EFT Discussion

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Blackboard Monitor Vimes
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

Prefacing my statement by saying that I was unable to attend EFT this year, although a mirror of the 07 one was my first college tournament...

Anyway, I think I said something similar the last time a discussion of "girly trash" came to my attention, but I think it's nonsense. I'm a not quite seventeen-year-old girl. I watch baseball and football, haven't listened to boy bands since elementary school, and would rather see something Harold and Kumar-esque than Mamma Mia any day. I have a (straight) male teammate who loves Desperate Housewives and Gilmore Girls and has never enjoyed watching any sport of any kind. I think trash should be written based on what's popular, not what's going to geared towards any particular audience. I don't mean to echo Farrah too much, but it really seems to be a pointless/ridiculous argument and it frustrates me to no end when it comes up.

So as not to end on a rant, from what people have said it seems like the overall set was pretty good, and I look forward to practicing on it.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Theory Of The Leisure Flask »

Captain Scipio wrote:
Theory Of The Leisure Flask wrote:"second movement consists of only two chords which make a false cadence" = Brandenburg Concerto #3
"coda modulates from C Major to E Major and features trombone glissandi" = Bolero
"two major triads a tritone apart" = Petroushka
I would just question how sure you are that these are, in fact, uniquely identifying. For example, this article (WARNING: may be complete lies) claims that at least a couple major works employ the device you claim is unique to Petroushka.

MaS
Well, yeah, you'd probably want to add "namesake chord" in that case. I certainly wouldn't use that particular wording elsewhere, though "this composition uses the Petroushka chord in place X" could be a usable musical clue for other works.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

I think that actively skewing the trash distribution away from what the people attending the tournament are interested in is artificial and probably not useful. Trash is frustrating to a lot of people since one doesn't actively study it, so if 80% of quizbowl is unfortunately male--I don't have actual numbers--then it's not inappropriate that 80% of the trash questions skew male. (Otherwise, any argument of trash at trash tournaments "skewing old" is a priori invalid, since there would then be a set canon of what ought to be included in trash, not to be deviated from for the sake of gettability.)

And the presupposition that it's a question of gender is silly; I recall watching TV shows in the past, but honestly, unless it's certain genres that would make Matt Weiner think I'm a pedophile, I haven't watched a TV show besides The Office in years, unless a few episodes of Arrested Development count. But I bet I'd get questions that are stereotypically girlier, if not that bonus with One Tree Hill and everything.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Lagotto Romagnolo »

yoda4554 wrote: I'll say the Stephen Dedalus tossup was really good, in that it avoided the many stock clues for him (though doesn't he explain his theories in detail to Cranly, not Lynch?)
Project Gutenberg says it's Lynch, although I could have grossly misread the text, or they could have screwed us all over.

With regards to the music questions...
grapesmoker wrote:
Theory Of The Leisure Flask wrote:I also wonder if, with the advent of tournaments that read off of laptops instead of printing packets, it might be feasible or desirable to try including the occasional auditory bonus. (e.g. "Name the symphony from these five-second clips of their main theme", or somesuch) What do people think?
I would be wary of doing this since it requires the use of a laptop, which may not be always possible.
I'd have to agree with Jerry on this. As far as music tossups go, I admit that music theory is hard to write on if you don't know much about it, but it's far better than vague clues about the auditory content. I personally detest the use of tempo markings in clues (e.g. "The fourth movement, an allegro non troppo..."), as they are almost never uniquely identifying. I try to include rare instruments in my music clues (i.e. two tenor trombones and a bass trombone for Pines of Rome) but that's just my personal style.

Also, I'm perfectly willing to take blame for some of the skewed distribution; the Akutagawa tossup and Watchmen bonus were both written by me, and I'm sure there were a few other questionable choices out there.

And of course, thank you all for your comments.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by yoda4554 »

To clarify:

1. Regardless of all acknowledged difficulties with writing music tossups, I think we can all agree that it's not good if, as in the Leningrad tossup, the tossup's first three lines contain exactly one clue (and an obscure one at that) that differentiate the answer from at least one other major work (i.e., Shostakovich 5). Furthermore, it's not good if said ambiguity is because the early clues (the wind/violin bit, the ambiguous climax, the snare drums) are individually so commonplace that they might apply to dozens of plausible answers; I will grant that good music tossups will contain clues that are perhaps not wholly unique in the history of music, but we should at least pick things that are distinctly odd, such that the plausibly askable works to which that clue fits is extremely small and pretty near likely to be 1 when one listens to adjacent clues. Incidentally, a better tossup on this subject from this past year's Regionals--there's still somewhat vague stuff in the middle, but much of it is specific enough to cut down on ambiguity.

A famous ostinato from this work’s first movement is quoted in the Intermezzo interotto of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. The composer suggested employing a relief drummer for the 352 bar “little puppet-like tune” in the first movement, which features a C major theme later quoted in the tonic minor as a “requiem.” The second movement begins with a fugue-like theme in the strings followed by a high variation on the theme played on an oboe. A march, repeated twelve times in eleven minutes, follows a theme said to represent the Nazi incursion into Russia. For 10 points, name this symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich named for a city.
ANSWER: Symphony No. 7 [or Leningrad Symphony; accept either; require "Shostakovich" before read]

Sorice, I don't really understand what you're arguing. Here, I'm pretty sure that the first clue, the 352-bar drum bit, and the 12 repeats over 11 minutes are individually uniquely-identifying (at least in the set of conceivably askable answers, which is all we ask of descriptions of art or novels, say) and musically important. Furthermore, if the EFT Leningrad tossup had mentioned, in combination, the references Mr. Comer identified in its early lines, I think it's all but certain they would uniquely identify that symphony, and certainly if you were talking about that symphony in, say, a Shostakovich seminar, you'd discuss those allusions, particularly because Shostakovich likes his allusions so much and makes a great deal out of them intellectually. (Are you arguing that musical allusions are academically trivial? That seems pretty strange, given the extent of their importance.) Regarding the Petrushka bit that I see in what you just wrote--if you say "namesake chord," or even make it clear that we're talking about a ballet, which most tossups on the subject do, this is clear; no one calls it the "Jeux d'eau" chord.

