2020 Terrapin Open: Thanks and General Discussion

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Thanks everyone who played the set, especially those that made the long trek. If I had this to over again, I would distribute the responsibilities more evenly across the set. I ended up not spending nearly as much time as I wanted on European literature, Other Visual Arts, and Philosophy. I would like to thank Geoffrey Chen, Justine French, Jakob Boeye, Evan Suttell, Eve Fleisig, and Jack Mehr for playtesting the set. I would also like to thank Ani Perumalla and Caroline Mao for helping proofread the set, and Ophir for his invaluable help with packetization and pronunciation guides. Here’s who did what:

Caleb Kendrick: American, British, and European literature, Other Visual Arts, Other Academic, Thought

Emmett Laurie: History (with last minute help from Alex Echikson and myself)

Naveed Chowdhury: Religion, Mythology, Modern World

Vishwa Shanmugam: World Literature, Visual Fine Arts

Graham Reid: Physics, Other Science

Ophir Lifshitz: Auditory Fine Arts

Joelle Smart: Biology

Ewan MacAulay: Chemistry

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

I edited painting/sculpture for this tournament and it was quite a time. I went in explicitly planning on making modern (post-1870) content more visible in this set, accounting for half of the tossups and bonuses, which was hopefully pretty noticeable. A nice side-effect of this was allowing for questions on a lot more diverse cast of artists and their achievements, but I'll admit there were a couple noticeble distributional quirks. I'm curious as to people's thoughts on how this distro played out and how tenable it is - I certainly didn't feel cramped or like I was grasping for straws to fill out either half. I'm also of course interested on any specific question feedback, but please refer to and consider the following quote by Gustave Flaubert before offering any:

‘Critics! Eternal mediocrity living off genius by denigrating and exploiting it! Race of cockchafers slashing the finest pages of art to shreds! I’m so fed up with typography and the misuse people make of it that if the Emperor were to abolish all printing tomorrow, I should walk all the way to Paris on my knees and kiss his arse in gratitude.’
--Letter to Louise Colet, July 2nd, 1853
If it isn't clear this is a joke I'd really appreciate comments

[Duckk]

Thank you for not making the linguistics in this set another instance of Phonology Bowl. I greatly enjoyed the semantics and pragmatics content.

[Bhagwan Shammbhagwan]

Thank you for making a very enjoyable open set Maryland! Despite getting owned by the set, it had a lot of great content and definitely kept me engaged throughout the tiring rounds.

However, the one gripe I did have with the set was the seeming lack of visual arts content before 1900. Renaissance and Baroque art, an important subdistribution of the visual arts, seemingly only appeared in 2 tossups (St. Peter's and the Giovanni Bellini, to my knowledge). This was probably a conscious decision to include more underrepresented artists and works in the mix, but I felt like this was semi-egregious. (Would take this with a grain of salt, as most of the stuff I'm buzzing on anyways is art before 1900)

[Mike Bentley]

Overall this was a fun tournament, thanks to all the editors and writers! There were several very interesting tossups, and in general I liked the history and literature.

It did seem on the hard side, especially on the bonus side. There were many bonuses that had no apparent easy part, just two middle parts.

And I thought that packetization in this tournament was not the greatest, probably owing to the questions not coming together until the night before. For instance, 6 of the first 7 tossups in Round 1 were on Europe (Trajan, Lisbon, Italy, Zurich, Helen), with three tossups in a row on places in Europe. Round 2 had two bonuses on American poets from the 1950s. Round 5 had an architecture tossup on the Netherlands followed by a geography tossup on Barcelona (both in Europe) that also heavily clued from architecture. Round 1 had a question on "speech" followed by a very linguistics-heavy philosophy question on "descriptions." Round 9, my best round, had arguably four questions on corporate/tech history (olive oil, Lockheed, Bhopal, porcelain).

The current events in this tournament were still a bit too skewed towards political parties and elections for my tastes. I appreciated some of the more interesting questions like the ones on soccer stadiums, Ultraorthodox Jews (I assume this was CE) and Gazprom. But I disliked the questions on Rwanda (mainly a list of Rwandan ministers), West Virginia and several of the CE bonuses.

On the subject of arts, I seem to remember perhaps 2/2 fashion. I think quizbowl needed a corrective to include more fashion than it was doing 2 years ago but this does seem a lot for an 11 packet set. And in particular I did not think that the Met Gala question was well executed. This is arguably the most famous event in fashion and it dropped enough context clues to be a big game of chicken from the start. The 1990s question, in contrast, was quite interesting. I didn't have very strong opinions about the other art questions, apart from liking the idea of the Daumier cartons question. In that one, I was a bit confused by the sculpture clue which I thought implied that only a French museum had a complete set, whereas I remember either the National Gallery of Art of Art Institute of Chicago having a set.

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

On the subject of arts, I seem to remember perhaps 2/2 fashion. I think quizbowl needed a corrective to include more fashion than it was doing 2 years ago but this does seem a lot for an 11 packet set. And in particular I did not think that the Met Gala question was well executed. This is arguably the most famous event in fashion and it dropped enough context clues to be a big game of chicken from the start. The 1990s question, in contrast, was quite interesting. I didn't have very strong opinions about the other art questions, apart from liking the idea of the Daumier cartons question. In that one, I was a bit confused by the sculpture clue which I thought implied that only a French museum had a complete set, whereas I remember either the National Gallery of Art of Art Institute of Chicago having a set.

The Daumier sentence reads: "An artist made clay sculptures modeled on 40 of these artworks in a series held by the Musée d’Orsay (“myoo-ZAY dor-SAY”) titled The Celebrities of the Juste Milieu" - I wasn't aware of the other copies of that series, so I'll clean up the wording there, thank you! The fashion problem was definitely on me - I asked for 90's to be reclassified as other ac (before Caleb became Other VFA editor) because I wasn't sure if it was fashion-adjacent enough, but relooking at the clues this judgment seems really questionable to me now. Fashion was explicitly subdistributed to be 1/1, with the Dali bonus being the 0/1.

[Noble Rot]

And I thought that packetization in this tournament was not the greatest, probably owing to the questions not coming together until the night before. For instance, 6 of the first 7 tossups in Round 1 were on Europe (Trajan, Lisbon, Italy, Zurich, Helen), with three tossups in a row on places in Europe. Round 2 had two bonuses on American poets from the 1950s. Round 5 had an architecture tossup on the Netherlands followed by a geography tossup on Barcelona (both in Europe) that also heavily clued from architecture. Round 1 had a question on "speech" followed by a very linguistics-heavy philosophy question on "descriptions." Round 9, my best round, had arguably four questions on corporate/tech history (olive oil, Lockheed, Bhopal, porcelain).

