2022 WORKSHOP: Thanks and General Discussion

[Santa Claus]

I am very happy to once again be thanking the many people who have made WORKSHOP possible: the 28 writers, 9 editors, and 5 logistic team members. Thanks as well to everyone who played, staffed, playtested, or helped in other ways.

Each of our subject editors is welcome to thank their writers and highlight those they felt excelled. I will begin by thanking our diligent logistics team for their work. In particular, this marks the third year that we will be telling everyone to hire Will Grossman: the speed and efficacy of his work helped make this year's set as straightforward as such a process can be. Special thanks to Mia McGill and Ashish Subramanian for TDing the online playtest mirror and our diligent packetizers Evan Knox and Sadie Britton.

As the editor of other science, chemistry, and mythology, I am very thankful to my writers Chinmay Sahasrabudhe, Dan Ni, Daniel Cronin, Erie Mitchell, Evan Knox, Jim Fan, Ian Chow, Justin Zhang, Kevin Ye, Martin Profant, and Sky Li. The questions they wrote and the ideas they had helped contribute to the quality of the set. In particular, I'd like to praise Sky for writing half of the set's computer science and much of the myth as well, Justin for his questions in chemistry, and Evan for being so eager to contribute to subjects across all of other science.

I would like to extend my thanks to my fellow editors — Adam Fine, Athena Kern, Caroline Mao, Chris Sims, Jordan Brownstein, Michael Kearney, Nick Jensen, and Wonyoung Jang — for their work organizing, planning, and (of course) editing this set. It wouldn't have been possible without their hard work, and they deserve great praise for theirs. I also want to thank my co-head-editors (headitors?) Jordan and Olivia for their help, to Jordan for the herculean feat of writing more questions than he edited, and to Caroline and Chris for their prodigious editing.

I am happy that WORKSHOP has seen three years of production, and I hope that there will be many more in years to come. Keep an eye out for a public application form for writers and other roles later this year for WORKSHOP 2023!

This thread is also for general discussion of the set. Please attempt to frame discussion constructively - our goal is to produce the best set and to provide good feedback for our writers.

[Sima Guang Hater]

This set was very good overall. There were a lot of interesting and creative ideas, and I think the set hit its difficulty marks on average. There were occasionally harder questions, but I think that's appropriate for a set like this to keep people on their toes. I also appreciate that powers were gettable and hard parts were generally reasonable and well-chosen. You should all be congratulated on writing a good set, and it should play well.

There were a few general flaws in this set, mainly the abundance of answerlines that are vague or won't play well (land, the west from Egyptian myth, the bonus part on being gay and sexually active, prion formation) and the occasional leadin that's vague and/or applies to more than one thing (see my post in the other thread). This set (like most) would benefit from some more reverse clue lookup and tightening up answerlines.

[ryanrosenberg]

I agree with Eric; I thought this was a good, fun set that needs maybe a little more than the standard post-playtesting polishing but should be a good experience for teams.

[caroline]

I edited all of the literature in this set, as I did for 2021. My goals were more or less “produce good questions” and “be a good mentor,” which I hope I have succeeded in. I would love to hear your feedback, here or privately if you’d prefer.

Thank you to my writers: Ariel, Ashish, Chris, Daniel, Erie, Jonathan, Jim, Raymond, Sam, Wenying, and Urbas. In particular, Ariel wrote a set of really great and evocatively clued handful of questions (including the very neat link on “white roses” in Vallejo + Marti), Raymond wrote wonderful and well-gradated questions that required very little editing (the teachers TU, heroically agreeing to read De Quincey to help finish the set), and Wenying had lots of creative and fun ideas I never would’ve thought of (wizards, Draupadi, Moretti, and many more). They were also very responsive to my feedback and I enjoyed talking with them about their questions. I’ve built up a bad habit of telling my writers I will give them feedback on their overall performance and then I don’t do it (sorry, 2021 mentees), so if you actually want some, please message me and I’m happy to chat.

I would also like to thank fellow editors Athena, Michael, and Jordan for writing several lit questions, especially Jordan for performing the valuable service of writing things I didn’t want to learn about (and making them interesting anyway) as well as basically everything else he did on the set.

Also, if you’re interested in learning to write literature, hit me up and please apply to WORKSHOP in the future—I do this for people like you.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

I edited the Auditory and Audiovisual/Other Arts (which is comprised of: opera, musical theater, film, dance, architecture, design, textiles, fashion, and cosmetics) for this set. As a returning editor, my philosophy for my categories remained mostly unchanged:

My general philosophy as the arts editor was to build on my past subject editing experience –– which often skewed more adventurous and novel –– by finding a better mix between “meat-and-potatoes” content and the spicier fare that I am wont to write about. All throughout trying to meet an optimal ratio, I also wanted and pushed my writers to include as much art made by and for womxn, POC, members of the LGBTQ+ community, etc. and expand the canon’s conception of “art."

I do think that, this year, I did decide to push the envelope a bit more than usual because I observed in a lot of recent sets that the canon has been expanding and diversifying at a relatively rapid pace -- a development that I welcome, of course. To this end, I experimented a bit more with my subdistributions and made some unconventional choices, such as deciding to include more fashion/cosmetics (2/3) than "traditional" opera (1/2, although the 1/1 musical theater was also included under the opera umbrella). I believe this resulted in perhaps my most experimental and bold output as an editor thus far, which is obviously saying a lot. At the end of the day, I believe that it is a quizbowl editor's duty to keep their finger on the pulse of both the developing trends in quizbowl as well as what is significant in real-life society today (not just what was significant one or two centuries ago).

As for the WORKSHOP writer that I would like to give all my flowers to: I believe that Sky Li should be on everybody's radar as an invaluable asset to any writing team. Almost all of the questions in my categories were written by either me or Sky, and thankfully Sky was more than happy to write great questions about content that I frankly could not be bothered to come up with cool questions about. His questions required minimal editing and oversight, and when I did have comments, Sky was quick to address them and did not need to be told twice. Sky was easily one of the brightest and most hardworking writers I've ever had the pleasure of managing; he has my highest endorsement for anybody looking for an arts writer -- or perhaps, even, an editor -- for their projects.