This is the point, I think--if you combine an unusual musical detail with some piece of context into a single phrase, you can get a substantial, uniquely-identifying clue. This did not really happen to the extent it could have in the Leningrad tossup, because the details were vague and the context didn't quite pick up its slack. A great number of music tossups in the past have managed it, though, and in fact happened at other points in this tournament--the first clue in the Brahms tossup about the variations on the Bach partita for the 4th symphony, for instance. I felt very comfortably buzzing in the first line of that tossup, while I didn't on the Leningrad one, despite knowing those two subjects about equally well.

2. Jerry, I certainly agree with you that unfamiliar clues can help ground the selection of possible answers, via the Yaphe Method. In fact, looking back at the Haydn one, I see I might have misinterpreted my teammate's response, as there were in fact no references to London Symphonies in the early part of that question (at least in this October 11 draft). However, I think the example you're giving is misleading and not representative; yes, if the question is giving some information that any educated person should recognize as restricting answer space, like the Jackson one you give, that's helpful. But few unfamiliar clues do so. Let's say, for argument's sake, you referenced The Miracle instead of The Hen in the Haydn tossup. Let's say a Haydn fan, hearing a description of it, immediately recognizes it as The Miracle symphony. Might he not think, "This is a group containing the Miracle Symphony. Well, The Miracle is one of the London Symphonies, and because there's twelve of them, including a couple I haven't listened to in a while and aren't that often-played, that first clue probably describes one of those"? That bit describing The Queen symphony is not a Stonewall-Jackson level bit of answer-narrowing; it's basically only helpful if you recognize it for itself. This is, in fact, the same exact problem as occurs with a list tossup and is a frequent complaint regarding common links: a player can recognize an entry very well for itself, but if it belongs to multiple groups, it's hard to tell which of those groups is being sought without lots of context about the size, scope, and nature of that group.

Also, I think your reaction regarding Don DeLillo rather demonstrates my point about him. Let me rephrase it: I would expect any halfway-decent high school team, or team of reasonably educated Americans totally new to quiz bowl, to be able to 20 the Nixon/Goldwater bonus, because those names are discussed at length in anyone's high school education. I would not expect that of the Don DeLillo bonus, because I doubt anyone mentions DeLillo's name in high school English, and indeed he is far from a dominant figure even at the college literature level; I myself had not even heard his name until my sophomore year of college, and I expect that a number of newer players playing EFT, particularly those less experience in qb, were completely unfamiliar with him. Of course, to experienced players he's "easy," which puts him in the same category as Nixon to us, but that's largely a matter of canon. I'm not sure if Dwight's reiteration of Andrew's claim that he's single-handedly responsible for making DeLillo part of the college canon is entirely true, but the fact that such an argument can be made by veteran players should be proof enough--no one had to make an effort to get Richard Nixon or Barry Goldwater into the canon--that there's a kind of canon parallax that distorts top players' conceptions of difficulty when writing tournaments for less experienced players. (Note: I have read both books that were answers in the bonus, and while I don't really think he's all that great, I'm not arguing against him as an author, nor about his deserved place in the college canon as a whole, only about his relative accessibility in this situation.)
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by alkrav112 »

MLWGS-Gir wrote: I'm a not quite seventeen-year-old girl. I watch baseball and football, haven't listened to boy bands since elementary school, and would rather see something Harold and Kumar-esque than Mamma Mia any day. I have a (straight) male teammate who loves Desperate Housewives and Gilmore Girls and has never enjoyed watching any sport of any kind. I think trash should be written based on what's popular, not what's going to geared towards any particular audience.
I completely agree with this statement; you have echoed my sentiments exactly, but in a much more articulate way. Not to beat a dead horse, but this tournament just focused on one type of popular thing too much.

And, much to everyone's delight, that is the last post I will make on the topic of pop culture at this tournament, because this tournament was FRICKIN' SWEET, and no more time should be devoted to saying otherwise.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Captain Sinico »

Theory Of The Leisure Flask wrote:...Well, yeah, you'd probably want to add "namesake chord" in that case.
Okay, but when you do that, you're out of pure music clues and into an area where someone who knows the, like, two namesake chords that might possibly come up is nailing this question (or negging with the other chord.) This illustrates my point nicely, actually - the pure music clue wasn't uniquely identifying (though it may have been close) and the things you might try to do to make it so corrupt the musical character of the clue. I think that's a general trade-off.

MaS
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Ummm, as valuable as this music discussion is, I'd like to hear people's opinions about the history and science in this tournament, if people have any comments. Not that I mean to stop music discussion, I'd just like to hear more.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I can't comment on science because I do not know it, but as a historian by trade:

I thought the history was fairly strong in the packets, asking about well known events with a good pyramidal structure. My only quibble was that I thought the toss-up about the Frontier Thesis should have prompted on "Turner Thesis" before Turner was mentioned.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Captain Sinico »

Of course I agree that it's better to have clues imply fewer answers. You argue that the "Leningrad" Symphony tossup failed to have musical clues that pared down the answer space sufficiently. I lack the technical knowledge to debate you properly in that regard, but that's moot as I trust what you're saying - that particular tossup was lacking. My argument, however, is that one has to carefully consider what are fair expectations with regard to the uniqueness of answer from early clues if those early clues are to be properly musical in nature. I argue that this is the case because it's difficult or even impossible to find clues that are about the music itself, that are significant, and that imply only one answer. In fairness, I've ambiguously defined "trivial" earlier. I don't mean unimportant, necessarily... but let me take up some examples from the (fine, agreed) question you cite to illustrate what I mean:

That the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra quotes the "Leningrad" Symphony is a clue that is trivial in the sense that it's easy to know (though perhaps not well-known) without any technical knowledge about the music per se. For example, I learned that fact from reading the liner notes from my copy of the Bartok. I lack any technical understanding of the music - I guess I've heard both pieces, but I know no music theory or anything like that - I probably can't even read music anymore. So I think that clue's somewhat lacking in its character as a clue about the music itself - someone who could play every part of both pieces from memory would have no significant advantage over me there. Similarly for the fact that the "Leningrad" contains a theme representing Nazi invasion, etc.
That that the drum figure is 352 bars is a technical, pretty much purely musical fact about the piece, but it's trivial in the sense that the exact figure of 352 is unimportant. The piece would not be so different were the figure a few bars longer or shorter or, what is more apropos, one's memory of the piece would not change much if the figure were somewhat shorter or longer in one's memory.
A somewhat weaker clue implied by the previous one, that there's a long drum figure, is an important musical clue certainly, but it's far from uniquely identifying anymore.

Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with any of those clues. In concert, they've summed to an excellent question. I mean only to illustrate the point that, as is often the case in technical fields, there's a trade-off in music questions between the technical musical character of clues to a student of the field and their uniqueness.

MaS
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Ethnic history of the Vilnius region »

I thought that the history was very good at this tournament. I think everything in the first sentence of the North Carolina tossup applies to South Carolina as well, which is why I negged on it. Also, both Carolinas were a united colony until 1712, making the first sentence even less uniquely identifying. However, if someone has a source that shows the first sentence to be uniquely identifying, I would be interested in seeing it. Also, I think that the Sick Chicken Case should have been acceptable in the Schechter bonus. If I remember correctly, it wasn't even promptable as an answer. Other than those two minor quibbles, the history was well done indeed, as was everything else.

Also, was there a reason the George Washington tossup in round 4 wasn't read? We got the Bishkek tossup instead. I just want to make sure it was like that for every room at the Wake event and not just ours.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by ClemsonQB »

Are you talking about the art tossup on Washington? If so, it was read in my room and Bishkek was not.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Stained Diviner »

Thanks to Brown for a great set. Not only was it a great set, to me it was the final nail in the coffin to a complaint that was common a few years ago--namely, that it was impossible to transition from high school to college because the canons were so different. In recent years, the quirks from each canon have been lessened, and they both now focus more on important academic material more, so being a good high school quizbowler makes you a decent college quizbowler, and students enter the college game with a useful base of knowledge. Several of the people who post on this board deserve credit for this trend.

That being said, I thought the worst tossup was Laws. For the knowledgeable players, it came down to knowing titles. For the novice players, it came down to a silly giveaway. One thing to keep in mind when writing novice tournaments is that novice players, compared to expert players, know some bio, chem, and history, a little about lit, fine arts, and physics, and very little about philosophy and social science. Therefore, the late middle clues in philosophy and social science need to be pretty darn easy--perhaps a reference to Halakha and Sharia or a scientific definition would have helped. Also, to avoid putting the moderator in a tough position on the giveaway, either the question should have stated Name this three letter word or the answer should have specified that only exact answers are acceptable.

I thought the worst bonus was on Italian directors. I didn't know any of the answers, and the team I read it to didn't know any of them either. That stood out, since in general the easy parts of bonuses truly were easy.

My team had a sophomore girl who did not buzz in once during the entire tournament, but she did sweep the CW bonus. I'll refrain from commenting, because too much has been said already and it doesn't matter.

One minor issue I had with the History came on combined names of laws, such as Smoot-Hawley. If the names are given in the wrong order by the player who buzzes in, is that always acceptable, always wrong, something the writer is supposed to comment on the acceptability of, or something the moderator is supposed to be smart enough to know about (since with some laws it seems common to reverse the names while not so much with others)? In the matches I moderated, the moderator was generally clueless, and that's not a typo.

The History was great. It was my team's strongest subject, and my team's enjoyment of the tournament would have been strongly affected had the History questions been weak. They hit the spot.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Maxwell Sniffingwell »

Lime, Self and Society wrote:That being said, I thought the worst tossup was Laws. For the knowledgeable players, it came down to knowing titles. For the novice players, it came down to a silly giveaway.
Not even. I watched the other team neg (well, miss) this, post-giveaway, with "Justice," then picked it up after having raced them to the buzzer with the same thing.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Gautam »

Lime, Self and Society wrote:One thing to keep in mind when writing novice tournaments is that novice players, compared to expert players, know some bio, chem, and history, a little about lit, fine arts, and physics, and very little about philosophy and social science.
Huh?

Some of the incoming freshmen I've seen at the Minnesota practices are fairly well versed in philo/social science, but are not scientists so don't really know much about science. I don't think this generalization you make is relevant; perhaps it's true of a hypothetical average novice player, but really, I don't see why we need to start assuming that a given player is going to have more deep knowledge in certain categories.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Moebius Striptease »

I moderated at the Vandy site and thought the questions were for the most part, good. My personal biggest problem was with the Santería toss-up since it took a while until it uniquely identified la regla de Ochá before ruling out any other Yoruba-based religious system.

Apart from other issues already mentioned (Clark Gable now winning an Oscar for _Mutiny on the Bounty_, e.g.), my biggest quibble was a technical writing one. A couple of times, syntax broke down in what was on the page or something was just off. Take this example from the In Cold Blood bonus:
10] The real life story of Dick Hickok's and Perry Smith's of the Clutter family is detailed in which 1966 true crime novel by Truman Capote?
ANSWER: In Cold Blood

Now, I was able to insert a good noun ("murder") about what happened to the Clutters, but it's always nicer not to have to do that.