Yeah, sorry about that. Packetization will definitely be addressed before the next mirror.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I enjoyed playing this set, but I wanted to observe publicly that the way the mirror situation and some of the logistics for this tournament went was pretty subpar. I'll leave people in the regions affected to speak to the situations with the midwest and Columbia mirrors, which, from the perspective of an outside observer, seemed pretty bush league. It was fairly annoying to hear (secondhand) that the justification for these actions was basically "UMD wants to do it this way." To my mind, the spring open is a pre-existing QB tradition that UMD just happened to claim this year; if you're gonna claim that schedule slot you have certain responsibilities. For the same reason, at the UMD site, ACRONYM should really have been announced in a separate thread, with adequate time, and had adequate staff - speaking as a villain who's been charged with high misdemeanors related to ACRONYM. Anyway, I again had fun playing the tournament and thought the UMD site basically ran fine, but I wanted to bring these issues up so that we can have a fuller discussion of how to avoid them in the future.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I enjoyed playing this set, but I wanted to observe publicly that the way the mirror situation and some of the logistics for this tournament went was pretty subpar. I'll leave people in the regions affected to speak to the situations with the midwest and Columbia mirrors, which, from the perspective of an outside observer, seemed pretty bush league. It was fairly annoying to hear (secondhand) that the justification for these actions was basically "UMD wants to do it this way." To my mind, the spring open is a pre-existing QB tradition that UMD just happened to claim this year; if you're gonna claim that schedule slot you have certain responsibilities. For the same reason, at the UMD site, ACRONYM should really have been announced in a separate thread, with adequate time, and had adequate staff - speaking as a villain who's been charged with high misdemeanors related to ACRONYM. Anyway, I again had fun playing the tournament and thought the UMD site basically ran fine, but I wanted to bring these issues up so that we can have a fuller discussion of how to avoid them in the future.

I'm pretty much solely to blame for the mirror fiasco. I should have done a better job of delegating tasks, and consulting with the editing team. I apologize to anyone who was negatively impacted by my incompetence. I promise that we learned from this mistake, and it will not be repeated if we ever write another set. I'll leave Alex to answer questions about ACRONYM since he was the TD and organized the tournament.

[gerbilownage]

This was a cool tournament. I appreciated the balance of canonical drama like Doctor Faustus and more experimental stuff like the Machine common link tossup. History seemed just about the right difficulty for a nats minus tournament as well.

EDIT: I agree with what's been said below about the lack of continental philosophy and the far-too-hard easy parts that seemed out of place next to ~100% conversion easy parts like chlorophyll and yeats.

[reindeer]

I thought the linguistics in this set was amazing and really enjoyed reading it. I particularly remember liking the speech production & implicatures TUs, and the raising/theta-roles/transitive and vowel/formants (with Praat content!)/rhotacization bonuses. They were all full of clues that I encountered in my linguistics classes and it was great to see them come up.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

A few thoughts, some positive and some negative.

Most of this tournament's categories struck me as high quality:

• The history seemed solid, if perhaps skewed heavily towards non-social history in the pre-modern questions, and it hit a good balance of topics. I wouldn't call it revolutionary, but Emmett did great work taking a tournament of this difficulty and the overall control seemed quite reasonable, better than many of the other categories. The only tossups I really had complaints about here were the Ming and Antigonid dynasty questions, which gave away what they were going for pretty quickly.
• The auditory arts covered a really good range of topics and used a wide variety of approaches to the material, which was much appreciated. The technical execution was also superb, as to be expected from Ophir.
• I obviously didn't know much of the science, but from talking to my teammates it seemed like it was excellent, though the chemistry was harder than the biology, physics, and other science. These questions seemed to consistently reward interacting with the material in an academic context, with a good helping of clues thrown in for people who (like myself) engage in a less formal manner, i.e. history of science, business-adjacent science topics, and other kinds of things you'd learn from general-interest science videos and websites.
• The geography and modern world questions were consistently interesting to listen to. Like Mike, I wasn't as much of a fan of the more electorally inclined questions here, but I think you absolutely need some representation of that content, so it's fine.

Finally,

I thought the linguistics in this set was amazing and really enjoyed reading it. I particularly remember liking the speech production & implicatures TUs, and the raising/theta-roles/transitive and vowel/formants (with Praat content!)/rhotacization bonuses. They were all full of clues that I encountered in my linguistics classes and it was great to see them come up.

Also agreed on all counts.

EDIT: This part of the tournament was really refreshing, along with the (mostly) excellent social science questions. The econ questions were also very good aside from the ones that I discussed in the other thread. It was a bit light on micro, but whatever.

Some negatives:

• Beyond the extremely modern skew, the visual arts was very lacking in "meat and potatoes" content - not a lot of deep cuts on easier artists, aside from maybe the silk screen tossup, and a distinct lack of stuff from the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. This, plus the extremely small portion of visual clues, was very frustrating, and it felt like kind of a middle finger to people who (like Hari) appreciate a lot of older art. Hard parts were also disproportionately in the "name this hard artist" vein.
• I think the balance of religion topics was good, but a sizeable portion of the religion questions were quite transparent. The Gethsemane, Panchen Lama, and arhat tossups each struck me as extremely obvious for reasons that I'd be happy to go into in the specific questions discussion. The "kosher on Passover" tossup also struck me as fairly obvious and, while it's a tossup on an important set of rules, I'm not sure why a simpler answerline couldn't have been used.
• Easy parts didn't have a consistent philosophy at all and ranged massively from "know this upper canon topic or get zero" to "name this state with capital X."
• A lot of bonus hard parts felt like CO or CO+ in difficulty, particularly in literature. The hard parts came first disproportionately often, too, which meant that you'd often get a hard work with a relatively low amount of context.

The thing that was most annoying about this tournament to me was the philosophy. I respect editorial discretion, and what questions did exist seemed thoughtfully executed, but frankly I feel bad for criticizing Alston Boyd for the proportion of analytic content in CO, because that tournament still managed to have a solid mix of content. The philosophy was miserable to play for me (and Harrison) not just because of how absurdly difficult it was (moral luck as an easy part??? tossups on the new riddle of induction and definite descriptions??? like, sure elite teams like us can get these, but what about the middle teams trying their hand?) but more importantly because of how transparently it just completely ignored areas of philosophy - specifically Early Modern and Continental - that a bunch of people care about, especially if you aren't someone whose main exposure to philosophy is being part of an analytic-focused undergrad or graduate curriculum.

