2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

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2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Hi all,

Thank you to all the teams that came out to Evanston this weekend for the triumphant and long-awaited return of in-person quizbowl! The editors would like to fix some typoes, errors, incomplete answerlines, and the like in the questions, so we'd like to ask you to be patient for a week before we post the packets. For now, I'll open discussion of the set.

First, thanks has to go to the writers and editors who made this tournament possible. The head editors were myself and Ryan Westbrook; subject editors were Jordan Brownstein, Andrew Hart, Jack Mehr, Eric Mukherjee, Derek So, Jerry Vinokurov, and Jennie Yang. I'd also like to single out Ike Jose, who wrote over a hundred questions for the editors' packets and served as an editor-at-large for the tournament, providing invaluable support.

Categories were as follows:

- Derek So: American/World Literature, modern Visual Arts, Visual Other Arts, Philosophy. Unfortunately due to the tournament cancellation, Derek was unable to stay on as subject editor after set production resumed this year. However, Derek wrote around a hundred great questions for the editors' packets, in a prompt manner that greatly sped up tournament production.

- Matt Bollinger: British/European Literature, Auditory Other Arts, pre-20th century painting (for the editors' packets), Religion.

- Jordan Brownstein: Visual Arts/Philosophy. I initially planned to take over Derek's categories myself for the submitted packets, but realized partway through that I would never be able to handle all of it. Jordan heroically took over painting and philosophy late in the game and wrote many of the best questions in those categories that I've seen.

- Andrew Hart: Social Science. Andrew reached out to me early on offering to handle the social science for this set; he's my favorite editor for that extremely difficult-to-write category, so of course I accepted immediately. I was thrilled to see the product of his efforts.

- Ike Jose: Writer and editor at large. We finished the editors' packets around January 2020, and that could simply never have happened without Ike. He wrote almost all of the Other Academic category by himself, along with a substantial portion of the other science, filling both with the kind of great ideas for questions that he and almost nobody else can generate.

- Jack Mehr: Took over editing American and World Literature for this set after Derek had to bow out. Jack wrote many of my favorite questions in the entire set, including No Longer Human, one of the only superhard tossups we wrote that actually played the way we hoped. Jack was also immensely responsive to feedback and engaged with all aspects of tournament production.

- Eric Mukherjee: handled the biology, chemistry, and other science for the entire tournament. As always, Eric is possibly the best all-around science writer in the game; I do want to highlight also how conscientious he is about making his questions, even at this high level, playable and enjoyable for everyone.

- Jerry Vinokurov: Physics. Jerry handled the most difficult category in any tournament for us and executed it admirably. Jerry was also a pleasure to work with, communicating proactively and writing all his questions with plenty of time to spare, even with his many real-world responsibilities. Like Eric, Jerry was also concerned, first and foremost, with making sure his categories were accessible and generous to the players.

- Jennie Yang: Music. As a player with an interest in classical music but very little technical expertise, I loved seeing Jennie's questions. She wrote and edited fantastic, accessible questions on a stupendous range of composers, producing the kind of experience that ACF Nationals should be all about. Jennie would also respond to emails literally within seconds, proactively incorporating feedback from me and playtesters with very little encouragement needed. It was an absolute delight to work with her.

- And last but not least: My fellow head editor, Ryan Westbrook. Ryan edited all of History, Mythology, and Other Academic. I'll let Ryan of course speak for himself as to what he wanted to do with this tournament. For my part, I'd like to note that this was the first time I've ever worked with Ryan, and I've been struck by his abundant, unrivaled love of our game. Ryan is also incredibly conscientious about his questions and how they play, and incorporates feedback from other editors without any ego.

I will have a more extensive post outlining our goals for the set and editorial philosophy at a later point in time. For now, I will briefly say that the set turned out harder than we intended it to be at the start of the process, when we wanted to produce a kinder, gentler ACF Nationals. It turned out, instead, to be a daunting challenge to the players, in the way that ACF Nationals typically turns out to be. I was elated to see that the field took our tournament in stride, getting great buzzes and maintaining positive attitudes throughout a marathon weekend in which we played 22 packets of hard quizbowl. Congratulations to Florida, and to runner-up Columbia, on making it through that gauntlet.
Last edited by The King's Flight to the Scots on Mon Aug 09, 2021 6:48 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Over the next few days, I will be making plenty more posts about the contributors who allowed this tournament to happen. Since their contributions are often overlooked in the catalogue of people who need thanks, I'd like to devote this post especially to the proofreaders. Olivia Murton and Ophir Lifshitz led the charge on proofreading this tournament, with additional significant contributions from Ganon Evans, Carsten Gehring, Alex Damisch, and Morgan Venkus. Without their help, large portions of this tournament would have been frustrating, brutal slogs for the field. Their contributions went far beyond adding pronunciation guides and catching typoes; they essentially amounted to the final layer of editing before the set reached the teams. In the mere week they had to work on the set, they rewrote a staggering percentage of the questions in clear, succinct prose that teams could actually play. On top of all that, they caught a number of substantive clue issues, which were fixed to the immense benefit of the tournament.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by No Rules Westbrook »

Thanks to everyone involved in producing and playing this tournament. I will likely be making a few more posts in the coming days on post-mortem thoughts, but I wanted to get one out near the top of this thread. I'm not sure if this will be my final significant writing or editing exploit in quizbowl, as I may offer my hand for some future ACF Nationals, Chicago Open, or similar event. However, I am pretty sure it will be my last large contribution for at least some time. I will say that I was very pleased with the final product of this tournament. As always, there were a few exceptions here and there - tossups with too few real middle clues, of too steep of a clue cliff, and bonuses that were a bit too easy to 30 or a bit too hard to 10 - but I don't think they too unfairly affected gameplay, at least in any of the matches that I witnessed.

I will also extend a great amount of appreciation to Matt Bollinger, who joined me as head editor, and who wrote many of my favorite questions in this set. Matt has a diverse style of writing questions that draws from a lot of different sources, and incorporates many different styles of clues, which is quite rare in my opinion. Matt also coordinated most of the logistical tasks involved in building this set, reaching out to tons of people in the community for freelancing, proofreading, playtesting, and other necessary tasks. I am very grateful for Matt's ability to handle these functions, given that I am not nearly as connected to many of the newer players in the community, or even some of the older players, in this dinosaur stage of my career.

So, when I talk about my goals with a tournament of this level or higher, it's gonna be half about playability and half about philosophy (the latter of which I will spell out in the coda to this post so that anyone can read or not read these takes). I don't think my views are too different than most of my fellow editors these days when it comes to the "playability" part. From a purely practical standpoint, I hope that we've achieved an acceptable tossup and bonus conversion level. I may be a little more willing than other editors to pick answer lines that are likely to get to the last few clues to generate a buzz, but there's certainly a limit to that. We all want to see competitive gameplay and good buzzes happening regularly, and I definitely saw plenty of that at this event.