A minor stylistic quibble can be seen in the giveaway to the Giorgione TU:
"He also painted a 1505 painting The Tempest."

Painted a painting, huh? Wowzers! JK JK OMFG :kenj: Like I said, that is a very minor quibble.

I was also curious why it seemed that fewer answers about works of literature, music, and the plastic arts had their names listed in their original language. They appeared at times (like with Dream of the Red Chamber) but not with others.

For the record, I was one of those moderators who noted the number of times “titular” came up. My comment was that its frequency just reminded me of a drinking game. *in Tina Fey's Sarah Palin voice* "So, for all you Joe 6-packets out there: titular."

Overall, the set was good and produced some good matches at our site. Thanks to all who worked on it!

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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

gkandlikar wrote:
Lime, Self and Society wrote:One thing to keep in mind when writing novice tournaments is that novice players, compared to expert players, know some bio, chem, and history, a little about lit, fine arts, and physics, and very little about philosophy and social science.
Huh?

Some of the incoming freshmen I've seen at the Minnesota practices are fairly well versed in philo/social science, but are not scientists so don't really know much about science. I don't think this generalization you make is relevant; perhaps it's true of a hypothetical average novice player, but really, I don't see why we need to start assuming that a given player is going to have more deep knowledge in certain categories.
I have to agree with this. I know chem, computer science, lit, earth/astro, bio, physics, math, philosophy/social science, fine arts, history, in (rapidly!) descending order of proficiency. I can answer history bonuses on things that I've heard come up in three straight practices/tournaments (i.e. Marburg colloquy); that's about it. I also know about the Time of Troubles. Literally, that's it. Perhaps it's true that experts have ascended to higher social science heights than novices could imagine, while most science player novices could imagine answering a tossup on the Cope rearrangement someday, as constructed from a baseline of no social science knowledge up to the novice social science level, novices aren't further behind in social science than they are in science.

I also agree with the Sick Chicken case; I'd forgotten about it being an issue.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I don't agree with "sick chicken case" being something that should be underlined. It's not the name of the case and it's that simple. You wouldn't accept "The Citizen King" for Louis-Philippe, would you?
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:I don't agree with "sick chicken case" being something that should be underlined. It's not the name of the case and it's that simple. You wouldn't accept "The Citizen King" for Louis-Philippe, would you?
It's what the case is called, more often than it is called Schecter. This is literally the textbook example of an informal name for a Supreme Court case being acceptable, in ACF rule G.14.

There are even more extreme examples, such as the Civil Rights Cases, the Legal Tender Cases, or the Slaughterhouse Cases, where even a practicing Constitutional law historian probably could not tell you the "real" name of the decisions in question off the top of his head, and that's why we accept names like these.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I will agree with Trevor and Reinstein about the philosophy and social science common-link tossups. Aside from the bizarre trash subdistributions, this was the only thing that took away from my enjoyment of the set. This tournament illustrated a few difficulties with such tossups. The "Civilization" tossup shows how easily it can be to misplace clues in tossups like this; I'm pretty sure that all eight players were buzzing there in our game with Chicago.

The "Law" tossup was bad for other reasons, namely that it said two very noted legal philosophers in a question whose answer is a word form of "legal." Now I definitely appreciate the attempt to get the underexplored area of legal philosophy into this tournament, but I don't think that tossup really helped people with intro-level primary knowledge of that field. I've had to read excerpts from various works of Hart, Posner, and Dworkin, and I've studied their ideas in class many times, but the only book I could name between the three of them is "Law's Empire." I was sitting through this question trying to decide of the answer was "justice," "legalism," "jurisprudence," or "law," (and I was thinking that "law" would be a really silly answer for the way the question was laid out, with Hart and Posner in the first two lines). I can imagine that many people who have taken similar coursework, or are similarly versed in legal philosophy, were doing the same. Add this to the subpar giveaway, and I'm not really sure who this question is helping. I think there's a way to introduce these guys to quizbowl, but I don't think this kind of tossup is the way to go.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Magister Ludi »

I agree with Dave's comments about bonuses. There were some bonuses that had easy parts that were far too difficult for novice players. Several younger players such as Daichi Ueda, George Stevens, and Ike Jose told me they zeroed several bonuses in the first Jerry packet and had no idea what the easy part was supposed to be. New players are least knowledgable in some niche areas like philosophy, social science, art film, or contemporary literature, and accordingly I think question writers need to make sure the easy part in these bonuses are definitely accessible. While the Italian directors bonus was my personal favorite of the tournament, questions on Leone/Argento/Rossellini is just too hard for players new to the circuit. When writing on these niche areas one needs to strive to make sure there is a real easy part that a novice player will have a chance at answering. While Sergio Leone or Doug Hofstadter qualify as an easy part in the sense that an experienced player understands it is an established part of the canon, they are not comparable to easy parts on Yeats or Elgar. Some bonuses just needed to be adjusted to make sure there was a real easy part. Overall, this was a great tournament and except for a few minor quibbles about a few poor lead-ins I really enjoyed playing this set.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by alkrav112 »

Yeah, with the Italian directors bonus, I kept waiting for Fellini or Antonioni, and I zeroed the bonus by riding the Antonioni pony. But this sentiment has been echoed repeatedly.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by ClemsonQB »

Same for Daichi and I, although we rode the Francis Ford Coppola train to zeroville.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Siverus Snape »

Packet 7, Question 17 wrote: This god gained one of his servants when her brother crushed the bone of one of his animals. One of his stepsons lives in the hall Ydalir and is the god of snowshoes, while another child was courted by the dwarf Alvis, who was turned to stone after this god tricked him. While traveling with Roskva and Thialfi, this god wrestles with Elli and has an eating contest with fire at the behest of Skrymir. He lives in Bilskirnir, and he carries the belt Meginjarpr and gloves Jarngrieper. His goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjost regenerate after they die. The husband of the golden-haired Sif and father of Magni and Modi, FTP, name this wielder of the hammer Mjollnir, the Norse god of thunder.
ANSWER: Thor
I have a question about a general issue regarding pyramidal questions that I think is well illustrated by the tossup above. When playing this round at U of I on the 4th, I buzzed in on the first clue I knew, which is in boldface. The problem is that that clue specifically refers to Loki, not Thor. Because I did not know any of the previous clues, I answered Loki, which was obviously wrong. How should this be handled in a gametime situation? The moderator agreed with me that that particular clue was probably wrong, but nothing in particular was done, and I had no idea how or if such a protest could be handled.

