Week 17: In the shadow of pyramids
In which I climb down a jargon rabbit-hole to offer caution.
One of the many experiments that will be tried to facilitate competition at a distance this fall will be to get rid of any questions that require a judgment of who answered first. Now this is fine, as long as you realize that the possibility of ties exist (as was shown in one championship which employed this idea this year.) What I've found extraordinary about these efforts is that a couple of requests to do this have asked if it can be done without pyramidal questions.
The argument made was that pyramidal questions would be unnecessary for such online competitions, that non-pyramidal questions could be substituted into this scenario because they could be produced more cheaply, and could be used to make the event run faster. But once I heard those arguments, I still couldn't see any way that that would make sense.
1. If the intent is that a purchaser can get non-pyramidal questions cheaper, that doesn't make sense, as most providers don't even offer that as an option. In fact, they'd have to work at restraining themselves to writing in that form having done pyramidal for so long.
2. Getting rid of the extra clues and shortening the questions would make the questions faster, but at the cost of making them useless as anything other than a simple test. Pyramidal questions have value even if read non-pyramidally. You get a bunch of possible clues some of which could overlap with a later question enabling a player to learn from what they've heard before. Pyramidal questions read in that fashion have pedagogic value. If you're giving someone X number of clues in a pyramidal question, removing the possibility of buzzing in the middle now guarantees that each competitor will hear all X clues. That isn't a bug, it's a feature.
3. No one who wants to sell questions after the crisis abates is going to be willing to have themselves associated with non-pyramidal questions. This isn't quite because the term "pyramidal questions" has universal internal cachet as a positive thing, but it's because, for a provider, there's really no downside to including the word in your descriptions, whether or not you are perceived internally as pyramidal. It is far too easy to stamp that adjective in the description of questions, and the meaning of pyramidality has become not a mark of quality, but a slogan.
This third part was surprising for me to see, because it meant that at least for these particular cases, they were rebelling against having the slogan presented to them, having never embraced the actual concept.
This was a new variation of a longtime problem I've witnessed: that the quiz bowl community has internalized premises that become barriers to introducing the game to the wider world.
To the outside world, "pyramidal" as a quality is a standard so low that any question possessed of multiple clues can be claimed to have a pyramidal quality.
The explanation of pyramidality given to the outside world is usually this: as a question is read the clues are arranged so that the most obscure clue is first, that only a few people know that clue and can answer, and as more clues are given, more people can answer the question. This explanation makes sense to us, and is simple enough that a layperson could understand it. But as constructed, it's a definition that is faulty for two reasons:
- A question in given orally and thus sequentially, and thus later clues have the context of earlier clues being read to shape the response.
- Each clue's relative obscurity is graded by the writer and editor, and not by the general population, or the person answering the question.
Any question which is given orally, possesses an order in which the clues are given. Consider the simplest model a question with two clues A and B. And as long as the clues are such that plausibly one person on earth could know A but not B and one person could know B but not A, you can place the clues in either order and a larger percentage of people will be able to answer after two clues than after one.
If you are at all a quiz bowl theorist, you immediately found the problem with the model as being too short. But your ability to find a problem with that stems from the fact that you have experience with pyramidal questions of which none are that short. That which results from this definition deviates from your model, and you find the flaws in that definition, and improve your definition of pyramidal.
But how will someone without that experience develop that improved definition?
This is the problem with the word "pyramidal": to the outside world devoid of the experiences of quiz bowl players, the additional concepts behind pyramidal questions: their utility, their pedagogic value, and the idea that they permit differentiation in rewarding knowledge never expands beyond the community. To the general public, it is jargon that cannot be understood without experience. And for those who only use pyramidal for slogan value are also interested in preventing players from developing too much experience.
The circuit interprets "pyramidal" as a quantitative measure. Clues can be out of order, clues can be missing creating difficulty cliffs, clues can open the question up too easily. We have an entire mental evaluation of how pyramidal a question can be. But the definition that we broadcast to the outside world (to simplify for their benefit) never gets past interpreting pyramidal as a qualitative measure, present or absent in a question.