[cwasims]

I edited European and World History, Geo/CE/Other, and Economics for this set (which is easily the most I've ever edited for a set, so thanks to the other editors for letting me try my hand at some more categories). I always think I have nothing to say in these posts, but lo and behold some walls of text got written, so here goes.

I know that World History in particular often gets complaints about an overabundance of country answer lines, so I was very pleased that the writers and I were able to come up with tossups that included only one in that category (and only slightly more in European History) while managing to cover a pretty wide array of topics. On the margins I also tried to include a few clues from the extensive social science literature on historical topics (such as in the bonus on the relationship between human capital and population growth in Europe) - hopefully they were at least interesting to hear given they're quite extracanonical in QB. Of course, a huge thanks goes out to the excellent writers: Allan Lee was a question-writing machine, especially on bonuses, and consistently proposed and delivered good question topics; the deservedly-lauded Sky Li produced many delightful questions such as the tossups on childbirth and cats in Early Modern Europe; Daniel Cronin displayed his passion for Medieval history by writing most of the questions in that subcategory; and Jack Izzo, Sam Hauer, Jim Fan, Pranav Veluri, and Ashish Subramanian all contributed great questions as well.

For Geo/CE/Other, my main goal was simply to reduce what I think is a pretty unjustifiable American bias in these categories (I've heard some people express 50/50 American/World as a goal for CE in particular, which I find absurd) and I think this set managed to cover many regions of the world with a good mix of topics. Due to the nature of the category, there were quite a few writers in this 1/1: the biggest thanks has to go to Evan Knox, who wrote a large number of outstanding questions across this category that drew on "modern world" material in a very engaging way; Jack Izzo wrote some great questions drawing in part on his background in journalism; Alana Dickey wrote geography questions that mixed physical and human geography in good proportions; Wenying Wu created some delightful common links in Other Academic; Sam Hauer displayed his expertise in his current events questions; and Ashish Subramaniam, Raymond Chen, Martin Profant, and Erie Mitchell's questions nicely rounded out the category.

The number of economics questions in this set was fairly small, but I wanted to make sure that some applied topics (like many of the clues in the healthcare and recessions tossups) got represented, somewhat at the expense of pure theory. Although I am not in general a fan of questions on old economists, Erie Mitchell's question on Henry George was a great choice to bring his still-relevant ideas into the canon at this difficulty level.

Thanks as well to the head editors, especially to Jordan for his thoughtful comments, and to my fellow editors - particularly to Nick Jensen for both contributing some questions to my categories and for his extremely diligent proofreading and comments. If you have any comments about the categories I edited, please feel free to let me know either on the forums or privately.

[benchapman]

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed the relative lack of "touch-your-butt" easy parts in this set compared to other sets at this difficulty. It made them much more meaningful and (as we scored ~13 PPB) consistently kept us engaged on every part of the bonus (except some hard parts we just had no clue on). I'm not sure whether it was a deliberate choice or just a function of the set overall (at least for me) playing harder than Regionals, but either way it definitely enhanced my experience.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Athena's editorial work on the Religion category remains excellent, expansive, inclusive, and a joy to play; I hope to see similar great efforts from them and the other writers who produced this set of Religion questions in the future. It's awesome to see thoughtful inclusion of dharmic religion content and "minor religions," two areas that many sets at this level aren't nearly as adventurous on as they could stand to be, particularly the former.

Chris did an admirable job taking a first-time crack at European and World History at this level. I do think a lot of non-ancient Euro/World History hard parts tended towards the challenging side, but none of them seemed something ridiculous that wasn't worth knowing; I'll comment more on this in the Specific Question discussion sometime soon.

(I've heard some people express 50/50 American/World as a goal for CE in particular, which I find absurd)

+100 on this, which is very much an NAQT-derived norm which I think mACF sets are right to disregard at the college level

[Father of the Ragdoll]

In general I enjoyed this set and am very grateful for the continued effort from the WORKSHOP team but I found myself consistently frustrated by some issues that were mentioned from older comments.

I found a lot of the set to have rough prose that was hard to parse at game speed. I also thought that a lot of the clues to be overly coy and confusing to hear and figure out what is being asked about. Similarly, I found a lot of the set (more on that later) to be quite topheavy and cliffy and would have benefited from more reverse clue lookup like Eric mentioned.

I think that the most noticeable thing I saw was that the other arts were much too hard with a (in my opinion) mismanaged subdistro. I appreciate the approach to novel ideas and "real world" important things but so much of the arts felt markedly harder than the rest of the set. I also felt that choreography and dance were overrepresented at the expense of architecture and jazz. That said, I did genuinely enjoy the under looked at areas of other arts such as cosmetics, fashion, and textiles.

I also noticed some similar issues in social science. In particular, much of the soc sci felt very very hard until the power break at which point it often became cliffy and resulted in buzzer races. I also thought that the social science lacked a lot of "meat and potatoes" content, particularly in psychology and sociology. I hash out some of the specifics in my other post but overall I think that social science was simply too hard and needed more buzzable clues in power to be really playable. Doing a quick glance, several questions have nothing but canon busting clues before powerbreak (or things that have come up 1 time before). That's not necessarily a good indicator of difficulty but it does give a good indication that something may be off for a regs dif set.

This may be a difference in philosophy (hehe) between Jordan and me, but I felt that the philosophy in this set also had an odd skew that left out a lot of meat and potatoes. Overall the phil was fun to play and had a lot of interesting content.

Myth and religion seemed pretty good on the whole, especially religion. Mythology had some questions I would have preferred to not have heard but most of the RM was very playable and well constructed.

Like I said, overall I enjoyed playing the set but there were several issues that made what would otherwise be a purely fun day of quiz bowl unnecessarily frustrating at several points of the day.