The "answer must fit the entire question" principle doesn't really satisfy me here, because if I'm answering at a certain point, it's very likely that I don't know the clues before that point, and therefore I don't have a context to check against.

Is this the kind of situation where a question should be thrown out?
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I think I would throw it out if I were reading.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Siverus Snape wrote:Thor
That clue was just wrong and I'm sorry we didn't catch it. The question ought to have been thrown out in this case.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Eric wrote:Stuff about North Carolina
According to my info, the first clue is probably uniquely identifying, because John Lawson's explorations were largely confined to what is now North Carolina; I haven't found anything to suggest that his meeting with the Catawba took place in NC, but I haven't looked very hard.
Ted wrote:Some bonuses just needed to be adjusted to make sure there was a real easy part.
I tried to do this in packets 8 and 12, because those were the ones that seemed like it needed it most (judging by the ppb at the Illinois site); packet 4's conversion was lower, but not by a large amount. This was an oversight on my part.
Andy wrote:Yeah, with the Italian directors bonus, I kept waiting for Fellini or Antonioni, and I zeroed the bonus by riding the Antonioni pony. But this sentiment has been echoed repeatedly.
Would've done the same thing; I cringed when I was reading this bonus. I think its a pet topic, which may explain it to some extent.
grapesmoker wrote:
Siverus Snape wrote:Thor
That clue was just wrong and I'm sorry we didn't catch it. The question ought to have been thrown out in this case.
Yeah this one is on me. Should've remembered Loki and Thor were traveling together.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Ike »

While I enjoyed the set, there were a few things I wanted to address.

I don't see why when we are writing common link tossups we dont put what they are asking for first. I buzzed off of Nox in dragon tossup and said Star Ocean 3: Til the End of Time and was unable to figure out what the prompt wanted. Had words been shuffled so that it said One of these creatures bites..., i wouldn't have had a problem. This also goes for tossups that about authors which begin with a description of one of their stories, why not put this author wrote about... instead of Jimmy Lowell eats a mushroom in this author's...

Other then that, I don't think any of my complaints haven't been addressed already from a cursory overview of the posts. So I Won't beat dead horses

Edit: horses
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by ClemsonQB »

Ike wrote:While I enjoyed the set, there were a few things I wanted to address.

I don't see why when we are writing common link tossups we dont put what they are asking for first. I buzzed off of Nox in dragon tossup and said Star Ocean 3: Til the End of Time and was unable to figure out what the prompt wanted. Had words been shuffled so that it said One of these creatures bites..., i wouldn't have had a problem. This also goes for tossups that about authors which begin with a description of one of their stories, why not put this author wrote about... instead of Jimmy Lowell eats a mushroom in this author's...

Other then that, I don't think any of my complaints haven't been addressed already from a cursory overview of the posts. So I Won't beat dead horses

Edit: horses
This is really easy to solve; when writing the answer line, just include all possible answers, such as:

ANSWER: Dragon(s) [accept Star Ocean 3: Til the End of Time until _ (whatever uniquely identifying word came after Nox) is read]

Instead of:

ANSWER: Dragon(s)
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Yeah, I'll reiterate how strongly I believe in putting a pronoun to designate the answer as quickly as possible into a tossup.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Yeah, I'll reiterate how strongly I believe in putting a pronoun to designate the answer as quickly as possible into a tossup.
That's definitely true, and its a good point, but consider this: would I really begin a leadin about a work (I use the term "work" loosely) with the name of one of the main characters?

Also, hello new avatar.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by ClemsonQB »

Would you? Probably not. Would a much less experienced writer? Its definitely a possibility.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant »

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:
Siverus Snape wrote:Thor
That clue was just wrong and I'm sorry we didn't catch it. The question ought to have been thrown out in this case.
Yeah this one is on me. Should've remembered Loki and Thor were traveling together.
For the sake of being thorough, Loki lost the eating contest with fire, Thor's servant couldn't win a footrace against Thought (for the record, this is the same servant who came into his service after breaking his goat's bone), and Thor himself couldn't lift a cat that was really the Midgard Serpent, couldn't empty a drinking horn full of the sea, and couldn't defeat Old Age in a wrestling match.

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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Ike »

would I really begin a leadin about a work (I use the term "work" loosely) with the name of one of the main characters?
He's an optionally obtainable character...I didn't get him my first run through playing...
Either way, Im not sure its fair to have to judge about relative importance of characters in the heat of the moment.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by cvdwightw »

Regarding the "music" stuff: I don't think there's a reasonable end to this discussion. Realistically, one can throw in all the "music" clues one wants (I'm all for the use of music theory-related descriptions of popular music), but if there's not a series of good non-music clues, its importance in the canon is not at all correlated with its frequency of performance or importance in the musical world. Maybe music specialists want to revolt like the science people did and force people to write using only music-related clues, but I don't think that there's a critical mass of writers and editors to enforce these changes.

The fact is that the Leningrad symphony shows up all the time because people can dash off clues about Nazis and bombings and whatnot, and even the non-specialists can get these clues. The Fifth is much more musically important, and much more significant, but probably 99% of non-music-specialists wouldn't have a clue what is being talked about until "FTP name this work written in response to 'just criticism' of the composer's earlier opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, a symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich", and even then you'd get almost uniformly random number guessing from people who are neither music specialists nor the top generalists.