Thanks for playing everyone, it was a lot of fun to watch. I doubt that I will ever support online quizbowl for any kind of serious competition, so it was great to see people back to playing the game in person.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The "philosophy" part of what I hope to achieve with a tournament of this nature will be way more controversial and unpopular. I will comment below on what I have come to believe should be a writer's goal for questions at this difficulty level or higher. I hope at some point to produce a longer tract on these beliefs. These opinions ultimately amount to a matter of preference, and can certainly be validly refuted by anyone reading them and declaring "I prefer just the opposite goals!"...

I envision high-level quizbowl as the "ultimate tertiary source" - an honest attempt to make an impartial narrative of the sequence of events that have happened at any given time and place in history. I think that quizbowl has never done a particularly good job of serving this role, and is moving further away as we speak. Curiously enough, fine arts subjects have perhaps stayed closest to this vision, because they have reference books (Janson, Gardner, Grout, Palisca, etc.) that facilitate this kind of "timeline approach" (i.e. pick a place, pick a time period, then construct a reasonable "dispassionate" chronicle of the events that happened in that space). The other humanities topics in quizbowl (history, lit, philosophy, religion, social science, etc.) seem to me to be moving away from this vision.

Critically, and most controversially, I do not particularly care whether a given topic is of current interest to an existing academic community. I do not think that quizbowl should rely on the university curriculum or the interests of academic "communities" or "experts" to be its polestar or anchor for determining relevance or importance of any given clue, and in fact I think that relying on same has resulted in a distortion away from a "pure timeline" approach. I am perfectly happy to write on the narratives of times and places that are unpopular in current academic research - ancient Egypt?, the timeline of papal history?, medieval Japan? - I don't wish to get bogged down in specific examples, but these are the sorts of things that come to mind.

I urge opposition to the Scylla and Charybdis of modern quizbowl:
(1) The deep dive into primary source material that seeks to reward "direct engagement" with a given text/source as opposed to secondary or tertiary knowledge of the timeline. (often these are "soft buzz" questions where the player just feels the answer in the bones, based on having experienced the subject matter...or questions that encourage the player to engage in a little subtle "linguistics fraud" or "geography fraud," etc. to puzzle their way to the likely answer).
(2) The "Zeitgeist / Modern World Approach" where we write about whatever the smart people in {insert subject} are currently writing or talking about in their most recent blogs and books and Twitterverses.

I'm delighted to see quizbowl cluing different sorts of events that were relevant to given historical spaces - social history, religious history, artistic history, history of thought, history of marginalized groups/movements, and so forth. The only time I would ever oppose such a clue is where you cannot convince me that it could be included as a discrete event in a reasonable narrative history of the given time and place.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

No Rules Westbrook wrote: Mon Aug 09, 2021 9:27 pm I urge opposition to the Scylla and Charybdis of modern quizbowl:
(1) The deep dive into primary source material that seeks to reward "direct engagement" with a given text/source as opposed to secondary or tertiary knowledge of the timeline. (often these are "soft buzz" questions where the player just feels the answer in the bones, based on having experienced the subject matter...or questions that encourage the player to engage in a little subtle "linguistics fraud" or "geography fraud," etc. to puzzle their way to the likely answer).
(2) The "Zeitgeist / Modern World Approach" where we write about whatever the smart people in {insert subject} are currently writing or talking about in their most recent blogs and books and Twitterverses.

I'm delighted to see quizbowl cluing different sorts of events that were relevant to given historical spaces - social history, religious history, artistic history, history of thought, history of marginalized groups/movements, and so forth. The only time I would ever oppose such a clue is where you cannot convince me that it could be included as a discrete event in a reasonable narrative history of the given time and place.
This is definitely a different approach to writing than the typical set and the portions of this tournament that I saw (mainly the submitted packets in rough draft form) certainly played differently than most recent sets I've played. I think there's some merit to some sets having a divergent approach to selecting answers and clues. These days, taking a non-zeitgeist approach definitely is a break. Even compared to the three other ACF tournaments produced this year.

I personally prefer the zeitgeist approach as it much more closely aligns with my interests. But, again, I don't think there's necessarily anything objectively better about it.

I'm curious how people who actually played the set felt about this. Did this tournament seem as different from Regionals or ICT as it felt to me playtesting? Was that a good thing, bad thing, or just different?

(And to be clear, I'm primarily talking about history and not really talking about science at all. Other categories were probably more in-between.)

Edit: I should also make it clear I'm not an impartial observer here. I contributed a handful of freelance questions for the editor packets, mainly in history.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by physicsnerd »

No Rules Westbrook wrote: Mon Aug 09, 2021 9:27 pm I envision high-level quizbowl as the "ultimate tertiary source" - an honest attempt to make an impartial narrative of the sequence of events that have happened at any given time and place in history. I think that quizbowl has never done a particularly good job of serving this role, and is moving further away as we speak. Curiously enough, fine arts subjects have perhaps stayed closest to this vision, because they have reference books (Janson, Gardner, Grout, Palisca, etc.) that facilitate this kind of "timeline approach" (i.e. pick a place, pick a time period, then construct a reasonable "dispassionate" chronicle of the events that happened in that space). The other humanities topics in quizbowl (history, lit, philosophy, religion, social science, etc.) seem to me to be moving away from this vision.
I must admit I'm a bit confused by this. Why do you think quiz bowl should be a dispassionate, tertiary source? The most intriguing quiz bowl questions I have heard are ones that made connections and did not simply feel like you needed to have read paragraph six on page 325 of a textbook. (And, really, quiz bowl, as academic as it may be, is fundamentally a game. I don't see why pushing it towards dispassionate tertiary-ness should be a goal, considering I think one of the greatest parts of quiz bowl is how easily it can draw someone into a new topic of interest.) Maybe I'm misunderstanding your meaning though?

I'm also curious why you feel direct engagement with the source shouldn't be encouraged (your "Scylla"). I know you said in your post that these lead towards "feel it in your bones" buzzes rather than actual knowledge...but I'm not sure how this is the case. Indeed, I'd think these "feel it in your bones" buzzes are more likely to occur based on answer space and clues occurring commonly in textbook descriptions, not from source-based knowledge. Isn't direct engagement with the source a better push to fall into something new and intriguing than a more textbook-esque style?
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by No Rules Westbrook »

I must admit I'm a bit confused by this. Why do you think quiz bowl should be a dispassionate, tertiary source? The most intriguing quiz bowl questions I have heard are ones that made connections and did not simply feel like you needed to have read paragraph six on page 325 of a textbook. (And, really, quiz bowl, as academic as it may be, is fundamentally a game. I don't see why pushing it towards dispassionate tertiary-ness should be a goal, considering I think one of the greatest parts of quiz bowl is how easily it can draw someone into a new topic of interest.) Maybe I'm misunderstanding your meaning though?