The idea that "these are the standard topics in the American philosophy classroom" doesn't just ignore the fact that there's a lot of diversity in philosophy departments, but also ignores the fact that - unlike say, science, for the most part - there are an awful lot more non-philosophy majors who are interacting with philosophy in meaningful academic ways than, say, people doing the same with quantum mechanics or organic chemistry (this is particularly notable because this set's science questions, along with having a ton of well-written technical clues, still threw a bunch of bones for people who approach the category in other ways). Thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Hobbes, and Foucault are not just folks who you'd be likely to encounter as a generally informed person, but they crop up in all sorts of other subjects - history, literature, political science, sociology, etc. I ran into all of these thinkers in courses I took in undergrad, none of which were philosophy courses. I don't have much constructive criticism - this entire category just felt like being given the middle finger, in a much stronger way than the visual arts, on a category where I'm far from an expert, but have interacted with substantially in both an academic and casual-interest contexts (YouTube videos, reading the SEP, a few biographies and survey books I've read, etc.)

All in all, I had very high expectations for this tournament and came away with pretty mixed feelings, and didn't really enjoy my playing experience (definitely as much my own fault as the tournament's, but still). The categories felt really disjointed, there were a lot more missing prompts than I'd expect for a tournament that's already had a high-profile mirror, and the non-insignificant number of pretty transparent tossups / easy early clues was pretty unwelcome when put next to an even greater number of CO-level questions. There were a lot of really funny and awesome clues that I'm looking forward to reviewing in the future, but overall this wasn't nearly as fun as it could have been.

EDIT: I mistakenly implied that Hume wasn't asked in this tournament when he was; consequently I have substituted his name for Rousseau, a similarly important and widely-recognized philosopher, in this post. My apologies.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

The thing that was most annoying about this tournament to me was the philosophy. I respect editorial discretion, but frankly I feel bad for criticizing Alston Boyd for the proportion of analytic content in CO, because that tournament still managed to have a solid mix of content. The philosophy was miserable to play for me (and Harrison) not just because of how absurdly difficult it was (moral luck as an easy part??? tossups on the new riddle of induction and definite descriptions??? like, sure elite teams like us can get these, but what about the middle teams trying their hand?) but more importantly because of how transparently it just completely ignored areas of philosophy - specifically Early Modern and Continental - that a bunch of people care about, especially if you aren't someone whose main exposure to philosophy is being part of an analytic-focused undergrad or graduate curriculum.

The idea that "these are the standard topics in the American philosophy classroom" doesn't just ignore the fact that there's a lot of diversity in philosophy departments, but also ignores the fact that - unlike say, science, for the most part - there are an awful lot more non-philosophy majors who are interacting with philosophy in meaningful academic ways than, say, people doing the same with quantum mechanics or organic chemistry. Thinkers like Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Hobbes, and Foucault are not just folks who you'd be likely to encounter as a generally informed person, but they crop up in all sorts of other subjects - history, literature, political science, sociology, etc. I ran into all of these thinkers in courses I took in undergrad, none of which were philosophy courses. I don't have much constructive criticism - this entire category just felt like being given the middle finger, in a much stronger way than the visual arts, on a category where I'm far from an expert, but have interacted with substantially in both an academic and casual-interest contexts (YouTube videos, reading the SEP, a few biographies and survey books I've read, etc.)

I based the sub-distributions for philosophy off the course requirements at UMD. While I appreciate your concerns about accessibility, I think it would be silly if we wrote chemistry based on, say, the chemistry history majors know. At UMD and most major Anglo-American universities, there aren't philosophy classes where you read Nietzsche or Foucault, and I don't think they should be included in the philosophy distribution. I think you're far more likely to engage with them in comparative literature classes or somewhere else. I originally planned to include more of these topics elsewhere in the set, but, as I said above, I was stretched too thin. As to the complaints about the difficulty, I definitely overshot it on a couple of questions, but this is also an open tournament (if you look at my philosophy for Terrapin last year, it was, I think, very reasonable and accessible.) Even those hard answerlines were on extremely core topics, Russell's analysis of definite descriptions marked the birth of analytic philosophy (and is something I talked about in at least three different undergrad classes) and Goodman's NRI is covered in pretty much every undergrad philosophy of science class, I certainly wasn't trying to give everyone playing the set the middle finger.

[Carlos Be]

At UMD and most major Anglo-American universities, there aren't philosophy classes where you read Nietzsche or Foucault, and I don't think they should be included in the philosophy distribution.

Wait, Nietzsche doesn't belong in the philosophy distribution? I think with a take this hot you need a justification much stronger than "he's not in my curriculum."

I think it would be silly if we wrote chemistry based on, say, the chemistry history majors know.

Yes. But we do write chemistry based on, say, the chemistry physics majors know and the chemistry bio majors know. History majors learn much more philosophy than chemistry, so analogizing philosophy and chemistry is fallacious, particularly when Will listed several reasons why qb philosophy should be more heterodox than qb science.

A lot of bonus hard parts felt like CO or CO+ in difficulty, particularly in literature.

When I playtested literature, I had 14.83 PPB. I had 18.95 PPB on literature when I played Fall Open. I'm not sure how much the bonuses were adjusted after I playtested.

[heterodyne]

At UMD and most major Anglo-American universities, there aren't philosophy classes where you read Nietzsche or Foucault, and I don't think they should be included in the philosophy distribution. I think you're far more likely to engage with them in comparative literature classes or somewhere else.

This is not true. I'm travelling and have quite a lot to do today, but I hope in the next few days to both provide some evidence for the startling inaccuracy of this belief and express my concern about this strategy for editing the philosophy distribution.

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

• Beyond the extremely modern skew, the visual arts was very lacking in "meat and potatoes" content - not a lot of deep cuts on easier artists, aside from maybe the silk screen tossup, and a distinct lack of stuff from the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. This, plus the extremely small portion of visual clues, was very frustrating, and it felt like kind of a middle finger to people who (like Hari) appreciate a lot of older art. Hard parts were also disproportionately in the "name this hard artist" vein.

I think a couple factors were at play here - The first being some poor packetization. The art tossups in 13/14/15 were all much more traditional painting questions (and from what I've heard of the finals, exactly one clue of those 3 tossups have been heard at any site thus far.) I'm going to move some questions around so that less non-traditional painting comes up in the first few packets and the later questions see the light of day more often.

I was definitely intending some aspects of this tournament to line up with what you listed, since I think a nats- tournament is one of the few places where one can really experiment with including more modern/contemp art, and especially on harder answerlines. That being said, it's quite likely that I went too hard on this front--my apologies there. I certainly didn't intend this tournament to be a middle finger to anyone, but [some nicer analogy I'm too lazy to think of] for people more interested in modern art.