Oh yeah, I also think that there are problems inherent with any novice tournament in over/underestimating what people know. These were magnified heavily in my inexperienced attempts to edit Zot Bowl, and EFT did a much better job of limiting these problems. I think that by virtue of being experienced enough to edit a quality novice tournament, you lose sight of the difficulty of certain answer choices and clues. So you get difficulty cliffs and widely varying bonus difficulties through absolutely no fault of your own.

I had a bunch more to write, but in keeping with my unsuccessful attempts to not write a page of response to every thread on the board, I'm just going to say that I mostly agree with Reinstein when you look at a group of incoming freshman quizbowl players as a whole - most high schoolers don't take philosophy or any social science other than psych/econ, whereas it's reasonably to assume that even piss-poor science players might have once upon a time encountered the aorta in a high school biology class. I suspect that the reason that Andy sucks at history is not because he hasn't been exposed to several topics in the high school/novice canon, but because he has no interest in the subject and just doesn't remember any of that stuff past the date he had to regurgitate it on some history test. On the other hand, I can comfortably say that I am a terrible philosophy player because in addition to not finding it terribly interesting, I have been exposed to something like 5 philosophers outside of quizbowl, and most of those were from the one year that Academic Decathlon decided to include philosophy in its curriculum. The biggest jump from the high school canon to the collegiate novice canon is in RMP and social science, because most subcategories in those subjects get zero coverage in a standard high school curriculum. I mean, sure there are going to be people who encountered the 10 or whatever philosophy questions that show up in an IS set and got excited about philosophy, but by and large the high school canon is extremely small in RMP/SS because this stuff just doesn't show up in the classroom.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by AdamL »

ClemsonQB wrote: Same for Daichi and I, although we rode the Francis Ford Coppola train to zeroville.
Yeah, same thing for us.

Also, this is more of a question than any sort of complaint, because I'm not familiar enough with the canon to know: was the econ in this tournament (I'm mostly referring to the bonuses) of appropriate difficulty? Our team found that we were bageling or 10'ing most of them when they came up, except when the answer was something like, dunno, Supply.

For what it's worth, I don't remember a tossup on Madagascar (unless it was a round I didn't hear) but do remember ones on Mozambique and South Africa, and I thought the South Africa one wasn't great in that it got real easy real fast (this coming from an extremely mediocre geography player)

With regards to the above comments about novice players knowing certain subjects: I can say that the subjects of social science and philosophy were more difficult/unanswerable for our team at this tournament than things like history and lit, and that the HS canon of those subjects in particular is significantly smaller (and also not as large a part of the distribution). Also, stuff that may be common orgo knowledge (like, say... Grignard reagents, Wolff-Kishner, etc.) simply baffled us. I can't really see how an entering HS player would've done exceptionally well on subjects like that unless they took deliberate steps to learn those subjects, which of course is possible, but I'm saying the HS game alone doesn't prepare you for such answers as well as it does for a subject like history. (Now, were we talking about incoming freshmen, or "novice level" players of any age?)
Edit: Dwight posted some similar thoughts while I was writing this, sorry for redundancy.

Anyway, overall, I definitely enjoyed the set, and thanks again to the writers/editors
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by sds »

I definitely had a good time with this tournament overall!
One tiny quibble, which possibly no one else cares about:

---
13. In Chinese legend, the immortal Chiu-Shou was one of these which took human form to fight in wars, and the Shinto god Aizen-Myoo has one of these creatures in his hair. To defeat Hiranyashka, Vishnu chose as his fourth avatar a cross between a man and one of these. As punishment for making love in one of Zeus' temples, Atalanta and Melanion were transformed into these. In Egyptian myth, the wife of Ptah and embodiment of the "Eye of Ra" possessed the head of one of these and was named Sekhmet, while this creature's body was supplied to the griffin, manticore, and chimera. FTP, Heracles frequently wore the hide of what type of creature, one of which he killed in Nemea?
ANSWER: lion
---

Vishnu's fourth avatar (Narasimha) was certainly half-lion, half-man. However, this avatar was chosen to defeat Hiranyakashipu (Wikipedia). Hiranyaksha was in fact his brother, and was defeated by Vishnu in his third avatar in the form of a boar (Wikipedia again). I buzzed maybe a few words after "Hiranyaksha;" had I been thinking, I certainly would have negged with "boar."

Other than that, I had great fun with the mythology; science-wise, I particularly liked the cones question, though I managed to neg early with "bipolar cells" for who knows what reason.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Siverus Snape »

You know, I remember thinking that the clue for Narasimha didn't seem very familiar considering how well I remembered the story.

Now you've got me wishing for all-Indian mythology quiz bowl.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Let me again make a giant post to respond to some things that people have said since the last time I posted.

Regarding trash, I don't want to belabor the point too much except to say that for me, trash is a category for writing questions about various pop-culture things I find amusing. I am amused by Aqua Teen Hunger Force; I am amused by the Trailblazers; I laughed while watching Pineapple Express. So, those are the things that made it into this set. I do agree with the statement that there was too much comic-book stuff in this set, but barring that (and another point that I'll get to later), I think it makes little sense to complain about the trash content in an academic tournament.

I also want to get back to the points that Dave was making regarding sections of works. It now occurs to me that the correct analogy would be something like poems from Leaves of Grass which fall into the Drum Taps section. It's entirely possible to recognize "As I Lay With My Head In Your Lap Camerado" and buzz in and give "Drum Taps" as an answer even though the previous clues referred to poems not in "Drum Taps." I continue to believe that one should not be prompted for this. At the very least, the knowledge of which section of Leaves of Grass a particular poem falls into entails the knowledge that this poem is in Leaves of Grass, and in almost every instance, the more general answer will at least result in a prompt if a more specific section is sought. So it's not clear to me that giving the more specific answer should be promptable, since it actually results in rewarding the wrong answer, even though that wrong answer is given because of some knowledge. My advice to players would be to always err on the side of generality rather than specificity; you will never be wrong to do so.

