few posts you can see this. I didn't at first, true, but that's because a few people thought it would be more effective to come in and compare me to James Johnson and make ad hominem attacks rather than say "We've heard these arguments before, from X, Y, and Z, and they're wrong for reasons A, B, and C."
I still think that it might be better, if we're going to keep SCT DII at a lower average difficulty (or lower it further), to increase the variance of the difficulty of the questions, because there are going to be people playing DII who should be playing DI, and I don't think that making it better for them is entirely incompatible with making it fun for the total novice, lower-level DII teams. Yes, maybe I just fell from the quizbowl moon, but I've thought a lot about this shit w/r/t math competitions since high school, and at least in that arena, with a sufficiently large sample size, it's totally possible to end up with an approximation of a ranking at the top and still make it fun for people toward the bottom, and a proper gradation of difficulty is essential. Maybe quizbowl acts differently -- but I see no reason it should. In any case, I don't think this is any sort of "wholesale restructuring."
Mechanical Beasts wrote:We're not contesting the point that "it's okay to spend one year in D2." The argument we're making is that if you're good enough at quizbowl to say 'HOW DARE CUP OF GOLD BE A LEADIN' then you have graduated from D2. The people who need to have finely gradated games on D2 questions are not all buzzer-racing on every STOCK LEADIN, because if you're fighting to qualify to D2 ICT, you most likely don't know that tier of clues.
grapesmoker wrote:This is the part that you and Joseph and Harrison seem not to be able to grasp for some reason, and it gets tiresome to rehash these debates all the time (as does your particular "woe is me" perpetual victim routine, by the way). You guys are coming in and making all sorts of wacky assertions and restructuring proposals which are manifestly unnecessary and may actually be detrimental. You want all these changes (many of which you can't even articulate properly because you're not actually sure what it is you want) and you've got various stab-in-the-dark proposals and you're not going to be restrained by anything so sensible as people with cumulative decades of quizbowl experience telling you that we're at a happy medium and to let it go. Why? Why are you so fixated on this?
grapesmoker wrote:I have a pretty low tolerance for people inventing shit to attribute to me.
Chris Ray wrote:some Alabama grad student's stock clue monocle
Matt Bollinger wrote:considering those few posers who will play the tournament
Andrew Watkins wrote:See, this is the James Johnson sentiment alive and well.
The way I've been talking about things this whole time has been very deliberate to point out continually that the things I mentioned were nothing but little blips, and that overall the system is good. I've made no radically overhauling stab-in-the-dark proposal, and yet why not, accuse me of saying I'm advocating some massive overhaul to the system when I've said over and over that the system's fine, but that a few of the clues didn't help distinguish two teams' total knowledge because the set was written to be appropriately easy.
Superb_starling wrote:Independent of a DI field being forced to play DII, I also felt that the set was significantly too frequently stock and/or too easy.
Fred wrote:Stop with the whole "AN AD HOMINEM POST GOES LIKE THIS HURR DURR HURR DURR", "NO IT GOES LIKE THIS HURF DURF HURF DURF" thing.
grapesmoker wrote:The way I've been talking about things this whole time has been very deliberate to point out continually that the things I mentioned were nothing but little blips, and that overall the system is good. I've made no radically overhauling stab-in-the-dark proposal, and yet why not, accuse me of saying I'm advocating some massive overhaul to the system when I've said over and over that the system's fine, but that a few of the clues didn't help distinguish two teams' total knowledge because the set was written to be appropriately easy.
I'm not keen for the metaposting discussion, but look at it in context: your sequence of posts basically reads like a litany of things you found problematic, and somewhere in there you sort of incidentally mention that yeah, actually the set was more or less ok, but then go on to list more things you thought were a problem. Sorry if that creates the impression that you think this set had problems! If I've unfairly lumped you in with people who think that SCT should be rejiggerred, then I apologize, but it sure sounded like that's what you wanted, because you said things like:
I wrote:Jerry's phrasing of this was accurate; current D2 SCT did divide the good teams from the bad teams on average, and therefore the occasional flaws it did have are statistically insignificant. The current qualification system does work fine, and the general difficulty of this set was fine too for where D2 players should be.