[Mike Bentley]

On that note, why do tournaments of this difficulty produce so many packets? I don't think I've played past packet 11 at any recent open tournament that was not CO. Seems like a waste of effort to me.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

A lot of bonus hard parts felt like CO or CO+ in difficulty, particularly in literature.

When I playtested literature, I had 14.83 PPB. I had 18.95 PPB on literature when I played Fall Open. I'm not sure how much the bonuses were adjusted after I playtested.

I went through and made the middle parts systematically easier after this, but then several literature bonuses ended up having an average conversion well over 20 at UMD site. so, I made some of the middle parts harder this week.

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

On that note, why do tournaments of this difficulty produce so many packets? I don't think I've played past packet 11 at any recent open tournament that was not CO. Seems like a waste of effort to me.

I believe that, had there been a tie at X-3 at Brown yesterday, 13 would have been available for us as a play-in to disadvantaged finals, which would means the site could have used all 15 fully produced packets. (I don't know if this is what Brown would have actually done in such a situation, but it's at least plausible.)

[1.82]

History majors learn much more philosophy than chemistry, so analogizing philosophy and chemistry is fallacious, particularly when Will listed several reasons why qb philosophy should be more heterodox than qb science.

For whatever it's worth, I have a history degree from a normal American state university, and in all my classes that I took for my history major, I remember covering absolutely no content that would come up in the philosophy distribution, whether in the way that it has been interpreted by Caleb or in the way that it has been interpreted by others. Literature students may cover philosophy, but as a history student I did not.

EDIT: Because I find it personally amusing, I will add that my experiences as a history major would have gotten me philosophy points exactly once: the 2020 ACF Regionals tossup on Locke clued in its leadin the work of a history professor at the University of Maryland who employs exactly one research assistant, a position that between 2015 and 2019 was held in turn by me and Justin Hawkins. However, I do not recall ever dealing with Locke in my actual history classes, so the point stands.

[Cody]

On that note, why do tournaments of this difficulty produce so many packets? I don't think I've played past packet 11 at any recent open tournament that was not CO. Seems like a waste of effort to me.

15 packets is the minimum a tournament must produce in order to accommodate all common field sizes + finals (due to a 13 team RR).

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

History majors learn much more philosophy than chemistry, so analogizing philosophy and chemistry is fallacious, particularly when Will listed several reasons why qb philosophy should be more heterodox than qb science.

For whatever it's worth, I have a history degree from a normal American state university, and in all my classes that I took for my history major, I remember covering absolutely no content that would come up in the philosophy distribution, whether in the way that it has been interpreted by Caleb or in the way that it has been interpreted by others. Literature students may cover philosophy, but as a history student I did not.

Yeah, same. Besides math and philosophy, history was the only class I took multiple classes in during undergrad. We read Mozi, Xunzi, Mencius, and Confucius in my medieval China class (which, I will note, is explicitly the reason why I included that Mozi tossup!), but we never read any philosophy in any other history course I took. I'd be shocked if most history degrees require any serious engagement with philosophy.

Moreover, the "philosophy" you encounter in comparative literature or English departments is usually completely divorced from the undergraduate philosophy curriculum: Butler, Lacan, Derrida, etc. You'd be hard pressed to find a major university in the English-speaking world where you'd read those thinker in an actual philosophy class. This doesn't mean that those thinkers aren't important or shouldn't come up at all, but I don't think they should come up in philosophy.

I will also note that a third of the philosophy in this set was explicitly distributed as history of philosophy covering core thinkers like Plato, Locke, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Averroes, Pascal, Marx, etc. These thinkers should obviously continue to come up, but I also want the category to be more representative of the topics you'd actually learn as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy. Again, I appreciate the feedback, but, as someone who's working on a PhD in the field, I feel strongly that this category should actually reflect the field as it's practiced today.

[heterodyne]

Moreover, the "philosophy" you encounter in comparative literature or English departments is usually completely divorced from the undergraduate philosophy curriculum: Butler, Lacan, Derrida, etc. You'd be hard pressed to find a major university in the English-speaking world where you'd read those thinker in an actual philosophy class.

Just want to note that this is also untrue. I'm about to board a plane, but I'm happy to provide class examples within the next few days. As long as we're remaining within the realm of the anecdotal, I was assigned both Butler and Derrida in philosophy classes I took in undergrad, and have been assigned both Derrida and Lacan in philosophy classes I took in the last year.

I don't want the appearance of endorsing the aggressive grounding of subdistributions in "course offerings within the department with which the category shares its name", but I think it's important to provide at least some resistance to claims that are both sweeping and inaccurate.

[Mike Bentley]

On that note, why do tournaments of this difficulty produce so many packets? I don't think I've played past packet 11 at any recent open tournament that was not CO. Seems like a waste of effort to me.

15 packets is the minimum a tournament must produce in order to accommodate all common field sizes + finals (due to a 13 team RR).

Right, I get that in theory someone somewhere may read 15 packets. But our pretty well-run mirror at Maryland went to 6 PM on 11 packets. I just don't think it's realistic that an open tournament is going to go so long. Based on quizbowl editor's habits, including for this tournament, having 2 or 3 fewer packets to worry about would help produce more polished set and will in practice have a very minimal impact on finals.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

For what it's worth, I have learned a bit of philosophy (and other "thinkers" that could come up in the SS distro) in my history courses, though not a ton. Mostly people who could be clued in a philosophy tu with an answerline of "history."

EDIT: Oh also I debated taking a phil class this semester which assigned Nietzsche

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Moreover, the "philosophy" you encounter in comparative literature or English departments is usually completely divorced from the undergraduate philosophy curriculum: Butler, Lacan, Derrida, etc. You'd be hard pressed to find a major university in the English-speaking world where you'd read those thinker in an actual philosophy class.

Just want to note that this is also untrue. I'm about to board a plane, but I'm happy to provide class examples within the next few days. As long as we're remaining within the realm of the anecdotal, I was assigned both Butler and Derrida in philosophy classes I took in undergrad, and have been assigned both Derrida and Lacan in philosophy classes I took in the last year.

I don't want the appearance of endorsing the aggressive grounding of subdistributions in "course offerings within the department with which the category shares its name", but I think it's important to provide at least some resistance to claims that are both sweeping and inaccurate.

Compared to other Anglo-American institutions, Chicago has an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings. I don't think your experience is generalizable.