[Jem Casey]

Thanks for your detailed feedback, Brad!

I think the truth about the difficulty of the thought (i.e. SS and phil) tossups lies somewhere between your sense that the power clues were mostly “unbuzzable,” and my fanciful hopes that clues coming up a couple times recently and/or being famous in my head would be enough to guarantee respectable buzz distributions across the national field. On one hand, the thought questions were powered in 63 of 175 chances (36% rate) at the playtest and Yale sites combined; it would be very unusual to see such a robust power rate at, say, the main site of a 3.5 dot set (e.g. IO), so it’s probably safe to say the early clues were a couple notches easier than what you’d expect at the harder levels of the game. On the other hand, the power rates of the thought at the other mirrors so far have been pretty paltry, which could probably have been predicted from the number of questions that, as you noted, didn’t really dig into solidly canonical material before the power-mark. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that I wasn’t more careful with meeting that standard, since I often left comments suggesting that my co-editors make their late power clues easier (sorry, gang!).

On another note, I’m not sure I agree that the philosophy leaves out “meat and potatoes”--in the packets played at your site, power clues and hard parts cover works and substantive concepts due to Nietzsche, Hegel, Spinoza, Peirce, Plato (twice), Aristotle (twice), Kierkegaard, Hume, and Marcus Aurelius, as well as core 20th-century analytic guys like Quine, Austin, and Nozick. But if what you mean is that the question concepts were too goofy or the clues too hard, I’ll definitely concede that point--a few more standard cuts like the Ethics tossup would have been wise.

----

Since I’m very bad at remembering to post on the forums, wanted to take this opportunity to thank my co-editors, who were all a delight to work with (not to mention, pretty good at this quizbowl editing thing). Thanks also to the writers who contributed to SS and philosophy; besides producing awesome question ideas, they all were timely, responsive, and good-natured about the lengthy feedback I left on their questions. Special shout-outs to: Evan Knox, who wrote the most thought questions of the writers, brought an unprecedented level of detail to his question claims, and was overall a dream to work with due to his impressive research skills, absurd response times, and great clue execution; Jack Izzo, who came up with great ideas like the “smiling” psych tossup, and improved markedly as a qb stylist with each question he wrote; and Torontonians Wenying Wu, whose bonuses could have been put in the set unedited (and basically were), and Sky Li, who stepped in to whip up an excellent 1/1 of linguistics late in set production.

I’m not planning to edit for the next iteration of WORKSHOP, but would encourage anyone curious about quizbowl writing to apply whenever it happens; it's a good time! The best argument I can make is that you’ll get to work with Caroline Mao, whose insight as a theorist of quizbowl writing and thoughtfulness as a mentor are truly in a class of their own.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

I don't have too much commentary to add about the actual set. It was fun to play and had lots of good ideas. More importantly it seems to have introduced a lot of new(er) writers to this level of writing. I do mostly agree with Brad regarding the arts subdistro even if I personally enjoyed hearing more fashion/design.

While looking at the packets afterwards to read the ones we didn't hear at our site, I noticed that the subheading of the packets claims that the set is "Produced by [list of editors (?)]." Perhaps this seems like a nitpick, but I really don't like that this implies that a large-scale project like this is produced only by the editors. I did see that there is a list of credits with the packets, which IMO makes it fine to only list editors or whoever on each individual packet (especially with so many writers), but I think this would be better phrased as "Edited by" or "Headed by" or something similar.

[csa2125]

This set was largely solid, but seems to follow a trend of "weird" regular(ish) difficulty sets (along with, to varying extents, this year's Regionals, ARCADIA, HARI, and Winter; but this "weirdness"--which I feel is invariably the bad kind of "weird"--probably prompts its own separate discussion); additionally, a very large proportion of bonuses seemed very miscalibrated: mediums were frequently quite underwritten, and hard parts frequently overshot. There was a great number of bonuses without a true / clear easy or a true hard to players at our Yale mirror due to this.

Contentwise, I can't really object to many of the set's question content or answerlines. However, I repeat the complaints about Philosophy and Social Science aired above, and I have to complain about the general drift of the history (Chris was buzzing on these more, but it just seemed to ask for a lot of strange things in strange ways, and had notable biases toward asking content that would prompt "who cares?" reacts from us and our opponents). I have some quibbles about the focus on econ content away from theory and a desire for econ not to get the short shrift within the social sciences. I philosophically object to the magnitude of the trend towards the hyper-contemporary in quizbowl (esp. in the arts), and was not at all feeling the 2/3 fashion, 1/2 opera*, and the film I heard ("samurai" seemingly confused several players due to the unemployed status of the ronin for the relevant portion of the film, leading to answers like "criminal" and "monk"; Rivette seemed like a hard hard, among other hard hards in this tournament; and post-2000s(?) Danish film isn't in my wheelhouse but seemed strange and hard to some people I heard from for whom it is in their wheelhouse) But I must separate this following complaint, and the larger issue to which it is attached, to its own paragraph:

Quizbowl's increasing aversion to opera has become increasingly strange to me, given its great importance to centuries of the Western musical tradition, and giving it just 1 bonus's worth more representation that musical theater does not feel entirely founded or coherent with visions presented in this set towards some notion of large-scale "relevance" (citing, as examples of this notion, the move towards more "world" content in the Other category, and the "editor's duty to keep their finger on the pulse of both the developing trends in quizbowl as well as what is significant in real-life society today" as opposed to "not just what was significant one or two centuries"; the latter of which I find oddly disconnected from the notions of continuity across periods and traditions, and from the notion of the indebtedness of the present to the past which quizbowl continuously and circumspectly instills). I truly appreciate the intent behind the subdistributional changes towards making minoritized creators more salient, but there is a counterintuitive element which "forcing out" centuries of strong, deep traditions such as opera for such content as fashion largely pulled from the last decade or so promotes, of making it seem one has to look for content from the "shallow past" of a much less serious and much more transient nature to ask about "relevant" or "important" contributions by minority creators, which element I cannot help but notice; certainly things that have been created recently can have importance and relevance, and it may be possible to recognize at this time what works and creators will have staying power, lasting importance, and lasting relevance, but it didn't feel like the other arts content of this sort really "sold" me much on why the vaunted sense of "relevance" should to such a heavy degree outweigh centuries of widely studied and influential architecture and opera, or decades of similarly influential jazz and (older) film and photography. I have similar opinions on "relevant" geography (moving almost entirely away from physical geography content within geo/CE) and towards "relevant" social science (moving often away from influential work because of the must of the "historical").