I wrote:That is, we should be playing D2 for now, and so we would rather it be enjoyable and good competition. Overall, it was.
grapesmoker wrote:Superb_starling wrote:Independent of a DI field being forced to play DII, I also felt that the set was significantly too frequently stock and/or too easy.
I don't know how else to read that.
I wrote:It certainly was easy, per se, but seemed to be frequently reactionarily too easy.
Superb_starling wrote:Chris Ray wrote:some Alabama grad student's stock clue monocle
Superb_starling wrote:Andrew Watkins wrote:See, this is the James Johnson sentiment alive and well.
This one was technically making a legitimate argument, but instead just made everyone think about how dumb James Johnson's ideas were. It'd be approximately like comparing the average intelligent republican to Sarah Palin, and thus it aims to invalidate everything they say by someone they stand on the opposite end of the same room as.
Mechanical Beasts wrote:Superb_starling wrote:Andrew Watkins wrote:See, this is the James Johnson sentiment alive and well.
This one was technically making a legitimate argument, but instead just made everyone think about how dumb James Johnson's ideas were. It'd be approximately like comparing the average intelligent republican to Sarah Palin, and thus it aims to invalidate everything they say by someone they stand on the opposite end of the same room as.
Well, when James Johnson makes an internet forum career out of complaining about how it's impossible to compete with teams FULL of grad students, and then I come across a player incidentally from the same school complaining about a circumstance only mathematically possible if a team is at least somewhat FULL of grad students, both of whom are unaware of the fact that it's quite possible to compete with grad students, what can I do?
The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:Mechanical Beasts wrote:Superb_starling wrote:Andrew Watkins wrote:See, this is the James Johnson sentiment alive and well.
This one was technically making a legitimate argument, but instead just made everyone think about how dumb James Johnson's ideas were. It'd be approximately like comparing the average intelligent republican to Sarah Palin, and thus it aims to invalidate everything they say by someone they stand on the opposite end of the same room as.
Well, when James Johnson makes an internet forum career out of complaining about how it's impossible to compete with teams FULL of grad students, and then I come across a player incidentally from the same school complaining about a circumstance only mathematically possible if a team is at least somewhat FULL of grad students, both of whom are unaware of the fact that it's quite possible to compete with grad students, what can I do?
Auburn and Alabama are two different schools.
Nobody arguing in this thread agrees with James Johnson, something I think is fairly clear by now. Alabama is a team chock full of grad students who competes at and/or hosts every pyramidal quizbowl tournament they can get ahold of, and Auburn is a new team that is quite active against tough competition.
Susan wrote:(self-selection and "gentlemans' agreements" and such have had a pretty spotty history in quizbowl and I suspect that this would work just as badly as previous examples have).
setht wrote:Sun Devil Student wrote:I offered an idea that could make those few dissatisfied people happy without negatively impacting anyone else. What exactly is wrong with that? If you want to argue why my proposal is logistically unworkable compared to the current system, fine. If you want to argue that my proposal is morally inferior to the current system, I'm happy to hear about it. But "the current system is good enough" should not be automatically a defense against all possible improvements.
I think your suggestion from earlier in this thread is, in effect, logistically unworkable. The D-value system is an approximation to some ideal ranking of teams; I think it works well in general. The DI-to-DII and DII-to-DI conversion factors are an approximation to an approximation, and I'm not convinced they work nearly as well. They exist to deal with the (hopefully rare) cases when some team has to compete on the set from the other division due to circumstances beyond their control. The fact is that trying to compare teams across different sites is already a bit of a challenge; trying to compare teams across different sites that play very different sets, against teams that aren't competing for spots in the same division, is very messy.
The upper end of the NAQT difficulty scale goes IS sets, DII SCT, HSNCT, DII ICT, DI SCT, DI ICT (in increasing order of difficulty). So your proposal that DII-eligible teams be allowed to play DI SCT to qualify for DII ICT means allowing teams to qualify for a national tournament by playing a harder sectionals set. I think this could easily cause problems in correctly determining which teams should earn bids.