[Cody]

On that note, why do tournaments of this difficulty produce so many packets? I don't think I've played past packet 11 at any recent open tournament that was not CO. Seems like a waste of effort to me.

15 packets is the minimum a tournament must produce in order to accommodate all common field sizes + finals (due to a 13 team RR).

Right, I get that in theory someone somewhere may read 15 packets. But our pretty well-run mirror at Maryland went to 6 PM on 11 packets. I just don't think it's realistic that an open tournament is going to go so long. Based on quizbowl editor's habits, including for this tournament, having 2 or 3 fewer packets to worry about would help produce more polished set and will in practice have a very minimal impact on finals.

This is not true. There are multiple field sizes that require 12-round formats in order to give teams 10+ games (including 9, 10, 14, and 21 teams). The absolute minimum number of packets you can produce for a college set that provides for a substantial number of formats + finals is 13, and even that is unwise (due to the previous). It may be feasible to cut to 14 packets, but more than that is a bad idea and as a community we should strongly discourage and/or boycott any set that does not provide enough packets to run a tournament on. (Because being able to guarantee your field has the right number of teams is generally impossible due to drops.)

[Carlos Be]

Moreover, the "philosophy" you encounter in comparative literature or English departments is usually completely divorced from the undergraduate philosophy curriculum: Butler, Lacan, Derrida, etc. You'd be hard pressed to find a major university in the English-speaking world where you'd read those thinker in an actual philosophy class. This doesn't mean that those thinkers aren't important or shouldn't come up at all, but I don't think they should come up in philosophy.

Where should they come up? Social science is very cramped, and I don't think many people want to hear a bunch of theory come up in literature. It's hard to justify having 1/1 philosophy if you don't fill it out with these other thinkers.

Furthermore, you still have to explain why qb philosophy should be defined as "what philosophy majors learn."

Again, I appreciate the feedback, but, as someone who's working on a PhD in the field, I feel strongly that this category should actually reflect the field as it's practiced today.

This begs the question. Why is "the way that (Anglo-American) philosophy majors practice philosophy" the only way to practice philosophy?

[Father of the Ragdoll]

Although I did not take as many philosophy and history courses as many people here, I took a good handful at the University of Illinois and read Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Hume, Marx, Nietzsche, etc as well as several non-western and ancient philosophers.

A quick glance at the shortened course descriptions for UIUC's advanced courswork reveals that "actual philosophy classes" also mention reading Nietzsche, Husserl, Kierkegaard (who has his own 400 level course), Hegel, Augustine, Ockham, Descartes, Leibniz, Dewey, Hegel, Mill, Kant, Marx, Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger...

The UIUC philosophy curiculum also cross lists courses with psychology, linguistics, history, mathematics, computer science, anthropology, sociology, religion, English, classics, engineering, etc. That is much wider range than any other department I am aware of which would offer some anecdotal evidence in favor of Will's argument that philosophy ought to be more open due to its wide academic range.

A current UT undergrad on our team was recently talking about reading Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, Heideger, Kierkegaard, and several other continental philosophers for coursework. Which at least offers some support that UIUC and Chicago are not on an island with offering "real philosophy" courses on continental subjects.

Maybe UIUC and UT also have "an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings," but I'd be pretty skeptical of that. Maybe you are right that "real philosophy classes" don't normally include this stuff, but there seems to be a enough exceptions to the claim that your theory for how philosophy should be written could be incorrect.

[heterodyne]

Compared to other Anglo-American institutions, Chicago has an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings. I don't think your experience is generalizable.

You're right! That's precisely my point; taking my experience to be the norm would be quite foolish, just as taking yours to be the norm was. Brad has helpfully done a bit of the legwork that I keep promising to, but I am curious: how many departments would you like me to search for classes on Nietzsche or Foucault in order to test the claim that most departments don't cover them?

As a start, I decided to look through the top bracket of ACF Nationals last year, where I found that only one of the six schools did not offer a course involving either Nietzsche or Foucault. I was, however, slightly confused to find that the school in question was UMN, rather than UMD, as it appears that UMD's philosophy department has listed in the 2019-2020 course catalog a class (PHIL 324) described as "A study of authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger..." Is UMD also an "an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings?"

[jinah]

Compared to other Anglo-American institutions, Chicago has an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings. I don't think your experience is generalizable.

You're right! That's precisely my point; taking my experience to be the norm would be quite foolish, just as taking yours to be the norm was. Brad has helpfully done a bit of the legwork that I keep promising to, but I am curious: how many departments would you like me to search for classes on Nietzsche or Foucault in order to test the claim that most departments don't cover them?

As a start, I decided to look through the top bracket of ACF Nationals last year, where I found that only one of the six schools did not offer a course involving either Nietzsche or Foucault. I was, however, slightly confused to find that the school in question was UMN, rather than UMD, as it appears that UMD's philosophy department has listed in the 2019-2020 course catalog a class (PHIL 324) described as "A study of authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger..." Is UMD also an "an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings?"

I think it's disingenuous to argue that contemporary Anglo-American academic philosophy -- as opposed to courses that count for philosophy credit, or that are cross-listed with philosophy -- is not predominantly analytic. Looking through course listings for a binary "is there Nietzsche, or is there no Nietzsche?" metric seems silly -- it says nothing about the degree to which continental thinkers like Nietzsche or Foucault are emphasized in academic philosophy, or the ways in which they are engaged with by different disciplines.

I think Justine raises a stronger point about whether "academic Anglo-American philosophy" is necessarily the best way to approach the quizbowl philosophy canon. Personally, I think it's fine* to do at a housewrite, and I like the increase in core analytic topics that are more likely to reward people who study philosophy academically, though it's helpful if there's also a robust "other ac" distribution that would account for thinkers like Benjamin, Foucault, etc. I don't think this change would work to this degree at all tournaments, and I think Caleb probably took his divergence from the canon a bit far, but I also found Terrapin's thought refreshing given that many tournaments err on the other side, where they reward "hobbyist" engagements with philosophy or people who encounter philosophy via other subjects at the cost of rewarding people who study philosophy itself academically (fwiw, I think Alston did a great job balancing these at CO, so despite quoting Alston here this is not meant to be a personal attack on him).

*Presumably, this is biased by my own perspective of having been a philosophy major at a school where I only encountered major continental philosophers in classes based in the French and German departments. I would suggest that other commenters consider their own biases and maybe not treat distributional choices as some kind of high crime and misdemeanor.