Conversely, I must praise the excellent work of the writers and editors of the literature and religion and mythology content, which did integrate past and present "relevance" masterfully. However, I have to question the choice of editors known for their issues with their overreaching difficulties in terms of difficulty and tendencies towards "experimentation" (which, several times, such as in this tournament's history content, has served as a thin veneer for questionable clue and answerline choice, choice of subject matter, and failures to appropriately cover a sufficient breadth of the relevant subject area and failures to correctly sub-distribute and/or to cover the core "meat and potatoes" in their subjects) for a set whose production is explicitly aimed at training and equipping new writers. While new writers should be made to feel unafraid to break boundaries and be creative, there are clearly good (this tournament's literature, religion, and myth) and bad (its OFA, history, and some social science) forms of "experimentality." There are clearer more "stable" and "responsible" editors who could have been chosen to curate much better bonuses, and thereby and overall to much more effectively mentor new writers and even curb some excessive tendencies of more established writers and editors by example.

*Here, I read "unconventional choices, such as deciding to include more fashion/cosmetics (2/3) than 'traditional' opera (1/2)" as meaning that content leaning more towards the "visual" part of "other fine arts" was expanded at the expense of "audio" (inclusive of "audiovisual") content such as opera; if this was not intended, I apologize, but I recall at least one recent announcement mentioning devoting 2/3 of OFA to "visual" and 1/3 to "auditory," which I would strongly object to as deeply ill-advised; I don't find the visual / audio OFA split perfect in the first place (often discourages the cluing tandem "audio" and "visual" aspects of audiovisual works, e.g., where I find the combination of visual and audio elements in several audiovisual genres and works of great interest, powerful effect, and great relevance and importance), but it does very effectively reward both audio and visual players and reflect the roughly equal "real-world relevance" of "auditory" and "visual" art forms.

[ErikC]

This set was largely solid, but seems to follow a trend of "weird" regular(ish) difficulty sets (along with, to varying extents, this year's Regionals, ARCADIA, HARI, and Winter; but this "weirdness"--which I feel is invariably the bad kind of "weird"--probably prompts its own separate discussion); additionally, a very large proportion of bonuses seemed very miscalibrated: mediums were frequently quite underwritten, and hard parts frequently overshot. There was a great number of bonuses without a true / clear easy or a true hard to players at our Yale mirror due to this.

Contentwise, I can't really object to many of the set's question content or answerlines. However, I repeat the complaints about Philosophy and Social Science aired above, and I have to complain about the general drift of the history (Chris was buzzing on these more, but it just seemed to ask for a lot of strange things in strange ways, and had notable biases toward asking content that would prompt "who cares?" reacts from us and our opponents). I have some quibbles about the focus on econ content away from theory and a desire for econ not to get the short shrift within the social sciences. I philosophically object to the magnitude of the trend towards the hyper-contemporary in quizbowl (esp. in the arts), and was not at all feeling the 2/3 fashion, 1/2 opera*, and the film I heard ("samurai" seemingly confused several players due to the unemployed status of the ronin for the relevant portion of the film, leading to answers like "criminal" and "monk"; Rivette seemed like a hard hard, among other hard hards in this tournament; and post-2000s(?) Danish film isn't in my wheelhouse but seemed strange and hard to some people I heard from for whom it is in their wheelhouse) But I must separate this following complaint, and the larger issue to which it is attached, to its own paragraph:

*Here, I read "unconventional choices, such as deciding to include more fashion/cosmetics (2/3) than 'traditional' opera (1/2)" as meaning that content leaning more towards the "visual" part of "other fine arts" was expanded at the expense of "audio" (inclusive of "audiovisual") content such as opera; if this was not intended, I apologize, but I recall at least one recent announcement mentioning devoting 2/3 of OFA to "visual" and 1/3 to "auditory," which I would strongly object to as deeply ill-advised; I don't find the visual / audio OFA split perfect in the first place (often discourages the cluing tandem "audio" and "visual" aspects of audiovisual works, e.g., where I find the combination of visual and audio elements in several audiovisual genres and works of great interest, powerful effect, and great relevance and importance), but it does very effectively reward both audio and visual players and reflect the roughly equal "real-world relevance" of "auditory" and "visual" art forms.

Besides what Brad said before that I agreed with, I also think there was a bit too many tossups on fun ideas that really seemed out of place here. An entire tossup on smiling is not going to have many clues people will know for power, as it seemed a lot of the soc sci had. It felt like questions like this were created from the bottom up to justify having a few cool clues - perhaps a bonus with smiling as a neat hard part at the start would have worked better.

I actually think the film content (besides a hard second clue in the Denmark tossup that made it play harder than it should have) was pretty good and improvement on what some tournaments have been doing lately of asking for the same few people without much of a theme or random, well-regarded movies that haven't quite fit into the greater picture yet. Another Round was pretty mainstream popular and Rivette is pretty important so I think both were fine for this level.

What you're saying about OFA as a whole, however, makes a lot of sense. I really didn't see too many good buzzes on the fashion content; I appreciate the experiment with having a lot of it, but going from once a tournament to taking up 5 spots in an increasingly crowded distro feels uncalibrated to me. This is just another good argument for giving more room to arts in a distro to support all these different traditions that people want to ask about.