I can imagine that there exist teams for whom DII ICT and DI SCT are pretty much right at their level--presumably some of the teams at the top of DII ICT each year are in this group, for instance. I would also imagine that some decent fraction of those DII-eligible teams would be able to qualify for ICT as DI teams, if they chose to do so. Now, if a strong, DII-eligible team wants to make a run at the DII title, I don't begrudge them that at all, but I do think it would be a mistake to make big (and I think problematic) changes to the current system just so they can play an SCT set that they'll enjoy more. In other words: if a team chooses to prioritize competing at DII ICT over playing the most difficulty-appropriate SCT set, I think that's fine; but I also think that's something the team chooses, and not a problem for NAQT to solve.
grapesmoker wrote:Hey, maybe you can do us all a favor and go find the places where I (or anyone else) proscribed discussion or thinking about improving things? Because I have a pretty low tolerance for people inventing shit to attribute to me.
grapesmoker wrote:People have considered lots of different options and they've settled on this system not because it represents some sort of global optimum but because it achieves a stated purpose (let the majority of newcomers play apart from more experienced teams) in a reasonable way.
grapesmoker wrote:You can already be a permanent basement-dweller by not qualifying for ICT. The (entirely reasonable) assumption is that if you have qualified for the DII ICT, you can, in fact, hang with the better teams (or at least begin to work towards doing so), and so you're bounced out of DII.
Susan wrote:only one team (at least, out of all the teams that have stats up on NAQT's website so far) got less than 8ppb on this year's SCT
Susan wrote:Those people [free-riders] aren't going to contribute to quizbowl, they aren't going to write packets for things, they're just going to be free riders and we should not accommodate them.
Mechanical Beasts wrote:both of whom are unaware of the fact that it's quite possible to compete with grad students, what can I do?
Mechanical Beasts wrote:Superb_starling wrote:Andrew Watkins wrote:See, this is the James Johnson sentiment alive and well.
This one was technically making a legitimate argument, but instead just made everyone think about how dumb James Johnson's ideas were. It'd be approximately like comparing the average intelligent republican to Sarah Palin, and thus it aims to invalidate everything they say by someone they stand on the opposite end of the same room as.
Well, when James Johnson makes an internet forum career out of complaining about how it's impossible to compete with teams FULL of grad students, and then I come across a player incidentally from the same school complaining about a circumstance only mathematically possible if a team is at least somewhat FULL of grad students, both of whom are unaware of the fact that it's quite possible to compete with grad students, what can I do?
Sun Devil Student wrote:Jerry, I apologize for over-interpreting your accusation of solving non-existent problems as an indication that any suggested change was unwelcome.
Since the current system is not globally optimal but rather is merely close enough to work most of the time, I think we should keep trying to approach that global optimum. Things like making the D1 set easier and having new graduate students start in D2 are some of the ways we're doing that. Letting D2 teams get D2 D-values on D1 questions has been rejected based on Seth's argument that it would decrease the quality of ranking for all the teams. But ideas that are not good today might work better in the future when the composition of teams nationwide changes (remember, graduate students used to start out in D1, etc). In order to get good ideas, you have to have a discussion that inevitably also produces bad ideas. All I'm asking is that someone who knows better, not necessarily Jerry all the time, but someone, take the time to educate less-experienced members of the community (like me) who are just trying to help. Again, Seth's post was very helpful in this particular thread.
This is how the current system is intended, but it's not what actually happens. Some years, so many teams decline bids to D2 ICT that teams which normally shouldn't be promoted to D1 get promoted. This is an imperfection most people here accept because they place more value on having a full 32-team D2 ICT field than on perfect consistency in judging teams' readiness for D1 competition, but I suspect this may play a role in the disappearance of those Southeastern D1-promoted teams that you often talk about.
The combination of these two things, I'll take a wild guess here, accounts for the Southeast's chronic shortage of D1 teams.
Well, not quite. They are contributing money in lieu of packets and studying effort. It is not completely a waste of time to accommodate them, they pay for the activities of the more committed teams, and they're fun to have around at local/regional tournaments. From the point of view of a college team, most of the local high school teams are basically "free-riding," and I think collegiate "recreational" quizbowl is worthwhile for much of the same reason as high school quizbowl.