[heterodyne]

Looking through course listings for a binary "is there Nietzsche, or is there no Nietzsche?" metric seems silly -- it says nothing about the degree to which continental thinkers like Nietzsche or Foucault are emphasized in academic philosophy, or the ways in which they are engaged with by different disciplines.

Ahhhhhh I hate that I keep doing this because I can fully explain what I'm talking about on Tuesday – I totally agree, and was just trying to address the specific (and baffling) claim that N and F don't appear in the curricula of most philosophy departments. I think there's much, much more to be said about a) the (dire) state of the American philosophical academy b) the role of "hobbyist" engagement with philosophy c) the relation of quizbowl philosophy questions to these two things. Sorry!!

Also, just to clarify, I really liked the questions that were in the set. I just wish they covered a broader area, and want to express in strong terms how unfortunate it would be for the subdistribution adopted here to become any sort of norm.

[Father of the Ragdoll]

Looking through course listings for a binary "is there Nietzsche, or is there no Nietzsche?" metric seems silly -- it says nothing about the degree to which continental thinkers like Nietzsche or Foucault are emphasized in academic philosophy, or the ways in which they are engaged with by different disciplines.

Ahhhhhh I hate that I keep doing this because I can fully explain what I'm talking about on Tuesday – I totally agree, and was just trying to address the specific (and baffling) claim that N and F don't appear in the curricula of most philosophy departments. I think there's much, much more to be said about a) the (dire) state of the American philosophical academy b) the role of "hobbyist" engagement with philosophy c) the relation of quizbowl philosophy questions to these two things. Sorry!!

Also, just to clarify, I really liked the questions that were in the set. I just wish they covered a broader area, and want to express in strong terms how unfortunate it would be for the subdistribution adopted here to become any sort of norm.

I would like to second this, I really enjoyed the philosophy content even if it was out of my personal (hobbyist) wheelhouse. I was mainly confused as to why someone would claim that Nietzsche and Foucault were not read in most philosophy programs or why they therefore should not be in the philosophy distro. Obviously Caleb (or anyone else) has the sole right to determine what distro to use, but I still think it is worth weighing in on them if they are a) controversial and b) backed up with claims that seem to fail the straight face test. Not a "high crime or misdemeanor," but surely something worth questioning/pushing back on.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Compared to other Anglo-American institutions, Chicago has an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings. I don't think your experience is generalizable.

You're right! That's precisely my point; taking my experience to be the norm would be quite foolish, just as taking yours to be the norm was. Brad has helpfully done a bit of the legwork that I keep promising to, but I am curious: how many departments would you like me to search for classes on Nietzsche or Foucault in order to test the claim that most departments don't cover them?

As a start, I decided to look through the top bracket of ACF Nationals last year, where I found that only one of the six schools did not offer a course involving either Nietzsche or Foucault. I was, however, slightly confused to find that the school in question was UMN, rather than UMD, as it appears that UMD's philosophy department has listed in the 2019-2020 course catalog a class (PHIL 324) described as "A study of authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger..." Is UMD also an "an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings?"

That class is something ARHU, which is dominated by the English department, forces us to offer and has been exclusively taught by grad students. No one in our department wants that class to be offered. Even at that, I think this supports my position that continental should, at most, be a tiny slice of the overall distro. We literally offer more classes on the philosophy of physics than we do on continental philosophy.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Also, just to clarify, I really liked the questions that were in the set. I just wish they covered a broader area, and want to express in strong terms how unfortunate it would be for the subdistribution adopted here to become any sort of norm.

My back-to-the-classroom strategy probably isn't very doable at Regs and certainly not EFT; so, I don't expect this to become the norm (though Penn Bowl did do a very laudable job of covering content you'd actually learn in the classroom.)

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Compared to other Anglo-American institutions, Chicago has an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings. I don't think your experience is generalizable.

You're right! That's precisely my point; taking my experience to be the norm would be quite foolish, just as taking yours to be the norm was. Brad has helpfully done a bit of the legwork that I keep promising to, but I am curious: how many departments would you like me to search for classes on Nietzsche or Foucault in order to test the claim that most departments don't cover them?

As a start, I decided to look through the top bracket of ACF Nationals last year, where I found that only one of the six schools did not offer a course involving either Nietzsche or Foucault. I was, however, slightly confused to find that the school in question was UMN, rather than UMD, as it appears that UMD's philosophy department has listed in the 2019-2020 course catalog a class (PHIL 324) described as "A study of authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger..." Is UMD also an "an extremely odd department with very nonstandard course offerings?"

That class is something ARHU, which is dominated by the English department, forces us to offer and has been exclusively taught by grad students. No one in our department wants that class to be offered. Even at that, I think this supports my position that continental should, at most, be a tiny slice of the overall distro. We literally offer more classes on the philosophy of physics than we do on continental philosophy.

This thread has convinced me: for Nationals, philosophy will be exclusively analytic. However, we will reduce its place to .5/.5 in the distro. The leftover .5/.5 will be used for our new category "not even really works of philosophy," which will cover thinkers like Plato, Nietzsche, and others.

[heterodyne]

We literally offer more classes on the philosophy of physics than we do on continental philosophy.

This is a useful fact for illustrating the degree to which your department is not representative of the norm in the way that you clearly take it to be. For instance, PhilPapers indexes about 31k papers on the philosophy of physical science, while it indexes 134k papers on continental philosophy. The fact that you failed to realize this, or did realize it and nevertheless chose to "[base] the sub-distributions for philosophy off the course requirements at UMD," is baffling.

But, rather than continue to guess at exactly how hyperbolic you intend your generalizations to be, I want to raise concern over the invocation of "back to the classroom" here. I see no reason why, in a field whose borders and proper subject matter remain as contentious as philosophy, we should put our trust in the haphazard and historically contingent nature of current American philosophy departments. (John McCumber's work, which I'm yet to read a convincing argument against, puts forth very persuasively that the current interests and focus of American philosophy departments can be partially traced to McCarthy-era university politics.) Many people engage with philosophy outside of those departments, and I have a hard time seeing why this engagement ought to be treated as less legitimate than that undergone within those departments. If we take the things they are reading to be "philosophical" -- and I have no idea why we wouldn't -- then those things should be asked in the philosophy distribution. Yes, this means that the way we split up the subject for quizbowl will weigh the history of philosophy somewhat higher than current American departments do.

I apologize for taking up so much space over such a small part of a distribution, and for a tournament where I liked the questions in that distribution! I just feel the position you are advancing to be an echo of the worst intellectual myopias of certain portions of the American philosophical academy, and would hate to see it go unquestioned. I have even less sympathy for the position when it seems supported only by an unfounded parochialism that holds UMD's distinctively specialized department to be a good representative of the field as a whole.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I just feel the position you are advancing to be an echo of the worst intellectual myopias of certain portions of the American philosophical academy, and would hate to see it go unquestioned.