We are going to have a rough time of it this coming year, because events may not be able to happen with the frequency of face-to-face events, there will likely be a loss of accumulating experience among the players. If that happens, it we be harder to explain the difference between pyramidality as a slogan, and as pyramidality as a principle.
PROGRAMMING NOTE
I may not have much to report next week, as I intend to devote my energies to compiling the Freshman Contact List, so we can have information in college programs' hands as soon as possible.
Stuff to Watch
This video showing you the “other” trigonometric functions skirts close to a 2013 Onion parody, but it’s legit and could come up as clues to the more basic functions. This SciAm article also comes with a nice diagram.
Stuff to Look at
The other “Death” painting by David.
The Articles I Learned From This Week
This article on the building of the US Capitol was sufficiently interesting I broke it off from last weeks read on all the former US capital sites.
A one paragraph history of Choose Your Own Adventure, which is kind of what this section is… choose your own learning.
This travelogue of St. Petersburg is interesting for its details about “Crime and Punishment,” but the single paragraph about the Lenin and the Astoria hotel led me to search and then to find this book, which in a single page of preview could inspire about ten questions.
The Articles You Can Learn From This Week
This note about an unfinished Louisa May Alcott story reminds me that unfinished and recently discovered works of authors are always used as a current events hook on a literature question, and so become a quick blip of points to those who know of them before they again fade into obscurity.
This article describing the life of the bandleader favored by the dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa gives you a short introduction into the madness of the later emperor.
An overview of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief and how they’ve changed.
Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia
Didn’t You Learn Anything from Last Time?
1
Local station CJON often uses the phrase World Television Premiere because the station gets to broadcast ahead of the rest of the continent.
A. Name this island, notable for being the only North American region with their local time offset by a half-hour, because its capital of St. John's is 7.5 degrees from the normal 15 degree time zone boundaries.
answer: Newfoundland
B. Most of Labrador does not use Newfoundland time, instead using this time zone a half-hour later and four hours off Greenwich Mean Time.
answer: Atlantic Time Zone
C. This French possession directly south of Newfoundland actually uses a time zone one half-hour ahead of Newfoundland.
answer: St. Pierre and Miquelon
2
The ocean and seagull tracks were mixed in by Steven Cropper, two days after the singer was killed in a plane crash.
A. Name this song written on a houseboat in Sausalito, the first posthumous single to top the US charts, doing so in 1968.
answer: (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay
B. Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay was recorded by this vocalist.
answer: Otis Redding
C. This Memphis record label released the song on their Volt imprint. Other acts recording under this label included the Staple Singers, and Booker T. and the MG's.
answer: Stax Records
3
After being approached by Sergio D'Angelo in the writers' colony Peredelkino, he handed D'Angelo an 800-page manuscript and wished it to make its way around the world.
A. Name this author who was forced by Soviet officials to refuse the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.
answer: Boris Pasternak
B. Pasternak had passed on this novel of a physician during the Russian Revolution, which had been banned from publication within the Soviet Union.
answer: Doctor Zhivago
C. The worldwide publication of Doctor Zhivago was partly a propaganda campaign to embarrass the Soviets organized by the CIA under this director.
answer: Allen Dulles
4
The events depicted came after a Girondist sympathizer came forward with false information about fugitive Girondists, allowing her entry into the bath of the title figure.
A. Name this 1793 painting depicting a Jacobin after succumbing to stabbing.
answer: The Death of Marat
B. The Death of Marat was painted by this man, a fellow Jacobin, who was also entrusted with organizing his funeral.
answer: Jacques-Louis David
C. This assassin of Marat was guillotined shortly after.
answer: Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont
5
The region of Llívia is entirely within France, yet belongs not to France but this other country.
A. Name this nation across the Pyrenees from France.
answer: Spain
B. Llívia is part of this autonomous community of Spain which attempted a referendum on independence from Spain in 2017.
answer: Catalonia
C. Because it is part of an entirely different nation but would requiring traveling through France to reach it, Llívia is an example of this kind of territory, examples of which include Kalliningrad and Alaska
answer: exclave