Superb_starling wrote:That said, I don't think I'm very far off -- probably no more than a year -- from being able to compete consistently with Jake et al. either; Like I may have said before, that 520 point loss was statistically much further apart than we actually are from Alabama A(P/N and PPB spiked for them in that match, not to mention there was only one match where they powered more questions than that one IIRC), and I actually think we'd be better suited to play them on the D1 set than D2.
Superb_starling wrote:The tense is key in understanding what I meant on this part; We are not, in the present, ready to compete with teams who combine for more years of college quiz bowl experience than number of years I've been alive. We will be, and we're moving towards this, but for now, we belong in DII, if just for this year, because we still have freshman problems, and we just frankly haven't had enough time. We aren't going to hide from established programs, per se, but it makes no sense for us to try and play against teams currently well over our head as we work to become better.
Joey and I are actually split as to whether or not we should play D1 or D2 next year, and I'm the one arguing that next year we should play D1, independent of whether or not we qualify for ICT. But this year, we simply aren't good enough to go and try and compete with the D1 teams in our region, as evidenced by our results against the two D1 teams at our site.
Jerry wrote:There's something that a lot of people in this discussion and in quizbowl in general don't understand: quizbowl's real currency is not money, it's time and effort. Quizbowl, at its core, is voluntaristic, because no one derives enough income from it to put in the kind of time and effort that most editors put in. Yeah, a team showed up and paid some money, that's great. However, if that team isn't attending tournaments regularly (which is how you improve) and hosting tournaments, then it's really not contributing very much to the circuit at all. Those $200 paid once a year or whatever it is to play SCT aren't doing anyone any favors; the influence of that money is so diluted that it barely matters. If you're not contributing to the health of the community by hosting and attending tournaments, you don't really have a voice, because no one needs your $200 divided among god knows how many editors so badly that they're going to change everything around for you. Teams that just do what you describe definitionally live at the margins of the game, and do so more or less by choice.
grapesmoker wrote:what specific problem are you trying to solve?
Susan wrote:I continue to think that any efforts to appease players/teams who don't contribute to the circuit are ultimately not a good use of the circuit's resources.
grapesmoker wrote:I just want to know if you have any familiarity with the southeast circuit at all. How does it come to pass that other schools all across the country somehow manage to make this transition and yet only one region remains outstanding?
Susan wrote:"writing packets" as another key factor in circuit participation
Sun Devil Student wrote:grapesmoker wrote:what specific problem are you trying to solve?
The problem of super-good D2 players having to endure a too-easy D2 SCT question set in order to be able to compete at D2 ICT. (I understand that you don't consider this to be a problem, but I was responding to the fact that other people perceived it to be. Anything that has a "national championship" will get importance attached to it, even if it's something that shouldn't, like D2 - and you see enough value in having D2 ICT to tolerate the side effects, right?)
Writing packets is exactly what makes ACF tournaments smaller than NAQT tournaments. Sure the ACF circuit does not need to accommodate the non-contributing teams or let them have a voice, but I don't know if NAQT should take the same attitude, as those teams are a significant part of NAQT's audience (though not ACF's). One tournament a year isn't much, but it's still better than nothing. (And the ACF circuit does require a lot more time and effort to sustain because it has several tournaments per year, while NAQT has only the one regional and one national at the college level.)
Sun Devil Student wrote:Susan wrote:I continue to think that any efforts to appease players/teams who don't contribute to the circuit are ultimately not a good use of the circuit's resources.
The D2 players who complained about the D2 SCT being too easy are probably pretty good contributors in terms of packet writing and such. There may be better ways to appease them than what I suggested (or maybe on this point there isn't any good way) but at least we tried.
grapesmoker wrote:
- The DII SCT is designed to achieve certain limited goals, namely, allowing players new to quizbowl to compete amongst themselves rather than against more experienced teams.
- It does so by lowering the difficulty of the questions, possibly to the point where the questions may end up being relatively easy for many of the teams that qualify for the ICT.