[Jem Casey]

This set was largely solid, but seems to follow a trend of "weird" regular(ish) difficulty sets (along with, to varying extents, this year's Regionals, ARCADIA, HARI, and Winter; but this "weirdness"--which I feel is invariably the bad kind of "weird"--probably prompts its own separate discussion)

I think I agree that most regular season sets (WORKSHOP included) are too "weird," with editors (myself included) including too many canon-busting early clues and shooting for too many "fresh" question conceits. However, your inclusion of ARCADIA on this list makes me think we're talking about different types of "weirdness," since the 7 or so packets of that set that I've read seem to have most virtues--well-controlled clue difficulty, answer selection, subdistributions, etc.--that you could ask for in a quizbowl set. I'd be interested to see more discussion of the "bad kind of 'weird'" that you mean.

additionally, a very large proportion of bonuses seemed very miscalibrated: mediums were frequently quite underwritten, and hard parts frequently overshot. There was a great number of bonuses without a true / clear easy or a true hard to players at our Yale mirror due to this.

With 2,535 bonuses heard across the first five closed mirrors, the easy/medium/hard (going by how they were marked in the packets, not how they played) conversion rates have been 88%/51%/17%. To be honest, these numbers look great to me, and not at all what I'd expect from a set where a "very large proportion" of bonuses had excessively easy medium parts (assuming this is what you meant by "underwritten") and very difficult hards. Re: medium parts, I think it's easy to overestimate the fame of straightforward 3-dot medium parts in the heat of battle, when you're one of the best quizbowl players, playing on one of the best quizbowl teams, in a top bracket that was way too OP for even perfectly calibrated medium parts to do much differentiating work in anyway. Re: hard parts, I assume you're remembering some specific set of hard parts that felt unreasonable--if you have the time to post further, it would be interesting to hear about those in "Specific Questions."

However, I repeat the complaints about Philosophy and Social Science aired above, and I have to complain about the general drift of the history (Chris was buzzing on these more, but it just seemed to ask for a lot of strange things in strange ways, and had notable biases toward asking content that would prompt "who cares?" reacts from us and our opponents)... I have to question the choice of editors known for their issues with their overreaching difficulties in terms of difficulty and tendencies towards "experimentation" (which, several times, such as in this tournament's history content, has served as a thin veneer for questionable clue and answerline choice, choice of subject matter, and failures to appropriately cover a sufficient breadth of the relevant subject area and failures to correctly sub-distribute and/or to cover the core "meat and potatoes" in their subjects)...There are clearer more "stable" and "responsible" editors who could have been chosen

I understand that your preferences about the weighting of "past and present 'relevance'" were not met by several categories of the set. Fair enough; philosophies on this topic vary quite a bit across the community, and I'm glad that different editors try out different subdistributions over the course of the season's sets. However, some of your comments make much more serious claims about the technical competence of the set's questions and editors. If entire game rooms were regularly in uproar over content being self-evidently obscure or trivial, if categories as large as history (which was split among three extremely experienced, knowledgeable, and skilled editors, with oversight from me) were rife with "questionable" choices in clues, answerlines, and subject matter, it would certainly be edifying for the set's writers to hear some more specific examples of what went wrong.

[Mike Bentley]

I think it's worth bringing this discussion of "weirdness" and quizbowl's move towards the contemporary to a more general discussion thread (i.e. not for this tournament). I personally like most of this direction (except for other arts and maybe visual arts where I think it's gone way too far too quickly) but can understand why others don't.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

This set was largely solid, but seems to follow a trend of "weird" regular(ish) difficulty sets (along with, to varying extents, this year's Regionals, ARCADIA, HARI, and Winter; but this "weirdness"--which I feel is invariably the bad kind of "weird"--probably prompts its own separate discussion); additionally, a very large proportion of bonuses seemed very miscalibrated: mediums were frequently quite underwritten, and hard parts frequently overshot. There was a great number of bonuses without a true / clear easy or a true hard to players at our Yale mirror due to this.

Contentwise, I can't really object to many of the set's question content or answerlines. However, I repeat the complaints about Philosophy and Social Science aired above, and I have to complain about the general drift of the history (Chris was buzzing on these more, but it just seemed to ask for a lot of strange things in strange ways, and had notable biases toward asking content that would prompt "who cares?" reacts from us and our opponents). I have some quibbles about the focus on econ content away from theory and a desire for econ not to get the short shrift within the social sciences. I philosophically object to the magnitude of the trend towards the hyper-contemporary in quizbowl (esp. in the arts), and was not at all feeling the 2/3 fashion, 1/2 opera*, and the film I heard ("samurai" seemingly confused several players due to the unemployed status of the ronin for the relevant portion of the film, leading to answers like "criminal" and "monk"; Rivette seemed like a hard hard, among other hard hards in this tournament; and post-2000s(?) Danish film isn't in my wheelhouse but seemed strange and hard to some people I heard from for whom it is in their wheelhouse) But I must separate this following complaint, and the larger issue to which it is attached, to its own paragraph:

Quizbowl's increasing aversion to opera has become increasingly strange to me, given its great importance to centuries of the Western musical tradition, and giving it just 1 bonus's worth more representation that musical theater does not feel entirely founded or coherent with visions presented in this set towards some notion of large-scale "relevance" (citing, as examples of this notion, the move towards more "world" content in the Other category, and the "editor's duty to keep their finger on the pulse of both the developing trends in quizbowl as well as what is significant in real-life society today" as opposed to "not just what was significant one or two centuries"; the latter of which I find oddly disconnected from the notions of continuity across periods and traditions, and from the notion of the indebtedness of the present to the past which quizbowl continuously and circumspectly instills). I truly appreciate the intent behind the subdistributional changes towards making minoritized creators more salient, but there is a counterintuitive element which "forcing out" centuries of strong, deep traditions such as opera for such content as fashion largely pulled from the last decade or so promotes, of making it seem one has to look for content from the "shallow past" of a much less serious and much more transient nature to ask about "relevant" or "important" contributions by minority creators, which element I cannot help but notice; certainly things that have been created recently can have importance and relevance, and it may be possible to recognize at this time what works and creators will have staying power, lasting importance, and lasting relevance, but it didn't feel like the other arts content of this sort really "sold" me much on why the vaunted sense of "relevance" should to such a heavy degree outweigh centuries of widely studied and influential architecture and opera, or decades of similarly influential jazz and (older) film and photography. I have similar opinions on "relevant" geography (moving almost entirely away from physical geography content within geo/CE) and towards "relevant" social science (moving often away from influential work because of the must of the "historical").