As for the DeLillo bonus, it's entirely possible (and is apparently the case) that I drastically overestimated how well known he is. When I read that bonus in my room, it was 20d, so I assumed it was at least reasonably of appropriate difficulty, and personally I would have known about DeLillo in high school (though not because he was in the curriculum).

More substantially, I want to respond to the negative reaction to the tossups on things like "law" and "civilization." The major problem with the former, in my view, was that it didn't have a good giveaway; what I should have done was ended by writing "For ten points, identify this sphere of human activity codified in the Code of Hamurabi and the Twelve Tables," (for example) since those are pretty well known compilations of laws. But all the clues prior to that were not only uniquely identifying but many of them were also knowable by high school students. Certainly Blackstone and Grotius were talked about in my classes when I took AP Euro. It seems plausible enough to me that a survey course in European history at the college level mentions both of these guys. David Reinstein's point about how for the experienced players it came down to knowing titles is, like all the comments about the "feel-in-the-blank" feel of such questions is understandable, but I think it misses the point. Questions have to refer unambiguously to their answer, and for common-link questions that means using titles for many of the clues. I could have probably dug up some choice quotes about both law and civilization and used those, but I didn't think that would be as helpful as having the actual titles in the clues.

And following on the heels of that comment, I want to address Andrew Hart's points about those same questions. I don't think it's correct to say that the clues in either tossup were "misplaced," although I guess one could argue that "Madness and Civilization" is better known than "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy." For me that was a 50/50 call, and I decided people were more likely to have heard of the Burkhardt work than of Foucault's book. Andrew goes on to say that the "law" tossup began with clues about legal positivism and HLA Hart, noted exponent of said positivism, and complains of really well-known legal philosophers coming up early in the tossup. Now, obviously this is not the tossup on "law" that I would have used for Chicago Open had I wanted to write such a tossup, but in a tournament geared towards newer players, starting with a clue about Hart seems entirely appropriate to me. Andrew goes on to say that he took a class where he read Hart and Dworkin, and that's great; what happened was that you were rewarded for your knowledge. That doesn't mean that the question was necessarily bad because it allowed you to use information that is actually not at all well known to answer the tossup early. Two quick anecdotes appropriate to the occasion: at Cardinal Classic this last year, Peter Austin, noted lawyer and quizbowl player, was unable to identify Hart after being given The Concept of Law, and more recently at CO, I was the only player on my team (unless I'm misremembering this completely) who got Posner in that Posner/Becker/Spooner (I think) bonus. So neither of these things are blindingly obvious, even among many quizbowl players, and surely not among players in their first, second, or even third year of play. If putting a clue on Marcuse's second-best-known book early on allows a player from a team that made the top bracket at ACF Nationals to buzz early, I'm comfortable with that in the context of EFT (though, obviously, not in the context of ACF Nationals).

I think a little explanation of the social sciences at this tournament is in order; indeed, the whole tournament could use a little clarification. We certainly advertise EFT as being a transitional tournament for players coming out of high school, but that doesn't mean that you're only going to encounter things here that you learned in high school. It's a collegiate tournament, so the range of answers is broader now, and that includes things like social sciences and philosophy (and organic chemistry too) which are not covered in the high school curriculum. My goal in working on the part of the distribution was to introduce concepts to new players that are relevant both in the sense that "this is an important idea and these are important works about that idea" and also relevant in a quizbowl sense, i.e. if nothing else, perhaps someone will one day be able to buzz on that Law's Empire tossup that Andrew Hart just finished writing. The benefit of these common link tossups is that they allow me to introduce these concepts and works in a way that remains difficulty-appropriate for the tournament. So while these tossups may be somewhat boring for players with more experience ("pfft, another Karl Mannheim clue, time to buzz,") I think (well, hope) that they are useful tools for newer players trying to get a handle on the collegiate canon.

On the much-maligned bonus about Italian directors: I hope it's obvious to everyone that this was intended as a trash bonus, not as fine arts. I'm honestly surprised by Reinstein's post saying he didn't know a single one of them; also, I think Ted gets it wrong when he talks about this bonus being inappropriate for beginning players. I tend to straddle the line between the Westbrookian (you should know this because it comes up) and the Weinerian (this is gettable because this is something that people actually know) conceptions of the canon, and this was a case in which no matter how long you've been around quizbowl, it wouldn't have helped you at all, whereas a minor interest in cinema would have allowed you to at least 20 this bonus. I don't think I remember the last time Argento or Rossellini came up in quizbowl; you could search the databases for this, but I think it's irrelevant. What is relevant here is that this is the kind of trash that actually has historic significance. Leone quite literally revolutionized the Western and launched the career of Clint Eastwood; Argento's horror movies inspired an entire generation of filmmakers; and Rossellini was one of the foremost proponents of neorealism. That people did not know the answers to these bonuses is unfortunate, so they were obviously too hard, but this is not because being in quizbowl will necessarily allow you to get all those Dario Argento tossups, it's just that apparently no one shares my interest in these things. The same thing is true about Douglas Hofstadter, by the way, who is in no sense only read by experienced quizbowlers. I guess some of the players at this tournament may not have been born when Godel, Escher, Bach came out, but hey, it was still a major bestseller that's widely read by all sorts of people today. In fact, I would conjecture that GEB is more popular with the populace at large than with quizbowlers, so not knowing anything about Hofstadter can't be excused by pointing to inexperience.