- This is an acceptable compromise because otherwise the set would be much less accessible to inexperienced players overall, and also because players for whom DII is too easy will qualify and move on to DI anyway.
grapesmoker wrote:
- As a consequence of points 1-3, there isn't any necessity to change the structure of the tournament or any of the qualification rules.
Mechanical Beasts wrote:people who want to play questions easier than DI indefinitely. Those are, almost 100% of the time, non-contributing players.
Superb_starling wrote:
On a lighter, much less angry note, the ad hominem arguments to which Harrison refers:Chris Ray wrote:some Alabama grad student's stock clue monocle
There were those 2, which were almost entirely directed at Harrison and served no logical purpose.
bt_green_warbler wrote:Note that in the distant past (2000 and earlier) NAQT did produce an additional college set for use in the fall.
Sun Devil Student wrote:grapesmoker wrote:I just want to know if you have any familiarity with the southeast circuit at all. How does it come to pass that other schools all across the country somehow manage to make this transition and yet only one region remains outstanding?
No, I meant what I said about taking a wild guess - I live in the southwest, not the southeast. In my own experience, my team (ASU) has lost many potentially good players because of the high level of time commitment required to enjoy regular-difficulty (or D1-level), and I speculate that this same effect occurs with other novice teams around the country, including the Southeast. I was hoping an actual Southeasterner might be able to confirm or deny this from their own observations on the ground. Fortunately, ASU had enough new recruits initially that the small fraction who stuck it out were still enough to make a viable organization, but at smaller schools I can see how organizations might end up being too small to sustain themselves.
The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:Every year from now on, we're going to have similar discussions pop up after every SCT about the transition from D2 to D1, and will focus on the general attitude of a lot of teams that keep playing D2 and consequently often leave D1 fields shorthanded. A lot of good (D2 eligible) players pour out of high school every year now, and the expanding circuit will mean that it's harder and harder to get a D2 ICT bid. As long as it's out there and they're eligible to get it, a lot of people are always going to chase the white whale of a D2 ICT bid instead of going D1, because the idea of playing in a national tournament is very appealing to them for a variety of reasons. While this is not good for the circuit overall, the attitude will not go away overnight. I don't know what the answer is, or even if it is something that can (or should?) be solved. Forcing players out of D2 with stricter eligibility standards or an increase in the size of the D2 ICT field would generally get more people out of D2, but there's obviously no guarantee that would get them to play D1.
DumbJaques wrote:Superb_starling wrote:
On a lighter, much less angry note, the ad hominem arguments to which Harrison refers:Chris Ray wrote:some Alabama grad student's stock clue monocle
There were those 2, which were almost entirely directed at Harrison and served no logical purpose.
Perhaps this phrase implies something different to you than it does for other people, but this in fact was not an ad hominem argument. It was also like, not at all directed "almost entirely" at Harrison, because it is a caricature of a hypothetical Alabama grad student, and to my knowledge Harrison is both tangible and an undergrad.
DumbJaques wrote:Also the reason I brought up James Johnson was to make fun of James Johnson for being an idiot, something I'd anticipated a member of the Alabama team would actually appreciate.I in fact consider it a very positive thing that (the limited merits of this argument aside), members of James Johnson's former team are just a year later advocating for the SCT-playing grad student's cause.
DumbJaques wrote:It's still like, a really bad argument and everything, and at this point I'm really pleading with you to consider that we don't need to alter DII's difficulty just because one lit question had an easy leadin* or whatever. But nobody here is behaving like James Johnson, and I don't think anyone was seriously suggesting otherwise.
DumbJaques wrote:This image was meant to evoke the comically significant degree to which we all should not give a fuck about whether a grad student playing DII questions finds them too easy, at least as far as changing DII difficulty is concerned. I continue to find the arguments raised by both you and Harrison underwhelming, repetitive, and somewhat frustratingly intractable (contrary to what you've professed, I really don't see where you've departed from the central thesis here). I'm not making any value judgments about people who play DII generally or you guys in particular, and don't appreciate being lumped in as such.
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