I'm also curious why you feel direct engagement with the source shouldn't be encouraged (your "Scylla"). I know you said in your post that these lead towards "feel it in your bones" buzzes rather than actual knowledge...but I'm not sure how this is the case. Indeed, I'd think these "feel it in your bones" buzzes are more likely to occur based on answer space and clues occurring commonly in textbook descriptions, not from source-based knowledge. Isn't direct engagement with the source a better push to fall into something new and intriguing than a more textbook-esque style?
I think you slightly misunderstand my conception, but you state a very common reason why many people are not fully on-board with my style.

My favorite quizbowl questions are not ones that try to convince you that their subject matter is interesting, or have any sort of agenda at all. I do not aim to pique anyone's interest or give them reasons to study a certain topic ("this sound cool, I should look this up"). My favorite questions are ones that would excite you if you have already studied the timeline of a given topic, because you will recognize the appearance of items that have relevant roles in that timeline ("heck yeah Galla Placidia, she did lots of stuff!").

Personally, I hardly ever pick things to learn about for ideological reasons or any kind of personal connection to the subject matter. I assume almost any subject area is going to have its fair share of interesting characters, events, plot, arguments, and so forth. I just want someone to tell me what happened, and save their thesis statement or their commentary on why I should think it's important.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

To interrupt briefly (although I hope this discussion continues), I'd like to thank the many freelancers who helped us complete the tournament. Ike Jose, as I've already mentioned, was the most prolific freelance writer. The full list of freelancers is as follows: Will Nediger, Mike Bentley, Aseem Keyal, Chris Manners, Alex Damisch, Stephen Liu, Kai Smith, Tejas Raje, Jonathan Magin, Geoffrey Chen, Rob Carson, Ryan Rosenberg, JinAh Kim, Billy Busse, Evan Lynch, Dennis Loo, Dylan Minarik, Andrew Wang, and Kevin Wang.

Of those, I'd like to especially thank Will Nediger and Alex Damisch, who wrote over 20 questions each; and also Kevin Wang, Andrew Wang, Dylan Minarik, Dennis Loo, Evan Lynch, Billy Busse, and Aseem Keyal, who contributed much-needed science questions to bring us over the finish line.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by ErikC »

No Rules Westbrook wrote: Mon Aug 09, 2021 9:27 pm The "philosophy" part of what I hope to achieve with a tournament of this nature will be way more controversial and unpopular. I will comment below on what I have come to believe should be a writer's goal for questions at this difficulty level or higher. I hope at some point to produce a longer tract on these beliefs. These opinions ultimately amount to a matter of preference, and can certainly be validly refuted by anyone reading them and declaring "I prefer just the opposite goals!"...

I'm delighted to see quizbowl cluing different sorts of events that were relevant to given historical spaces - social history, religious history, artistic history, history of thought, history of marginalized groups/movements, and so forth. The only time I would ever oppose such a clue is where you cannot convince me that it could be included as a discrete event in a reasonable narrative history of the given time and place.
This focus on "discrete events" in narrative history seems really narrow and limiting for writers and players.

Most history questions, particularly those in the old style, are about what happened in a chosen time period or place (the questions I heard while watching this Nats fit this description). This is also how a good deal of history is taught in school and written about in books. I'd wager this is a large portion, if not the majority, of how quizbowl players and writers learn history.

But this approach is only really covering what happened, and not so much how things were. If you're expecting history tossups to rely on discrete events that make it into narrative histories, then you're going to miss out on a wide variety of historical topics that are just as important. There's some ideological reasons for this - I'm sure someone more academically trained could outline how history has started to move away from writing about Great Men and towards covering the lives of the average person at a given time period. Cluing this historical scholarship can be tricky and something we're still learning collectively as a community.

It can be hard to write literature-style "plot clues" about "interesting characters, events, plot, arguments" about some of this relatively newer approach to history. But writers have been creating questions with these clues for a long time - I'd point to Roman history as an area where quizbowl has succeeded in writing about people's lives and society in an interesting and informative way that's not necessarily tied to "the timeline". Historical work also frequently draws novel connections on why seemingly disparate events or trends happened, something that may be difficult to find in narrative history. A standard narrative history about Viking conquerors probably won't cover the theory about overpopulation due to climate change causing the Nordic migrations.

Another issue I have with this reliance on narrative history is, well, how its biased towards the reading of narrative history. People learn history through many different ways. There's plenty of ways of engaging with history that are more focused on how a society functioned or what people did during a certain time period, whether its a book written by a historian or a piece of media set in a time period that (accurately) depicts its period. It's worth noting that a good deal of this academic work highlights the lives of women and other groups that are often neglected in "chronicle history".

I will agree that newer approaches to history often lend themselves to the "figuring out" process. I'm not a big fan of ling fraud, but other types of "fraud" tend to require a fair amount of background knowledge. Writing to avoid any sort of "way in" with this background knowledge by writing plot clues about events without any names or context will prevent early buzzes players not familiar with the exact event, but you're also giving people very little to work with. If that's the goal, then you're going to get very few buzzes on early clues without getting the context building effect of clues that do give other types of information.

(Side note: I'd also argue that you're giving people very little they will find interesting or make connections with pure plot clues -I know I almost never look up a zany event in a first line, but might look up an interesting argument made by a historian).

The "zeitgeist approach" seems, to me, more reflective of what history really is as a discipline now. I also think it's more interesting and engaging for players, whether they're history-inclined or not. Forgive me for not understanding the mythology reference, but maybe this is an increasing trend in qb writing because more people like it? (Also, how much are people reading twitter for hot new clues? Maybe you'll get linked to something new, but twitter itself?)

Most of this is from my perspective as a writer who is still learning. As a player, I often don't benefit from primary sources clues. I do benefit from clues that reward knowledge of "the timeline"; however, these are very rarely on plot clues. "Timelining" and knowing when things happened as a skill is still a very valuable for history in the modern style of question. Many of the assumptions and inferences that one makes to narrow things down are drawing on a pretty extensive body of knowledge that I'd say broad history players (those who buzz on most parts of the distro) tend to have.

I've been thinking about some of these things for a while; Westbrook's posts have just been a very clear statement of a philosophy I don't agree with, and this thread an opportunity to make my case. Apologies if this is a bit of a tangent from the discussion of the tournament itself, tho I will say with the small 8/8 sample size that this tournament seems to be what I'm criticizing here.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

I really enjoyed this set. It made for a fun return to irl quizbowl, and witnessing maybe the most heart-warming title run in quizbowl history was an added plus. The philosophy and social science had loads of good ideas, and the literature was extremely well-written with a lot of accessible answer-lines on core works. I mostly liked the history as well, but I do think that the Westbrook-ian focus on "discrete events" led to that category being a bit harder than the others. In general, I think that's the major downside with this kind of writing philosophy--you wind up with a lot more tossups on things like the Old Court-New Court Controversy, which, while important, don't necessarily make for the best answerlines.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I wonder if Westbrook's (interesting) points about question theory might be better moved to a new thread, unless people specifically wanted to discuss that in application to this tournament. I have some thoughts on them, but I didn't play Nats or see most of the questions, so this might not be the best place to discuss.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island »

I had fun at the tournament; the categories I pay most attention to felt interesting and well written. It felt like there was a lot of CS at this tournament which I appreciated, and a lot of it was cool (though I do think the middle parts were too easy across the board, between null in the Sql bonus, cellular networks / IoT on the edge computing bonus, and waterfall/design patterns on one of the later bonuses e.g.)

