Week 119: English Archers and Question Writers
The Battle of Crecy, micromotives, and another cat.
On my way back from Virginia this weekend, I listened to the latest Cautionary Tales podcast, and ended up coming up with a different way to analyze a particular problem which I can't include in the book. Namely: "Why do packet submission events typically miss their target difficulty?"
The first subject of the podcast was the Battle of Crecy, where the outnumbered English forces managed to rout the French knights because of a series of poor decisions. Each of the decisions of each knight was acceptable and reasonable based on their expectations and code of chivalry, but the result placed them in precisely the wrong position at the wrong time. The knights charged too close to the English archers on the hill, but not close enough that a charge would have made it up the muddy hill to the English troops. The French king aimed to battle after a long chase rather than regroup; and the Genoese crossbowmen employed by the French were forced into action without their shields, with their bowstrings wet from a rainstorm, and with a weak position at the bottom of the hill. Given I associate difficulty in quiz bowl with distance, the analogous nature of the situation appealed to me, and I paused the podcast so I could place the problem of packet submission missing difficulty in the analogy.
Part of the discussion in the podcast came from Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior. Now, I'm only part way through the book, but the summary given in the podcast has put me on a path to looking at the question differently.
If I'm wrong about this interpretation, I'll apologize, but the idea seems to be that individual motivations of an organization which individually produce the health of the organization can produce actions of the group which run counter to the organizations principles, or in the case of the Battle of Crecy which was discussed in the podcast, the organization's health. The code of chivalry made the knights choose to catch up close to the king, and into the path of the archers.
If the ultimate end point of the book is to get a school's teams to move from television to the circuit, there must be a point where they enter a tournament run on questions created by the circuit.
Where I'm taking a new approach here is in realizing something I experienced as a player, and something I've tried to coach in the most neutral terms possible: one writer will have a predictable variance from the norms of quiz bowl difficulty, multiple writers will have less variation, but that doesn't mean they won't vary. What that variation is not is normally distributed. That is if they are aiming for a particular difficulty they tend to miss the difficulty in a regular pattern.
If I apply the idea of micromotives, individual motives to the process of writing, I can come up with six or seven reasons that people write questions.
Why do people write a question?
-- To learn something new.
-- To record the learned knowledge, so the writer can use it in future.
-- To note a particular fact and make it better known, so other players can use it in future.
-- To teach more people about a subject.
-- To fulfill a requirement.
-- To get paid or to reduce the entry fee for their team.
The interesting thing I find in this is that the ennobling and enriching reasons are also the reasons which, when they miss the difficulty, pretty uniformly miss difficulty by making the question more difficult than prescribed. The first four methods all start with the writer looking for something to write about, and finding something interesting that they want to share with the rest of the world, or to memorize so that when the rest of the world writes it later, they have the advantage. They are all based on the prior that someone doesn't know this. When that happens there's always the possibility that few players aside from the editor (who should have more experience) or the writer (who has the experience they just cultivated) know this. And the editor may be content to have that question be one of the one that they let slide, and be one of the harder questions in the set, even though it probably should not be left in the set.
In contrast, those baser reasons could swing a question in this direction, but they could also could result in a question that is of lower difficulty, and that way of missing the mark is not possible with the other reasons. Certainly there are other factors that could lead to that result, questions that are easier to construct are often easier to answer, or not be interesting enough to attract editorial scrutiny and have them punched up in difficulty.
I had tried to tackle this idea earlier for the book, but it ended up with a lot of vagaries and inside circuit knowledge that wasn't relevant. I don't think this will make the book, but it's worth considering, that because the packets of a tournament are the product of a slew of writers, if their individual motives end up aligned in a particular way, they can produce a collective result counter to the event's goal. We might need to ask if we're doing a tournament for the ennobling task of outreach and creating questions that we believe to be acceptable for inexperienced teams: "How many of our writers were French knights, and how many were English archers?"
Last Sunday, I brought home another cat from my aunt's house, as we clean it out. Lily is another tuxedo cat, and had lived for several years with Margaret. Lily is about 14 years old, and I will put her picture up somewhere when I get her to come out of hiding for a snapshot. She was very shy to begin with, my wife doubted she was actually in my aunt's house for several years, and I only saw her well hidden in the back corner under the bed.
Since her arrival, she's taken up residence behind the living room couch, and has otherwise been a phantom. She takes her meals at night, after everyone else has gone to bed, and has made her presence known only by sneaking across our bedroom at 2:30am and using the litter box. I'm expecting her to get a little less skittish, but since she saw Peggy, who disappeared one day from the old house, I think she thinks Peggy's a ghost and haunting her.
I'm used to this, Catie's favorite cat Poppy was a regular couch hider for her first two years, and Angel used the couch as a naptime hideaway and a treasure vault until Lily took up residence. But I had hoped that an older cat might not be as much of a hider. There's one more indoor cat down there, and I'm the host of last resort for her too, but if anything she's a better hider than Lily, and Lily is a bloody expert.