Conversely, I must praise the excellent work of the writers and editors of the literature and religion and mythology content, which did integrate past and present "relevance" masterfully. However, I have to question the choice of editors known for their issues with their overreaching difficulties in terms of difficulty and tendencies towards "experimentation" (which, several times, such as in this tournament's history content, has served as a thin veneer for questionable clue and answerline choice, choice of subject matter, and failures to appropriately cover a sufficient breadth of the relevant subject area and failures to correctly sub-distribute and/or to cover the core "meat and potatoes" in their subjects) for a set whose production is explicitly aimed at training and equipping new writers. While new writers should be made to feel unafraid to break boundaries and be creative, there are clearly good (this tournament's literature, religion, and myth) and bad (its OFA, history, and some social science) forms of "experimentality." There are clearer more "stable" and "responsible" editors who could have been chosen to curate much better bonuses, and thereby and overall to much more effectively mentor new writers and even curb some excessive tendencies of more established writers and editors by example.

*Here, I read "unconventional choices, such as deciding to include more fashion/cosmetics (2/3) than 'traditional' opera (1/2)" as meaning that content leaning more towards the "visual" part of "other fine arts" was expanded at the expense of "audio" (inclusive of "audiovisual") content such as opera; if this was not intended, I apologize, but I recall at least one recent announcement mentioning devoting 2/3 of OFA to "visual" and 1/3 to "auditory," which I would strongly object to as deeply ill-advised; I don't find the visual / audio OFA split perfect in the first place (often discourages the cluing tandem "audio" and "visual" aspects of audiovisual works, e.g., where I find the combination of visual and audio elements in several audiovisual genres and works of great interest, powerful effect, and great relevance and importance), but it does very effectively reward both audio and visual players and reflect the roughly equal "real-world relevance" of "auditory" and "visual" art forms.

Appreciate the comments, Clark. I think Jordan has already touched upon a couple more data-driven points in response to your feedback, so I won't bother rehashing those. Like Jordan, I read a lot of this post as generally indicative of a philosophical divergence between us two, as opposed to an actual critique of the quality and execution of the Other Arts editing (the few specific critiques that were included have been noted); I can respect such philosophical differences, even if I stand in opposition to them. To more explicitly outline my person philosophy: I view quizbowl as a game in which people learn new and important information, which, in my opinion, is only possible when the present and near-past are treated with same level of eminence as the more well-established (and more well-trodden) far-past. Such an approach, in my opinion, actually enhances the experience of learning about and discussing topics of the past, as one can provide an additional layer of context, or an additional framework of analysis, to their dissection of such topics. Thus, I think that the past and the present both should work synergistically to ensure a holistically complete understanding of each other. Simply put –– I believe that learning new things about an old topic cannot entirely be substituted by learning about a new topic entirely.

I think the dichotomy that you raise between the relative paucity of opera and the more prominent presence of fashion is an apt place to start this discussion. Like you mentioned, opera has been performed and studied for centuries and has been asked about time and time again in quizbowl; its past significance and present influence are, no doubt, a large factor behind its stature in the Western academic canon (and thus the quizbowl canon) particularly. Opera (or at least what quizbowl considers “opera”) is also, as an art form, white and elitist at its core. Its origins (as a form of intellectual entertainment created by and for Renaissance aristocrats), as well as its practices and traditions through the present day, are steeped in complex and deeply problematic dynamics of race, class, and gender. You stress its "great importance to centuries of the Western musical tradition," but this is a notion that I wholeheartedly reject, not because opera itself is unimportant, but because the Western musical tradition you speak of in this context comes with the heavy asterisk of it being the white and elitist side of the Western musical tradition. Moreover, opera, like you said, is largely contained within the Western musical tradition –– other art forms, such as painting, instrumental music, and fashion have a much more diverse history of practice throughout different societies and cultures. I suspect that many people would also object if I were to group all music-drama traditions from around the world under "opera," and replaced a significant amount of the Italian/German/French opera with topics such as Peking opera or the hiragasy tradition of the Merina people. Opera is an extremely influential art form that must be asked about at every tournament, but why does it have to be one of the most prominently featured subdistributional categories in Other Arts? Why should the Western musical tradition (moreover, one of its whitest and most elitist institutions) be so heavily prioritized at the expense of other artistic traditions and institutions? Will quizbowlers really benefit more from hearing another question on Der Rosenkavalier, even if there may be one or two "canon-busting" clues, than hearing a question about the cultural and historical impact of Virgil Abloh, the first Black director of a major luxury fashion house?

(I recall reading an article on the race problem in opera a while back that I think encapsulates some of these issues, and I've attached it here for further reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts ... ation.html.)

Fashion as an art form, on the other hand, has existed in societies and cultures around the world for much longer than Western opera; its historical influence cannot be understated, whether it be economically (due to trade and commerce) or socioculturally. Fashion is also significantly more diverse, and even in Western fashion, we see a significantly higher amount of BIPOC, womxn, and members of the LGBTQ+ community represented in that field than we do in traditions such as Western opera. I think it's a pretty foregone conclusion that the average person (of any race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) in society today will encounter something that was more influenced by fashion (ex. social media, popular music, consumer brands) than by opera. Again, this isn't to say that opera is unimportant; this is to say that fashion has also had a significant long-term impact on society and culture, so I'm not entirely sure why opera is more valued under those parameters.