I wasn't a fan of the Pixar tossup occupying a cs slot though, specifically at Nats - while the content in retrospect does seem interesting and important I think it's also a tossup that only will distinguish teams based on extremely specialized knowledge. In my experience graphics is one of the least taken electives / areas of computer science, and while that doesn't mean it shouldn't be asked, I think especially at Nats it would be better to either write on an answerline that rewards players with more traditional cs knowledge towards the end (rather than relying on clues about the history of Pixar) or to categorize the question as oac. Again I want to emphasize that I don't think the question is intrinsically bad - it seems like it would be a great tossup at a CO or side event, but it's a frustrating tossup to play as a science question during the playoffs of a national championship where it seems very likely to devolve into a late tossup buzzer race on non cs clues in most rooms. It's also very possible my experience is skewed by my personal experience, as I know players did get good buzzes on the material - I just think it's likely to have played poorly in the aggregate and it was one of the "hard answers" I felt more disappointed with.

I think the leadin to the wheat fields tu is technically unique, but I feel like the leadin could have used disambiguation from Van Gogh's series of double square portraits of Daubigny's Garden, since those are also fairly important; in general it feels difficult to be confident given a constraint like appearing in "most of" a series of paintings.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

As noted above, I was responsible for the other science, biology, and chemistry in this set, and had some input on the physics as well.

First, some people to thank. I'd in particular like to thank Ike Jose for eagerly contributing several questions and expertise to the Other Science, with plenty of unique ideas that only Ike can write well. I also want to thank other contributors. Andrew Wang, Billy Busse, Evan Lynch, Kevin Wang and Aseem Keyal's contributions to chemistry and physics were invaluable. Andrew's questions are always creative and interesting, in a category where it's often hard to fill out a full distribution, and Billy's comments made a lot of the questions better. Aseem wrote some solid bonuses at crunch time, and Evan's and Kevin's experience with fields of inorganic chemistry that I have very little knowledge of helped round out the distribution nicely. Alex Damisch and Ryan Rosenberg were very helpful with the data science/applied math distribution. Dennis Loo helpfully stepped in to write some math. Dylan Minark contributed some excellent CS, and Geoff Chen wrote for several categories and provided many helpful comments. I also want to thank the playtesters, of which there are too many to list, whose comments were very helpful. And finally, the submissions in my categories were a pleasure to read and edit, so thank you to the field for those as well.

Second, a few apologies. There were a few oversights that I should have caught (sphaelerons coming up twice, the registers repeat in the bonus in Finals 2, annihilation coming up a few times). Most importantly, I should have caught the fact that B-factories are named for producing B mesons, and not bottom quarks. Apologies to those teams it affected.
Last edited by Sima Guang Hater on Thu Aug 12, 2021 9:14 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by shmno »

I greatly enjoyed the science from this set. I thought it was well-written and focused on topics important to scientists. Special shoutout to whoever wrote the intro to finite element analysis, because I now actually understand (kind of) what FEA is.

I did notice a subdistributional quirk towards neuro-related questions, although not all were classified under bio (a-synuclein, GBM bonus, Wernicke, brain size, motoneurons, pineal gland, part of the glutamate TU/MS bonus part).
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

More thank you's:

I would like to thank the playtesters, whose feedback dramatically improved the tournament. I may miss some, but they prominently included Jonathan Magin, John Lawrence, Matt Weiner, Matt Jackson, Ryan Rosenberg, Rohith Nagari, Michael Yue, Lia Rathburn, Jason Zhou, Joseph Krol, Daniel Hothem, Chris Borglum, Ani Perumalla, Zach Foster, Richard Yu, Susan Ferrari, and Naveed. The set ended up being fairly rough at times on the field; the fact that it didn't grind everyone down is due to changes we made based on playtester feedback.

I would also again like to thank all the players who came out and gave us an amazing run in the playoffs. The full round robin was everything I'd hoped it would be for the past two years, with astounding buzzes, terrific upsets, and the most exciting Play-In/Finals sequence of any collegiate Nationals I can remember. It's been discussed plenty on the Discord, but Will Alston gutting out four consecutive must-win games, forcing his way into a winner-take-all single game against Florida, deserves public commemoration on the forums. I was also impressed that seemingly every team in the top bracket was able to play competitively on the set; no team went winless in the playoffs, and every team I saw had memorable, impressive gets.

Last, and more humbly, I would like to thank my friends for the moral support and undeserved patience they have provided me through this two year process. Due to the circumstances, this has been the most challenging and frustrating tournament I've ever worked on. I could not have stuck through it without the often-unsolicited support I received from many people, without whom I would probably have deleted the Drive folder and moved to China. I can't begin to name you all, but I would like to mention Alex Damisch, Jordan Brownstein, JinAh Kim, Tejas Raje, and Morgan Venkus.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by cwasims »

Thanks to all the editors and writers for a great tournament! I was very glad I made the trek from Canada (where I've been living over the summer) to play it.

It has been interesting to see the discussion on the history writing philosophy but I would say that I noticed relatively little difference between these history questions and history questions at other well-regarded recent tournaments. Perhaps the main manifestation of this philosophy I noticed was a relative lack of clues about historiography and recent books about history, which I did find somewhat unfortunate as someone who tries to pay attention to these things. Somewhat relatedly (although nothing against this tournament's questions), I think tournaments at this difficulty level could make more effort to clue history-related research in the social sciences - at least in economics there's a lot of very interesting work being done recently that considers historical phenomena from a broader array of perspectives than you generally find among historians. The 16th century tossup was a good step in this direction, although I think that tossup ended up suffering from some difficult-to-buzz-on clues and a shortage of possible answers.

On the topic of social science, I was not very impressed with the economics questions in this tournament. Particularly in comparison to the (in my opinion, excellent) questions in the 2018 and 2019 sets, these seemed to be a strange mix of overly technical to a layperson and of relative disinterest to someone who studies the field. A figure like Albert Hirschman is of fairly marginal importance to the field nowadays - I had actually never heard of him before (in my experience, his name is usually dropped from the Herfindahl index) and after looking up some of his work, it sounds very much like the sort of research from the 70s that is mostly forgotten today. Robert Shiller is certainly a more relevant economist, but the tossup bizarrely omitted any mention of his most recent book, Narrative Economics, in favour of only cluing relatively older texts that I don't think have really become "classics" of the field or anything similar (having read one of them, Animal Spirits, several years ago). I don't believe we got any of the economics bonuses so I don't remember their content in detail, but I remember finding they were fairly technical and uninteresting. In future, I would encourage economics questions at this level to dwell more on the empirical economics literature (including econometrics!), which has dominated research in recent years, and the core theories of micro- and macroeconomics instead of asking about the relatively narrow work of individual economists.