That's a lot of writing about what amounts to two tossups and one bonus, but I do think it helps illustrate some of the goals I personally had for this tournament. In some cases (Italian directors) it sounded like a much better idea at the time than it turned out to be; in the other two cases, I continue to think that there were good reasons to write those tossups with those answer choices and using those clues (although as I've said before, the giveaway to the law question was awful and should have been changed).
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Kevin »

A few comments:

I agree with the comments that philosophy and especially social science questions at a novice-level tournament need to be a little bit easier than questions in science, lit, geography, etc. I won't regurgitate the arguments already put forth, except to say that it's fairly obvious that those subjects aren't covered anywhere near as much in either high school curricula or high school quiz bowl as the big three, geography, myth, even art.

Classical music: I thought the classical music and opera questions were quite well done and did a better job of integrating descriptions of the music than a lot of tournaments have. Those questions are tricky to write, so I'm not necessarily saying they were always perfect, but of the admittedly short list of tournaments I've played, I can't think of a tournament which had better music questions (maybe that's just because I can't remember a tournament where I got more music questions right!)

Pop culture: leaving aside the whole male v. female argument, I did think the trash was way too biased toward geek stuff (comic books, cartoons, video games) without enough general trash. One sports question, and it was a tennis bonus? Maybe there were others I didn't get to, but to have only one sports question all day strikes me as being way off.

All in all I'd say it was very well done. I know there were some quibbles from moderators about occasional typings and bad wordings, but from a player's perspective I think it went well. It may have been a bit too hard for the actual novices, but considering the wide spectrum of talent present at the various sites, I think it was well-suited for the average team, at Vandy's site at least.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Kevin wrote:Pop culture: leaving aside the whole male v. female argument, I did think the trash was way too biased toward geek stuff (comic books, cartoons, video games) without enough general trash. One sports question, and it was a tennis bonus? Maybe there were others I didn't get to, but to have only one sports question all day strikes me as being way off.
To reassure you, there were many more sports questions in the set as a whole.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I can off-hand think of a Charles Barkley toss-up, for one.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

Cheynem wrote:I can off-hand think of a Charles Barkley toss-up, for one.
There was (or at least should have been) a tossup on the Portland Trailblazers as well. Damn you, basketball overrepresetnation!
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Saiem »

My thoughts on this set are generally good. Having had to read this set on October 4, there were errors that got taken care of. EFT was a pretty solid set overall, that Charles Barkley question was pretty cool. The trailblazers tossup... me and Billy agreed that the clue ordering wasn't the best... because it is pretty famous that they took Sam Bowie with the number 1 in that year, but I totally had not heard of those previous players mentioned later on. The set as a whole was well-written. I'm normally in favor of the early clues being pretty hard, but based on the field it was intended for, the questions tended to start off far more difficult than they needed to. No real complaints, though yeah.. that Law tossup could have indeed used a better giveaway. And yeah, it really does feel like fill in the blank with those common link tossups asking you to name the missing word. I'm sure I would be a lot more in favor of it if I had gotten it early hah.

I think most of the problems with this set can mostly be attributed to a lack of time in editing, but I was pretty satisfied with the set as a whole.

Also, trash is trash. People are really giving them alot of heat for multiple comic book questions. But really, c'mon, have you met Eric Mukherjee? (irony) I know I brushed up on my comic book characters before going to this tournament.

EDIT: Irony
Last edited by Saiem on Tue Oct 14, 2008 11:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I applaud the usage of comic books and would like to see an all-comic books side event at some point.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by AKKOLADE »

grapesmoker wrote:Damn you, basketball overrepresetnation!
EFT's got a Basketball Jones.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Frater Taciturnus »

Cheynem wrote:I applaud the usage of comic books and would like to see an all-comic books side event at some point.
Just you wait....

EDIT: Seriously, if people want this, I will do it.
Last edited by Frater Taciturnus on Wed Oct 15, 2008 11:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Saiem »

Fred Morlan wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:Damn you, basketball overrepresetnation!
EFT's got a Basketball Jones.
I really don't mind a basketball overrepresenation cause I would argue it is underrepresented overall, compared to other sports.
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by theMoMA »

Jerry, you're misunderstanding my criticism of "law."

I'm saying that the people who have knowledge of who Posner, Hart, and Dworkin are (like me, for example) aren't being rewarded by a question that says "hey, here's a really noted legal philosopher in the third word of this tossup on 'law.'" For someone like me who has read excerpts of these guys, it really threw me off the track because I don't know their titles, but I figured a tossup on "law" would not begin this way. So I was trying to think of what the answer was going to be ("justice," "legalism," etc). The Hart title that was given (it was either Law, Liberty, and Morality or Law, Morality, and Society) isn't a particularly well-known title of his, and so putting that clue first just seems to foster guessing. Now maybe I'm just a bad player complaining about not getting a question and I should just go out and learn what Posner's noted titles are, but having read only excerpts in a primary-source book, I did not know his titles.

Anyway, if you want my opinion, a question like this would go something like

These were called [description of Concept of Law] in a book about the "concept" of them, and they [etc] in a book about "overcoming" them. They [etc] in a book about the "empire" of them, and three noted scholars of them are HLA Hart, Richard Posner, and Ronald Dworkin. Blackstone wrote a commentary on the ones of England, and Hugo Grotius wrote [etc]. For 10 points, name these entities [appropriate giveaway].

My point is that anyone who knows anything about legal philosophy is going to be really confused when you start naming people who are really famous in that field in the third line in a question whose answer is a word form of "legal."
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Re: EFT Discussion

Post by Stained Diviner »

Saiem wrote:it is pretty famous that they took Sam Bowie with the number 1 in that year
number 2, you mean

Between Andrew's new opening and Jerry's new giveaway, I think the Law question is now better. I think it is a difficult question to write, and the goal of having a legal philosophy question without blowing away a bunch of novices is a good one.
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