Contrary to your remarks, only one fashion question (the tossup on Virgil Abloh) “largely pulled from the past decade”; everything else was mid- to late 20th century fashion that helped pioneer a multimillion dollar industry with immense cultural impact in the past and present. I find your characterization of these topics as "transient" and "less serious" to be mildly shocking. Film, theater, and visual and multimedia art as we know it would not be the same without trailblazing lipstick brands that helped propel the sex symbols of Hollywood's Golden Age to stardom, and, in so doing, established the extremely complex standards of beauty and presentation today. Kate Spade's ubiquitous handbags have been worn by millions of people across the globe for the past thirty years because of the unique accessibility and affordability of the brand's pieces and the brand's influence on prêt-à-porter fashion. Fashion schools –– schools that are often part of visual arts and design schools that also practice painting and architecture –– across the world are populated with talented artists and famous graduates who have gone on to change the cultural landscape of the world we live in with their designs and aesthetic ideas. I certainly hope that you wouldn't consider Abloh to be "transient" and "less serious" –– Abloh made history as the first Black director of a major luxury fashion house, and his artistic and cultural impact transcended fashion, as evidenced by how his death sent waves through the art, music, and architecture spheres of society. Politicians and celebrities publicly mourned the loss of one of the most prolific artists of the 21st century. Abloh is not simply just another "minoritized creator" from the "shallow past" whose work and influence will be forgotten in a few decades, and I think that such an attitude exemplifies the very issue that quizbowl has with these kinds of topics: just because they are not part of a white and elitist Western tradition that is more covered in academic settings does not mean that they are less important to us as people.

You lamented that "forcing out" opera for fashion is a poor way to go about including such important content, but what is there to be done if we need to make room for content that has not been covered previously? Such is the nature of ever-evolving knowledge; outside of increasing the amount of arts in the quizbowl distribution, or removing content from other subdistributions, some content from the "centuries of strong, deep traditions" must be sacrificed to make room for content that quizbowl and Western academic as a whole have unjustifiably cast aside for years. After all, isn't this the basic mechanism of quizbowl and its canon? That, with only so much space in a set, less relevant topics start appearing less and less, and new and more relevant topics begin to appear more and more? I certainly do not purport to have all the correct answers to these extremely difficult questions, but I do think that it is important to raise them and for quizbowl to reckon with its very own problems of race, class, gender, and identity as a whole. Why does the Western academic tradition value opera more than fashion? Is that valuation problematic, and if so, how can action be taken to resolve that tension? Should quizbowlers be more cognizant of the spaces that we occupy and the beliefs that we possess as people who are complicit by default of perpetuating these problematic power dynamics?

Finally, like Jordan said, your argument seems to have somewhat of an unclear delineation between your personal subdistributional preferences and the actual issues with the writing and editing themselves. I certainly would never claim to put out a perfect body of work as an editor or a writer, but given that the vast majority of the feedback I have heard thus far has indicated receptiveness to and enjoyment of my editorial choices, such as the increased focus on fashion, I am finding it difficult to take away actionable points from a critique that focuses more on an opinion of what is more or less important, and not as much on what was not technically well-executed. If you thought the Virgil Abloh tossup, for example, was poorly written, then I am all ears. But it seems to me that your issues with it revolved primarily around the actual inclusion of that topic itself at the expense of a topic like opera, and, like I said above, this is a philosophical difference that I respectfully do not see myself conceding at the moment.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I don't think you need to appeal to a Bloomean notion of the "Western Canon" to object to the way Other Arts was done in this set. Looking over the packets, a third or more of the Other Arts tossups were written on topics we'd usually consider popular culture. The clues, rather than emphasizing the subjects' "academic" importance, seemed close to what you would find in trash tossups on the same answers. And to accentuate the issue, these "borderline" topics were included in the 1/1 of the distribution that's already most cramped for space. It's natural that players who love opera or architecture would be upset to see those subjects cut dramatically.

I'd like to draw out a few of the arguments in Wonyoung's post, since I think they' raise important theoretical questions. I think Wonyoung's eloquently articulated why the quizbowl canon shouldn't just be tied to the historical canons of the academy. It's an asset that quizbowl can ask about lots of topics you'd primarily encounter outside of the classroom, because, among other reasons, the academy is as hierarchical an institution as any other in our society. We should, therefore, strive to ask about forms of art practiced by people traditionally excluded from those hierarchies. I personally enjoyed the Virgil Abloh question he brings up and think it's an eminently defensible choice.

I do, though, want to question the idea that present-day "cultural impact" should be a primary criterion for including topics in the canon. Going by "cultural impact," popular culture will almost always beat out academic topics. If you followed that across the board, literature would be questions on A Song of Ice and Fire, film would be about Marvel movies, music would consist of Beyonce questions, etc. As you read this, you may roll your eyes a little at this familiar objection, since it's a slippery slope argument and most people don't really write that way. But this slope can get pretty slippery, and in Wonyoung's reasoning, it's hard to discern any way to hit the brakes.

The relatively small cultural impact of opera should also make us question whether it's really an "elitist" topic at present. Putting aside the question of whether it's really a historically elitist form - often, it's been a very popular one - it's not really in favor with the elite or aspiring elite, now. Our current oligarchs are infinitely more likely to date indie or pop stars than opera singers, and, like symphony orchestras, opera companies are financially struggling. High fashion is actually much more closely linked than opera to the status of the elite and those who emulate them. Opera is more the province of, well, the kinds of people who play quizbowl.

Quizbowl functions as a kind of preserve for important subjects that are out of favor with the mainstream. At its best, it rewards knowledge of the kinds of challenging, attention-demanding subjects that don't survive well under a more commodified regime. It should not exactly mirror the academy, which is why it's good that we ask about popular culture; but we also shouldn't reflect the (capitalist-driven) culture at large, which stamps out difference even more fiercely. In the past, we struck a balance by allocating a set part of the distribution to popular culture and being relatively more strict about those same topics elsewhere. Whatever decision people come to now, I hope they consider the above function seriously.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

I don't think you need to appeal to a Bloomean notion of the "Western Canon" to object to the way Other Arts was done in this set. Looking over the packets, a third or more of the Other Arts tossups were written on topics we'd usually consider popular culture. The clues, rather than emphasizing the subjects' "academic" importance, seemed close to what you would find in trash tossups on the same answers. And to accentuate the issue, these "borderline" topics were included in the 1/1 of the distribution that's already most cramped for space. It's natural that players who love opera or architecture would be upset to see those subjects cut dramatically.