My last comment is that the classical music questions in this set, while all technically well-written and interesting to listen to, seemed to be somewhat poorly subdistributed and a bit monotonous in the choice of answer lines. From my memory in the rounds we played, there were very few tossups on Romantic music (I think just Dvorak 8th) coupled with a preponderance of tossups on 20th-21st century music (Gymnopédies, Ravel, 5th symphonies, Washington D.C., Schoenberg, Bernstein, Britten, Milhaud, and Kreisler) and rounded out by a pretty reasonable number of pre-Baroque, Baroque and Classical (L. Mozart, Tallis, gigue, and Cherubini). Given the hugely expanded answer space at this tournament, there also seemed to be an excessive number of tossups on individual composers at the expense of other kinds of answer lines and common links, which became a bit predictable after a while (especially compared to the more varied answer lines of other categories). I focused this analysis on tossups because I think it's very important that the tossups be carefully subdistributed given that the vast majority of games are decided on tossups and it isn't really fair (in my opinion) to claim that an important subdistribution "came up in bonuses" when not all teams will have the chance to be rewarded with their knowledge. All that being said, I probably shouldn't complain too much about the music, since I ended up doing fairly well on it regardless of these qualms.

Apologies if this comes across as lengthy and overly critical - I want to reiterate that I very much enjoyed the set and these comments are really very minor in comparison to the high quality of this tournament.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Ike »

John Quincy Adams's Alligator wrote: Tue Aug 10, 2021 6:37 pm I wasn't a fan of the Pixar tossup occupying a cs slot though, specifically at Nats - while the content in retrospect does seem interesting and important I think it's also a tossup that only will distinguish teams based on extremely specialized knowledge. In my experience graphics is one of the least taken electives / areas of computer science, and while that doesn't mean it shouldn't be asked, I think especially at Nats it would be better to either write on an answerline that rewards players with more traditional cs knowledge towards the end (rather than relying on clues about the history of Pixar) or to categorize the question as oac. Again I want to emphasize that I don't think the question is intrinsically bad - it seems like it would be a great tossup at a CO or side event, but it's a frustrating tossup to play as a science question during the playoffs of a national championship where it seems very likely to devolve into a late tossup buzzer race on non cs clues in most rooms. It's also very possible my experience is skewed by my personal experience, as I know players did get good buzzes on the material - I just think it's likely to have played poorly in the aggregate and it was one of the "hard answers" I felt more disappointed with.
Just wanted to comment on this since this was something that was brought up in playtesting right after I wrote it. I can understand the general thrust of the frustrations of this tossup, and considered doing some revisions on it; however after Hanrahan and Catmull won the 2019 Turing Award, I became even more OK with the tossup as constructed near its end. The Turing Award until now has never been given to people in software rendering; the last time it was given to someone in computer graphics was over 30 years ago to Ivan Sutherland, who made Sketchpad. To wit, all of the material in this tossup is the One Thing you have to know about the achievements of computer graphics. At worst I see this tossup as akin to the spike protein tossup, something topical, but written in a way that is knowable by people with genuine interest. (As an aside Vishwa, I'll point out that even if you have taken Graphics as an elective, there's a good chance you don't cover any of the material in the tossup instead of spending like half of the class getting WebGL to work or something...)

The larger point I want to make is this idea that we should shove tossups that don't aesthetically fit our sensibilities into other academic. I strongly disagree. I find this aversion happening the most in science; lit writers, by and large, are okay if one of the four lit questions are devoted to potboilers and the like, as this discussion has laid out we are ok if there's a history tossup that isn't in the vogue of the current modes of academia, I find the almost kneejerk reaction of many science players / writers that if it's applied science, and thus possibly knowable by the public at large, it's other academic. I think the space of other academic should be reserved for completely other tacks since there isn't space for such tacks; for example, Catmull, while instrumental in computer graphics was kind of involved in various employee wage-fixing scandal that plagued the industry; (not to mention he silently ignored a lof the MeToo issues that surround his industry), this kind of material is the tack I would have gone with if I were to do an OAC tossup on Pixar.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by vydu »

I had a great time playing this tournament, so thank you so much to the editors, writers, proofreaders, and playtesters, as well as everyone involved with staffing and organizing the tournament! I thought that the questions were uniformly really interesting to listen to and rewarding to play (including easy parts of bonuses), and that answerlines felt mostly accessible. Will preface by saying that I didn’t hear like 5 packets so subdistro thoughts should be taken w a grain of salt

Some thoughts I had:
  • I liked the chemistry and physics in this set a lot, and thought in particular that the quantum+computational chemistry in this set was asked in a way that felt quite creative/fresh. The physics felt somewhat heavy on AMO and E&M-adjacent topics, and also felt like it could have drawn more from core classical/statistical/quantum mechanics topics. Really liked the q’s on liquid oxygen, sputtering, spin glasses, nucleic acids, and bonuses on spacecraft maneuvering, quantum metrology
  • I noticed and appreciated the amount of machine learning-adjacent topics in this set (things like Metropolis-Hastings, expectation maximization, logarithm, and the regularization bonus), and thought broadly that the set did a good job cluing computational methods in other sciences as well (GIS data question was super cool). However, this increase seemed to come at the expense of earth sciences -- besides the reflectivity tossup and the radioisotope dating bonus, I’m struggling to remember any. The math question on “continuous” also struck me as somewhat transparent -- the first line made it clear that it was asking for a property of maps between topological spaces, and continuous jumps out immediately as the natural answer there
  • More than any other category, the social science seemed to deviate both stylistically and content-wise from the way the category is asked at regionals-difficulty. I thought the space was filled with really interesting questions on things like traffic, Fordism, linguistic prescriptivism, hominid brain size, Captain Cook, etc. (apologies if some of these were other academic), and am excited to revisit the category. But for me this also made social science feel like it was a notch or two harder than the other categories -- I’m curious if others thought the same. [the position I’m coming from here is someone who has hobbyist interest primarily in socio/anthro and theory]
  • I learned a lot from this tournament’s philosophy questions, especially the ones on philosophy of science and ancient philosophy. Really liked the questions on the Cyborg Manifesto, epistemic violence, and discord
  • I quite liked the classical music, though I think the middle parts of bonuses were somewhat variable (e.g. “mazurkas” in the Chopin piano concertos bonus vs. Marin Alsop in the BSO bonus). I also would have liked to hear more chamber/solo piano music, and agree with Chris that there could have been more Romantic tossups, but imo the overall genre/time period spread was good. Really liked the questions on Ravel, gigues, bonus on Brouwer/PIazzolla, Messiaen bonus
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Ehtna »

I liked the set. We didn't do as well on it as I hoped we would, but the questions consistently piqued my interest in their subject matter and made me want to learn about the topics more when I got home.