This is definitely my biggest beef with this approach to the distribution. Without venturing to dismiss the analytic project, I suspect that this sort of myopia Alston mentions (along with idiosyncracies of European intellectual culture) is a big reason why a lot of continental philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek sell quite well in Europe, Nietzsche has permeated the culture, etc. while you'd be hard-pressed to find similar recognition of Quine even though he's undoubtedly more "important" to what you learn in most American classrooms. Obviously popular recognition is not the sole metric on which we should base our decisions on what to emphasize in quizbowl, or we'd be writing a bunch of questions on pulp romance novels, but these people are actual philosophers who are treated as such by both ordinary people and substantial bodies of academic work outside contemporary Anglophone academia, and who people who are interested in the subject of philosophy read.

The implicit denigration of "hobbyist" knowledge from some of the posts above is especially irksome, since all quizbowl players are ultimately hobbyists and I suspect that if you look at people who have some substantial knowledge of philosophy in this game, the ratio of "hobbyists" to "academically trained philosophy majors" is probably in excess of 10 to 1. Incidentally, this is probably also the ratio by which the quizbowl audience would shrink if we took applied a narrow view about what's worth asking to the whole 20/20 distribution, since there's just not enough room to go around - not to mention that we'd probably run out of material pretty quickly, especially in philosophy.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

This set was one of my favorite sets that I've ever played. I thought the literature and the music were refreshing and well-executed, for the most part, and tossup difficulty was reasonably controlled on the whole. This tournament also did an extremely admirable job experimenting with more interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary content in a way that felt more organic than contrived, which I greatly appreciated.

I agree with Will's observation about this set's easy parts and general bonus difficulty control above, although I do think that on the whole the bonuses were also well-written and controlled -- there were times when I felt as if it was quite clear (sometimes excessively so) that one part was The Easy Part, and then there were times when it was difficult for me to tell the difference between the easy and the medium part, or the medium and the hard part. This issue was occasionally exacerbated by the fact that some medium or easy parts tried to obfuscate the answer in an attempt to match the difficulty appropriately (such as avoiding "curved yellow fruit"-esque easy parts), but it instead would sometimes cause undue confusion over why the bonus would choose to phrase these clues in those ways. I think that this situation could perhaps be ameliorated by zooming out and really considering the difficulty of bonuses in relation to each other, rather than in a vacuum -- that way, these jarring shifts in difficulty would more likely be caught.

That being said, I do want to reiterate that I think that this was still an excellent set, and, for a "nats-minus" set, its difficulty was judiciously controlled, particularly on tossups. My compliments to the writers and editors!

[jmarvin_]

I want to concur the comments from (Will/)Alston about the analytic/continental breakdown here. First, just to be clear, I thought that the analytic content present was fantastically written, and even as I played the worst quizbowl of my life (in terms of my execution) yesterday, I was really engaged and interested in all the content. I thought the tossups on Newcomb's paradox, the cosmological argument, and a few others were really great and rewarded real knowledge super well. My complaint is not at all about the content that was there, which was universally well-executed in every subject I'm competent enough to judge. My only other quibble about the content would be that I was surprised that your approach didn't yield more straight up philosophical logic content, which is fine, but is something I'd expect to have been more present based on the avowed editorial ideals and which would've been welcome.

And yet - I think the above posters are correct that it's, as Alston put it, "baffling" that you seem to think that a "back to the classroom" approach to philosophy would produce a totally analytically-skewed (and post-1970ish skewed, at that) distribution. You seem to be totally unaware that there are a large number of universities in the United States where contemporary / recent modern analytic philosophy is not really taught at all, or only as a specialized elective, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. For example, almost all the top Catholic universities in the United States (such as Boston College, Villanova, Georgetown, Loyola, DePaul, Catholic University, St. Louis University, Fordham, and notably excluding Notre Dame), many of the SUNY schools, Penn State, Vanderbilt, Emory, Tulane, Syracuse, and some of the public California universities, have philosophy departments with faculty that totally or by plurality specialize in continental material. That's not to mention analytic departments with significant minority continental faculty, or with analytically-trained scholars interested in continental / historical thought, like Pitt, Northwestern, MSU, Rice, WUStL, etc.

I was almost a philosophy major at Boston College (ended up with a theology degree because there were fewer requirements and I had been taking courses all over the humanities) and I literally did not have the opportunity to study analytic philosophy in the classroom—I had to read papers, SEP articles, and books for myself out of my own interest in what the majority of universities were doing. Moreover, I was able to take graduate-level research courses on phenomenology, Derrida, continental hermeneutics, and modern Japanese philosophy (Kyoto school etc). Were the PhD students in these courses, who spend years specializing in and publishing papers on these topics, who end up with tenure track positions in philosophy departments at rates similar to or better than graduates of UMD and comparable schools, not real philosophy scholars? Are you really willing to say that literally all of these universities, a significant minority of all the top schools in the United States, are so deviant from the one true Anglo-American philosophy curriculum that they can and should be ignored by a "back to the classroom" approach? Again, this is not about my university in particular, just as Alston's comments weren't just about UChicago's department and its idiosyncrasies: the point is that these "alternative" philosophy departments illustrate the actual heterogeneity of philosophical study in the United States' philosophy departments, of which you seem skeptical.

The fact that continental "theory" has relevance in other humanities and social sciences, and is widely read by non-professional/academic philosophy enthusiasts, is a sound argument for a slightly disproportionate representation of these materials due to crossover. But this argument need not even be made to justify a substantial inclusion of properly continental material in the philosophy distribution. In many top research universities, at all levels, these materials are studied in the classroom and research is conducted about/around them. I can't think of any serious reason for deciding that this scholarship and these students' experiences are less legitimate and worthy of quizbowl inclusion than analytic materials that doesn't betray a philosophical bias.

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

I based the sub-distributions for philosophy off the course requirements at UMD. While I appreciate your concerns about accessibility, I think it would be silly if we wrote chemistry based on, say, the chemistry history majors know. At UMD and most major Anglo-American universities, there aren't philosophy classes where you read Nietzsche or Foucault, and I don't think they should be included in the philosophy distribution. I think you're far more likely to engage with them in comparative literature classes or somewhere else. I originally planned to include more of these topics elsewhere in the set, but, as I said above, I was stretched too thin. As to the complaints about the difficulty, I definitely overshot it on a couple of questions, but this is also an open tournament (if you look at my philosophy for Terrapin last year, it was, I think, very reasonable and accessible.) Even those hard answerlines were on extremely core topics, Russell's analysis of definite descriptions marked the birth of analytic philosophy (and is something I talked about in at least three different undergrad classes) and Goodman's NRI is covered in pretty much every undergrad philosophy of science class, I certainly wasn't trying to give everyone playing the set the middle finger.