I'd like to draw out a few of the arguments in Wonyoung's post, since I think they' raise important theoretical questions. I think Wonyoung's eloquently articulated why the quizbowl canon shouldn't just be tied to the historical canons of the academy. It's an asset that quizbowl can ask about lots of topics you'd primarily encounter outside of the classroom, because, among other reasons, the academy is as hierarchical an institution as any other in our society. We should, therefore, strive to ask about forms of art practiced by people traditionally excluded from those hierarchies. I personally enjoyed the Virgil Abloh question he brings up and think it's an eminently defensible choice.

I do, though, want to question the idea that present-day "cultural impact" should be a primary criterion for including topics in the canon. Going by "cultural impact," popular culture will almost always beat out academic topics. If you followed that across the board, literature would be questions on A Song of Ice and Fire, film would be about Marvel movies, music would consist of Beyonce questions, etc. As you read this, you may roll your eyes a little at this familiar objection, since it's a slippery slope argument and most people don't really write that way. But this slope can get pretty slippery, and in Wonyoung's reasoning, it's hard to discern any way to hit the brakes.

The relatively small cultural impact of opera should also make us question whether it's really an "elitist" topic at present. Putting aside the question of whether it's really a historically elitist form - often, it's been a very popular one - it's not really in favor with the elite or aspiring elite, now. Our current oligarchs are infinitely more likely to date indie or pop stars than opera singers, and, like symphony orchestras, opera companies are financially struggling. High fashion is actually much more closely linked than opera to the status of the elite and those who emulate them. Opera is more the province of, well, the kinds of people who play quizbowl.

Quizbowl functions as a kind of preserve for important subjects that are out of favor with the mainstream. At its best, it rewards knowledge of the kinds of challenging, attention-demanding subjects that don't survive well under a more commodified regime. It should not exactly mirror the academy, which is why it's good that we ask about popular culture; but we also shouldn't reflect the (capitalist-driven) culture at large, which stamps out difference even more fiercely. In the past, we struck a balance by allocating a set part of the distribution to popular culture and being relatively more strict about those same topics elsewhere. Whatever decision people come to now, I hope they consider the above function seriously.

I think that Matt brings up a lot of salient and reasonable points in this post, and I appreciate these additional perspectives brought to the discussion. I do want to clarify, though, the claim that "a third or more of the Other Arts tossups were written on topics we'd usually consider popular culture." There were 14 Other Arts tossups, so let's say that Matt is referring to at least 4-5 tossups as "written on topics we'd usually consider popular culture." Assuming that we eliminate the strictly conventional Other Arts fare, we are left with the tossups on lipstick, Kander and Ebb, Jane Fonda, Misty Copeland, and Virgil Abloh. None of these tossups, other than the Virgil Abloh tossup and potentially some of the clues in the lipstick tossup, strike me as any more indicative of "popular culture" than the film tossup on bicycles, for example, which I think everybody would agree on as being symbolic of standard academic quizbowl fare. Certainly, I can see one argue that, for example, Jane Fonda is an actress and celebrity, and not a director or "artist" in the traditionally academic sense, and I'd agree that a tossup on popular culture facts about Jane Fonda (such as her recent role in Grace and Frankie, or her immensely successful series of home workout videos) should not be included in the Other Arts distribution of a standard academic quizbowl set. But, to me at least, films like The China Syndrome seem to be just as important to American film history (as well as American history in general) as other, more commonly included films. If George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim are indisputably considered part of a standard Other Arts distribution, I see no reason why Kander and Ebb wouldn't be; their frequent collaborator Bob Fosse is also asked about in the Other Arts distribution semi-frequently as well. And is the lipstick tossup being considered "popular culture" because it had one clue mentioning Rihanna and her Fenty Beauty company? My point being: I'm not sure if this was meant to be an off-the-cuff estimation of the magnitude of "unconventional" Other Arts questions, but if it wasn't, I'm genuinely curious as to how "a third or more" of these questions were about topics that are considered to be "popular culture" in most cases.

Certainly, I did not explicitly state a limit to which this more liberal interpretation of relevant academic knowledge can be pushed, but I am not sure if such a limit needs to be explicitly stated. We don't set explicit boundaries of what classical composer, Victorian playwright, or scientific equation is fair game to ask about. We use our best judgment on a case-by-case basis; my best judgment, therefore, stopped me from writing vacuous questions about –– using your example –– the plot of Marvel movies, and I think most quizbowlers' best judgment would also have had the same effect, in the same way that our best judgment stops us from writing tossups on spontaneous parametric down-conversion. But, as a thought experiment, let's propose a hypothetical: what if a famous economist wrote a seminal paper on the economic effects brought on by Marvel movies and other high-budget, consumerist media projects? Or, what if a famous contemporary artist created a groundbreaking exhibition satirizing, subverting, and deconstructing Marvel movies as a protest against the capitalistic hijacking of the art of film? In those cases, perhaps our best judgment might compel us to reevaluate the place that Marvel movies have in the academic canon. This is obviously a bit of an absurd hypothetical, as even I do not foresee a world in which I feel like it is pertinent to include clues about Tom Holland and Zendaya's "showmance" in any Other Arts question that I write. But I think that we often consider these more unconventional topics in concept with more reticence than is necessary; if a topic is irrelevant, then it simply shouldn't (and, for me, wouldn't) be written about, whether it is conventionally academic or slightly more bent towards the "popular culture" side of the aisle.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

nice post this u?

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

nice post this u?

nah bro who that