I was curious if the editors/proofreaders/anyone else working on the packets currently were planning to difficulty-mark the bonuses and/or category-mark the questions? I'm guessing that's not a high priority, but I think it would help for future teams' studying endeavors and solidifying the movement towards bonuses explicitly stating their easies, mediums, and hards.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by No Rules Westbrook »

Yeah, the good news may be that - whether you like, hate, or are indifferent to my writing philosophy - it's perfectly possible that you can hear a set like this and not even notice all that much of a difference. There's a practical dimension to writing questions, and oftentimes it doesn't really matter what your overarching philosophy is...you have the same basic handful of clues no matter what, and you order it, and go with them.

The significant majority of the History in Editors packets was written by myself (around 75%), and the other ~25% were freelance submissions that were edited by myself - with those contributions coming from Ike Jose, Will Nediger, Mike Bentley, Jon Magin, Tejas Raje, and a few Matt Bollinger questions. In the ten team packets, I wrote about 50% of the history from scratch, and the other 50% were edited by me from team submissions. The mythology and other ac questions were a little more scattershot....but my point is that it should be pretty noticeable in any of those areas if my philosophy in fact did cause them to feel different (either in a positive or negative way). Other than the obvious fact that nobody but me is ever gonna write a Jack Kemp tossup, I'm not sure it was incredibly noticeable.

Incidentally, I liked Will Nediger's tossup on Ely and Quanah Parker so much that I tried to make it decide this tournament - alas, Florida was already well on its way to 420 by that question.

When we talk about the dogmas of question writing philosophy, it's easy to make incorrect generalizations. I certainly don't like my questions to be boring in the sense of having them sound like dry encyclopedia reads, or bland lists of things. Nobody likes wacky stories and humorous anecdotes more than me - and those kinds of colorful things are certainly part of the "Narrative" that I think about when I think about any given historical time and place.

But, here's the thing - quizbowl is full of academics who love being academics, and I'm no academic. I just wanna be the new Eric Hoffer - some grump with no proper education who's keeled over on a beach somewhere in Costa Rica or Madagascar, but if you poke him with a stick, he just might tell you a story about Gregor MacGregor.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I had a great time playing this event. It was far from anything insane, had excellent length control for tossups and bonuses, and had a ton of both hilarious and explanatory clues that made each round a joy to play, even when we were getting our butts kicked by Florida and Illinois. The logistics were absolutely superb, especially considering external considerations. Everyone who made this tournament happen deserves a hearty round of applause.

Onto the meat of the subject: the team tier list ranking questions!

I find it a bit odd that Ryan contrasts his fact-based narrative style with "explaining why something is important" - I don't think there's really a conflict there, as a good narrative of historical facts should always be able to explain why something is important. In any case, I think most of Ryan's questions did this pretty well and I love that he's able to make tons of informative, fun questions on "unfashionable" topics or in areas where many writers have trouble finding fresh material (yes, there are still military history fans in college quizbowl!) Among the Ryan-edited history sets, this was the most enjoyable one I've played, and made a good effort to still touch on many topics of social and economic importance. As with his other sets, I think the hard anecdote lead-ins were excessive and some of the middles too rough, but that was hardly an unpleasant surprise. And it's probably only a Ryan set where my favorite question of the tournament is one I just frustratedly sit there trying to remember the answer until the end - because Galla Placidia is indeed dope.

There were parts of this tournament that did feel a bit "hacked-together" - in ways that were both good and bad, but mostly good. On the bad side, there were some rather obvious missing prompts, some weird instances where three different pronouns were used in one bonus part, and apparently a lack of pronunciation guides for mods, which was mildly disappointing given the time available to the editors. On the much more important good side, a multitude of different writing voices clearly poured out from each of the tournament's pages. Ryan's avoiding of writing deep source/text-first questions was balanced by Matt's great question on Germania; Matt and Jack's mixing of lit questions with a variety of Yaphe-esque, Adams/Gioia-esque, and other such approaches; Jordan's diverse analytic topics by Ike's excellent Continental Content, and so on. Not every Nats set's editor packets need to feel like one editor/writer's clear vision or whatnot and the diversity made each round even more unpredictable and exciting.

With regards to difficulty, this set felt about the same as 2019 - which I still think was harder than necessary, but the field stepped up in either case. That said, there were a bunch of things that teams missed which, well, we should have gotten - I think many teams might not have been quite ready for the return to in-person bonus collaboration over 5 seconds, being used to 8 seconds you're given to pull online. As usual, I'd suggest next year's Nats editors turn their eyes towards smoothing middle parts, which are easier to regularize than hard parts.

On a final, positive note, this tournament alleviated the classic "two-tournament effect" very well, which I take it was a conscientious decision to insert a lot of wacky editor ideas, smooth out the balance of hard vs easy answers, etc. The only minor difference I noticed here was somewhat harder bonuses in the editor packets, but that could totally be due to player fatigue after many rounds and certainly wasn't unique to this event either.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

CWSims wrote:A figure like Albert Hirschman is of fairly marginal importance to the field nowadays - I had actually never heard of him before (in my experience, his name is usually dropped from the Herfindahl index) and after looking up some of his work, it sounds very much like the sort of research from the 70s that is mostly forgotten today.
I didn't think this set's economics was spectacular or anything (it was probably my least favorite part of the social science, the rest of which was awesome) but I wanted to push back on this. Criticism of "marginal importance to the field" is a really insular perspective and doesn't reflect the breadth of range across with people in general -- and especially those who play quiz tournaments as opposed to attend economics conferences -- engage with the field. Admittedly I also have seen it just called the Herfindahl index, but knowing the full name of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index isn't a huge ask especially, as the tossup explained, the thing is of great importance to the US's (admittedly outdated) antitrust laws and is of course an extremely common intro economics topic. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is a classic of modern political economy, insofar as that field even exists anymore, and is something I ran into in my public economics class in undergrad, as well as through numerous casual readings about the subject. I'm not a fan of "minor things this economist did" approaches for too many early clues and maybe the question could have used more from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty but this question hardly seems like such an awful offender.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Grace »

I imagine that many people (or at least, many old people, since the youth seem to fear posting on the forums as a rule) are waiting for the official release of the set before they make broader comments, but I'm sallying forth anyway because I don't let things like facts get in the way of my opinions! That said, please feel free to point it out if I slip the surly bonds of reality and just start making things up.

After a pretty rough year, in-person Nats felt like a real gift, and I'm so grateful to everyone--staff, site coordinators and TDs, editors and writers and proofreaders and playtesters, and even other players who kept making great buzzes and beating me to questions--who made it happen. With all that in mind, I think I would have felt generous towards the set no matter what, but I thought the 2021 Nats set was well-conceived and well-executed throughout. I can't buzz on most categories, and this is my first time playing Nats without an opinionated teammate who can mop up questions and then complain about the tossup they just got, but even with questions that seemed borderline (weak gravitational lensing?), I didn't feel bullied by the questions, and I probably learned something (like groundwater contamination, learning always seems to happen despite one's best efforts to remain impermeable). In general, I thought the biggest systemic flaws in the set were a bit of sloppiness on prompts, which could be chary, and some feng shui/repeat issues, which seem like a natural outgrowth of the extended set production process.