History majors learn much more philosophy than chemistry, so analogizing philosophy and chemistry is fallacious, particularly when Will listed several reasons why qb philosophy should be more heterodox than qb science.

For whatever it's worth, I have a history degree from a normal American state university, and in all my classes that I took for my history major, I remember covering absolutely no content that would come up in the philosophy distribution, whether in the way that it has been interpreted by Caleb or in the way that it has been interpreted by others. Literature students may cover philosophy, but as a history student I did not.

I know I shouldn't beat a dead horse, and having Joey Goldman on my team meant that the emphasis on analytic philosophy meant substantial amounts of free points for us, but both of these takes are also utterly unhinged from this history major's perspective. Naveed is in a sub-discipline (sports history) whose scholarship I have found fairly abnormally averse to the sort of deep engagement with the sort of continental/"soft" philosophy I'll here call "theory" that is the norm in many, perhaps even most, other sub-disciplines. Graduate-level history classes (including one basically entirely focused on "theory" that the "normal American state university" that I attend makes all of its incoming history grad students take) are also much more intensive than undergraduate ones in this regard. Let us not forget, also, that intellectual history is a major branch of scholarship that is fully grounded on such engagement! I doubt that any of its practitioners would agree with either siloing their material and their methods into fully separate categories of knowledge or dismissing either as categorically "not philosophy" (or "not history" for that matter). Another point that might be raised is that we absolutely do not write history based on what history majors know (if indeed you could even generalize this over so broad a discipline) or what scholars of history know. The same is, I think, the case for categories like geography and literature. This, although I selfishly would enjoy some minor tweaks in favor of writing history off of what history majors know, is fundamentally as it should be; quiz bowl should absolutely reward engagement with scholarship, but not with this much disdain for access for amateurs. I suppose the overarching point here is that it would be advisable in the future to proceed with more caution in assuming that our own experiences of any of these disciplines are universal.

EDIT: I suppose I should add that on the whole I liked this tournament a lot; history was consistently well-executed, with an emphasis on core topics that, although not quite my personal cup of tea, was probably the best course of action here. I also really enjoyed the literature, especially the world literature, and thought the Other Ac was much more fun than the normal Drumft bowl. I will also echo the praise upthread for the linguistics; seeing material from my syntax coursework come up was a very welcome surprise. The religion was also consistently really creative and fun to listen to.

[Red Panda Cub]

I really, really enjoyed this set. I thought it broached new ground in the categories I'm qualified to comment on in a very conscientious and controlled way (perhaps sometimes even over-cautious, e.g. the cycling TU dropping Poulidor/Anquetil in the second sentence, or Schiaparelli as a hard part?).

The issues I had with it, echoing the above discussion, didn't really relate to the execution of questions, so much as the decision of what to write abut. Now, most of these decisions that I noticed benefited me personally, since they skewed the set towards recent art and recent anglo-analytic phil. Certainly these are both topics that I think are probably slightly underrepresented in quizbowl in the main, but I think this set stepped a bit far.

W/r/t philosophy, I studied at basically the place that is to blame for the fact that anglo philosophy departments are, in the main, the way they are today, and even I thought this set went too far in this direction. (Also, fwiw, at Oxford the philosophy faculty does indeed offer an undergraduate class where you read Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Sarte, Heidegger, etc., and it recently held a conference with papers on Foucault. On the other hand, at Oxford the only place you can study Peirce is in the theology faculty, so the godfather of this school of thought seems to suggest "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" should be in the religion distro). I think it's a misconstrual of the what is meant by the "back to the classroom" approach to suggest only these things can come up. To me, that was used as a heavy handed metaphor for getting away from the school of writing that broaches new topics by just picking random hard/medium parts from bonuses and turning them into TUs, making the game an insular arms race. "Back to the classroom" seemed to suggest that new material should reflect the reality of what intellectually curious people engage with, which, sure, is mostly from the classroom, but surely is also from other sources. I basically only did analytic or early modern modules at uni, but in that time I definitely read more "continental" philosophy than analytic in my free time, and I'm sure this is reflected by the experience of many others. I don't really see the argument for parochialism here, basically.

An additional issue I had, is that basically all of the analytic phil TUs covered material you learn in a single 8 week course at Oxford (the kind of cruddy and hodgepodge module of "Knowledge and Reality") , so even within the analytic realm it felt like there was a lack of diversity. Again, the questoins were very well executed, and this tournament had the best philosophy questions of any set that I have played, and questions were clearly written with care, but they just felt narrow.

[reindeer]

I don't really have a horse in this race, but my vote would be for quizbowl philosophy's "back to the classroom" proponents to move more into computational ethics, following e.g. the recent announcement by the MIT philosophy department:

[Kevin]

First, I want to say that I enjoyed reading for the online mirror. During day 1 I found myself thinking, "Wow, I would be playing horribly," but by the end of packet 13 I thought "I'd be losing to better players, not being destroyed by an unfair set of packets." In retrospect I wish I had gone to the mirror at Georgia Tech. As a reader I thought the packets played well to a strong field. I can only remember maybe one five- or six-person buzzer race.

A few things that I thought were a little bit strange: questions on both the Cistercians and the Trappists. I know that one was categorized as history and the other as religion, but to have two Catholic religious orders as answer lines was a little weird, let alone two closely related religious orders. As someone with 20 years of being a student and a teacher in Catholic schools, I'm not complaining, I just thought it was an odd choice. Overall I think the religion content was quite good. I thought the "and with your spirit/Peshitta/Holy Ghost" and "Seattle/complementarian/LDS" bonuses were well done. But the Gethsemane TU probably shouldn't have used the quote "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" in the first line. Statistically I don't know how that played out, but it seemed like that clue was a lot easier than the clues in the second sentence.

Second, I thought it was weird to have two sports questions in "other academic." The cycling one did have at least one history-based clue, but the uneven bars question was purely a sports question. Now, as a sports fan who's probably better at "other sports" than the Big 3 American sports, I'm not complaining. But I'm puzzled why these questions are included instead of questions about more popular sports. I don't have a strong opinion on whether or not an open tournament of this difficulty level should have trash or not, but I don't get why a tournament would have these two tossups and nothing else about sports.