Since at least 60% of question discussion involves gazing deeply into the navel of one's pet categories, I would like to talk a bit about Other Arts (well, not jazz; get thee behind me, Satan). Given the way the schedule worked, I didn't hear at least 3 packets, but there didn't seem to be a lot of dedicated opera in the set. Even bonuses that asked about opera usually did so as a middle or easy part and moved onto more instrumental pastures, which is a totally legitimate editorial decision that makes me sad because I don't know very much about those things. In place of opera, there were a bunch of truly excellent dance and performance questions, which usually get the short shrift in quizbowl. Based on the note in the Specific Questions document, it seems like I might have both the Visual Other Arts editor (Derek) and Alex D. to thank for those questions. Traditionally, ballet questions in quizbowl have been either music questions in disguise or vague literature tossups on one of five story ballets (the only "dance move" that ever gets clued is this one Petipa Swan Lake knee arabesque thing because it was in a NYT article; you can thank me when you milk points from it for the next 4 years). The demographics of quizbowlers and their areas of preexisting interest have a lot to do with this state of affairs: very few quizbowlers watch dance as a hobby (I confess that I don't really either--I've had some of the best naps of my life at the ballet), and even fewer have any training in its technical vocabulary (this is a polite way of saying that there are a lot of men in quizbowl). Using words to uniquely describe a series of movements is also just very hard, and it's a challenge even for professional dance critics, as far as I can tell.

All of this makes it more impressive how good the ballet questions at Nats were, and how well they captured different ways that hobbyists could engage with dance as both practice and as history. Rather than listing ballets associated with a particular composer/choreographer or asking the same lightly reworded question about Revelations/Appalachian Spring, the questions on Cuba and pantomime, the Nijinskis, and even repertory staple Don Quixote did an amazing job of respecting dance as an artistic discipline. I loved the emphasis on Bronislava Nijinska's choreography and teaching; I loved that the leadin to Don Quixote talked about Plisetskaya's Kitri leap, which has influenced every subsequent Kitri; I've waited my whole quizbowl career for questions about the immortal Alicia Alonso and about traditional miming in ballet, although I can imagine that the last question may not have played super well in terms of creating a gradient of buzzes. Perhaps because I'm not very good at parsing music clues, I feel that audiovisual other arts questions should differentiate themselves from music questions by engaging with their reality as stage works. For film, the revolution of the 2010s has increased the focus on shot composition, rather than plot; opera questions have improved (and not to my benefit) by asking about productions, the singers' words, and the actual music. Dance is overdue for a similar improvement, and Nats was easily the best collection of dance questions I've seen in a non-specialty set*. Because we often lack the technical language to describe ballet evocatively, dance writing in quizbowl has focused heavily on story ballets, ballets with famous music, and "things with unique names." This tendency has elided vast differences in how the same story ballet can be staged by different companies, results in an embarrassing neglect of Balanchine masterworks that don't have plots (e.g. Symphony in C, Allegro Brillante), and often doesn't get at the way casting (esp. star performers) and costuming influence the presentation of and traditions associated with a work. In other words, I think that the average level of ballet writing in quizbowl sort of resembles the kind of thing that music players complained about in the late 2000s, when the Turangalila symphony was way more likely to come up than someone's unnamed Fourth Symphony or a famous String Quartet in some key or another. I don't think that an incomprehensible and bad transcription of a videoclip you find of a ballet on Youtube is the way to describe dance--that would be analogous to some of the less successful "score clues" that inexperienced writers would sometimes cook up--but I think that we should probably try a little harder to accomplish something along the lines of what Alex and the other dance writers did in this Nats set.

There's lots else that can be done with the dance distribution. We rarely ask about famous dance scenes in MGM movie musicals. We almost never touch contemporary choreographers or dancers, at least not before they die like Merce Cunningham. Famous solos (not just the Black Swan fouettes), pas de deux, and sequences like the Kingdom of the Shades should all be very much in the realm of the askable.

All this aside, I wouldn't mind that much though if we gave up on making dance better and just upped the opera distribution. ;)

*To give credit where it is due, I think I may have missed some of the intermediate developments in dance writing during my post-2016 hiatus from quizbowl. Auroni wrote a great Don Quixote question for George Oppen back in 2015 that talked about late-stage Balanchine casting himself opposite Suzanne Farrell in his own version of the ballet. There have been a couple great ballet tossups in specialty events like The Unanswered Question and Tamara Vardomskaya's packets for Chicago's end of year parties, and MUSES has gone deeper into dance than most quizbowl sets, thanks to Terpsichore.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

I'm still recovering a bit before I write a big theory post, but I wanted to observe that I tried to depart from my previous work in a couple ways. First, in lit, I've previously focused largely on "core" Adams/Gioia type questions. This time I wanted to expand into "breadth" a little bit more, with the aim of testing somewhat more wide-ranging curiosity about literature. This included bonus parts on hard authors; common links like "princesses" and "Russian symbolism" that clued Malina and The Petty Demon, which are popular within certain circles but not academically canonical; "literary history" questions like Lu Xun and Caxton, which tried to test knowledge of the context around literary production; and tossups like Hamsun, which asked for authors whose works are more commonly tossed up, and which clued their theoretical writings and lesser-known, but still important, texts.

I understand that the downside of this approach is the possibility that it rewards firsthand reading somewhat less. I do think, though, that if you're curious about literature, then in the process of finding books to read, you'll encounter and read about lots of other books as well. I wanted to reward that form of engagement with literature, as well as create those happy occasions when an obscure book you read on a whim once finally comes up. Drawing question topics from a less-rigid "canon" is a big part of what I think ACF Nationals is about. I also understand that I probably drew on an older archive than other writers will, and I look forward to other tournaments that choose perhaps more modern topics.

Second, in the large majority of cases, I tried to focus hard on playability over creativity in terms of answerlines. Although there were plenty of common-links, almost all of my answers were pretty simple and defined. In the past, I've gotten a little wild with answers in the name of creativity, which I still think has its place; however, those answers do inevitably draw a lot of negs, perhaps especially from players with some knowledge of what's happening. For the most prestigious collegiate event of the year, I tried hard to play it on the safe side. Based on the results, I believe that was the right decision. The one exception here was "Ahab's leg," which I more or less knew would draw a million negs but went ahead with anyway.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by theMoMA »

vydu wrote: Wed Aug 11, 2021 6:31 amMore than any other category, the social science seemed to deviate both stylistically and content-wise from the way the category is asked at regionals-difficulty. I thought the space was filled with really interesting questions on things like traffic, Fordism, linguistic prescriptivism, hominid brain size, Captain Cook, etc. (apologies if some of these were other academic), and am excited to revisit the category. But for me this also made social science feel like it was a notch or two harder than the other categories -- I’m curious if others thought the same. [the position I’m coming from here is someone who has hobbyist interest primarily in socio/anthro and theory]
For what it's worth, I didn't envision any of the topics mentioned as being particularly difficult. They're all things that I assume people have heard of and could hone in on later in the question, even if they didn't know the earlier clues. I'm pretty sure most of them would work for a Regionals-style tournament, so much so that I feel comfortable saying that, if I were editing the social science Regionals, I'd write similar questions (with the caveat that I would, of course, shade the clue difficulty easier if I were writing at that level).

My general philosophy at Nationals difficulty is to have a vast majority of the answers be basic and simple, with the clues doing the work to make the questions interesting and difficulty appropriate, and the giveaways ideally not written in such a way to make them feeling insulting easy. (Of course, I also try to sprinkle in a few questions on more difficult answer lines to keep players honest.) I think all of these questions fit that bill, and they don't strike me as a departure from the rest of the set, or from how social science at Regionals difficulty might look.
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by Saltasassi »

Thanks
I'm a little late to the party, but I just wanted to say some quick thanks and other stuff. First of all, it was an honor to be an editor for this year's ACF Nationals. Many thanks to Matt Bo for initially approaching me about this opportunity almost exactly two years ago as well as his patience in working with/overseeing me. Secondly, big thanks to Alex Damisch for chipping in several top-notch classical music questions in addition to the many other things she did for this set. And obviously, thanks to all the other editors/freelancers/proofreaders/tournament organizers/etc. for all of their efforts from both last weekend and the past two years.

Auditory FA
Hope you enjoyed the music in this set! I honestly don't have too much to say in the way of writing philosophy. I guess it boils down to (a) try to write good, not overly-verbose score clues and (b) try to bring up a bunch of non-white-male musicians. Do let me know if you have feedback on those fronts or anything else.

Re: not-so-great subdistribution that someone mentioned upthread. Sorry about that!! I made a concerted effort not to let my 24/24 be dominated by my pet topics, which happen to be Romantic orchestral/chamber stuff and the viola. Incidentally, I made too concerted an effort here, oops.

Good-Bye
With the conclusion of this year's Nats, I'll probably be retiring from editing. (Whether this is a real retirement or a Brett Favre-type retirement remains to be seen.) I've always invested a great deal of time, effort, and care into my questions (even if it's only ever 1.5/1.5 tops). This is no longer super tenable now that I'm grown and employed and also estranged from collegiate quizbowl in general. Thanks to ACF (and "stanford housewrite" of course) for allowing me to indulge in the only category I know anything about, and thanks to all you music players for tuning into my questions. That's all, folks! :party:
Jennie Yang
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

I've submitted the packets to the database, so they should be publicly posted once my request is approved.

I've been thinking of making a "theory" post for a while, but ultimately I decided I don't have a grand project to promote this time. I don't tend to think the most interesting things happening in quizbowl are happening at ACF Nationals and Chicago Open, anymore. When the overriding project I had interest in was to make quizbowl more "real," my attention was naturally centered on the most intense and consequential event; now I tend to think rather more inclusively about what's "real" engagement, and my interest is diffused across many other events. These include this past year's ACF tournaments, which point the way towards a more diverse and inclusive canon; FLOPEN, with its distributional changes; Scattergories, with its perennial joys; and many various side events and "3.5 star" tournaments. If I didn't mention your event, please don't take it the wrong way, because there are too many recent tournaments with great features to list. My general point is that I think we've moved from a high modernist phase in QB to a more postmodern era, where Nationals cannot claim to be definitive or central.

As a result of this shift, and for reasons related to the ones Morgan quoted in the BHSU announcement, I think a more accessible Nationals should be an improvement. I would like, though, to highlight some things the past couple Nationals have done well that I think ought to be preserved. I will also cite some experimental things we tried that had more mixed results, but which could be successful if tried slightly differently.

I. Given its importance, Nationals cannot afford to be as experimental, in terms of complex or unusual answerlines, as Chicago Open or various spring open tournaments have been. However, I don't think this approach requires a stricter or more conservative vision of quizbowl to implement. More questions on concrete answers, with fewer negs, should result in a more enjoyable and fun experience for the players. Many of the best questions in Nationals have been the product of taking a more "novel" topic, perhaps asked about recently in a side event or an open, and asking about it in a simple and approachable way.

II. We started out with the goal to write easier early clues than past Nationals, which did not really come through in the final product. I think a good general rule is make your tossup easier right up to the point that you're starting to worry about getting too many early buzzes. Obviously you shouldn't intentionally make your question too easy, but the questions where I felt that little twinge of anxiety were actually the ones that played out the best. Jordan's Phenomenology of Spirit tossup is a good example: I initially worried it gave away too much too early, but he (correctly) assured me it would be fine.

III. I think there is an important connection between the upper-level "canon" and a more liberal approach to quizbowl. In miniature, ACF Regionals is going to be dominated by things you learn in school; ACF Nationals is going to have a lot of stuff that could be in articles about things you didn't learn in school. 2019 ACF Nationals, in particular, had many excellent questions in this vein, which often also drew attention to artists and historical figures from underrepresented groups.

The connection here is more complicated than the simple narrative I just laid out; university curricula are not the same as they were at the start of the 1960s, the past few Regionals have included many novel questions on minority artists, and not all hard tournaments do take advantage of the opportunity to ask different kinds of questions. I also think we may have been too freewheeling with the hard tossup answers at Nationals 2019. But I think the freedom to break away from a more restrictive concept of the canon (both in and outside of quizbowl) is valuable and mind-opening.

IV. For 2021 Nationals, when I wrote on "old stuff," I tried to ask them from a different angle to highlight their relevance. I thought my bonuses on Wordsworth's conservative turn and the controversies around Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry pulled this off pretty well. The latter relates to something Jonathan Magin later told me, which was that it's easy to recognize the brilliance of high modernist literature, but he often found it more rewarding to find what was interesting about other kinds of writing. Will Nediger, by the way, is underratedly good at writing this type of question.

(In writing terms, Magin is basically my Yoda, with Evan Adams as my Obi-Wan; in many ways I kinda departed from their example in this set, but I was glad I found my way back in a couple of areas.)

V. In most cases, when we departed from the canon for 2021 Nationals, it played harder than we anticipated. However, there are important exceptions to that rule that I want to point out. In particular, I don't think the answer is only to go "back" to the canon of five years ago or so, because many questions on things that came up then (but do not come up as much now) played fairly hard. Conversely, the tossup on No Longer Human, which was set aside as one of the hardest literature questions in the set, had as many early buzzes as practically any question in the tournament. Which is all to say, I think, that players' interests are more contemporary and diverse now.
Matt Bollinger
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Re: 2021 ACF Nationals: Thank Yous and Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

This is a random late-night thank you post, but seriously, thank you ACF for providing an amazing in-person nationals at the time the community needed it most. As noted by previous posts, this tournament provided some of the most poetic stories ever seen at a Nationals, a much-needed bonding experience after a year of COVID-induced isolation, and a display of the incredible human talent this game induces people to express. As a culminating experience for my collegiate competitive career, I could not have reasonably asked for anything more. It will forever be burned into my memory.
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