[Not really feeling it this week. While I enjoyed the MSNCT this past weekend, I underestimated the time I needed to invest in it and the press releases afterward. I am going to shuffle some OTW stuff around, and I ran out of time for that, so I’m punting it. I got started too late on the main body of this, as I realized it was too much of a topic. And the one sidebar thing was a little too short, and a little too on the nose given the other things. The one good thing was I found leagues and events that look to be at risk for next year due to disappearing suppliers, so I’m trying to throw some darts at targets. We’ll try to make it better next time.]
When I was getting married, I figured I might not have as much time as I had earlier for financial planning, and I couldn’t devote as much attention to a large number of stocks. I spent a couple days sketching out what I figured were going to be the investments I could feel safe in for the next 10 years, and evaluating what rules I should follow so I wouldn’t be caught out. So I had a forecast that I had the courage of my convictions to take me from 2010 to 2020. It served me well, I never invested in anything that depended on being sold in a retail space, or had a sensory experience purely of sight or sound. Those rules served me well up until 2020, and then like most rules, got smashed up at the end. Now that we’re getting to the point post-COVID where there’s some predictability in what is going to be a trend, so I may have to do another forecast exercise this summer.
While thinking about this this week, I happened across a similar forecasting thread that I could work with. Earlier in the month, a thread on hsqb popped up along similar lines, asking "where quiz bowl will be 20 years from now?" I have to say that, having been an observer for over 30 years now, everything predicted seemed simultaneously wildly optimistic, and focused on the endpoint without actually considering any of the points that would get to the endpoint. All of them focused on the college game, and that's a bit like assuming everything about the outflow of a hose is determined by the nozzle. It omits everything upstream, and does nothing to consider the entire system of how the system goes start to finish.
I was reminded of something I said during my 20 for 20 interview:
“The bounds on growth for a tournament are still teams, costs (travel, lodging, tournament), time at event, questions, buildings, staff, buzzers, and clocks. Everything is currently a tradeoff between these pieces. The next evolutionary step is going to have to be technological, something that can increase one of these without a tradeoff.”
https://www.naqt.com/hsnct/20for20/kidder.jsp
Due to COVID, there’s been a shift of five of these that were guided by technology and necessity: travel cost, lodging cost, buzzers, clocks, and buildings. Virtual competition enabled these to move to a different equilibrium, and with a minimal tradeoff.
So to answer the question "where will quiz bowl be in 20 years?" I should look to the changes that could be done to push the equilibrium state to a higher level and then stabilize, and look to prevent changes that would push the equilibrium state lower. And I'm going to have to look at the upstream pieces: middle schools, high schools, and the ordinary events rather than just evaluating based on championships.
What of my list of features can be modified and will stick? What of my list of bounds could collapse, and how do we prevent that? And what did I forget to include in the list? The one thing I immediately know I forgot, probably the most important, was the expectations of teams.
The first tradeoff I'd like to note starts with a good observation: the level of event level feature support teams get today is much greater on all levels than it was just a few years ago. Teams get incredibly quick and detailed statistics which the top level teams demand of host institutions. And the teams also are seeing questions that can be updated much faster and corrected for errors, additional answers, or typos. These are good improvements to the game, but require more technical innovation than simply printing paper copies and interacting with the paper. The tradeoff in this is the increase in staff expertise to manage these features, as a reader or scorekeeper, to keep these features stocked with information, you need to be expert in the process of scorekeeping, and expert in the spreadsheet. You need to have the account as the reader, and know how to call in a protest. For championships, that's possible by drawing from the pool of experienced moderators and scorekeepers, who have to be trained on the software before they come to the event. But for a new tournament or new host, that expectation is a problem, because fundamentally, such features are a luxury of championship level events. As long as the teams see such features as value added and not value required to provide, this is fine, but it cannot be an expectation of every event until there's a surplus of trained moderators and scorekeepers, that stay resident in the circuit for longer.
This is a common pattern in estimation of the future of quiz bowl. We can do something at the topmost level, therefore it should be able to implemented at all levels below that, and quickly. But this model is flawed because the communication of new ideas and methods rarely flows down from the top, and when it does, it flows slowly, and deliberately, and takes multiple cycles just to go one step outward. In all the predictions for the future of quiz bowl, there was the prevailing sense that it should be easy to keep lots of things propagating, that all were built on the assumption that the flow of information out is dominant, when the reverse is true.
If you've ever heard me discuss "should" in the past, please remember what I tell developers. "As a tester, everytime you use the word 'should' to describe the behavior of the system, I double my estimate of how long it will take to test it." Yes it should be a quick and easy process, but it isn't a quick and easy process every time, and you're describing a goal in its most ideal form, but it has to reach everyone in the least ideal form.
I suspect I'll be revisiting this topic over the summer because of the many aspects that matter, and because I know this would be more than one week's writing.
On Disasters
In the last practice of the school year, I ended up in two digressions on similar lines: The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Each is a disaster which dramatically affected a city (Tokyo/Lisbon), has a quiz bowl chestnut associated with it (Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel/Candide) and each sets up as a middle to late clue because of it.
Typically, disasters occupy an earlier position in questions about a city, but they're one of the most reliable ways to phrase a clue about a city or region. Disasters are memorable enough, and have enough of an impact on a city's structure that they can be used as clues, and integrate other geographical or architectural clues into the question. But since the disaster is usually placed a lot earlier in the question than most clues, it's a good task to study or highlight when pointing out what can be asked about a geographic answer.
As I read through the this year's SSNCT and MSNCT this pattern appeared before me repeatedly, and during the last practice, I saw it crop up again. I posit that this is one of the more entry-level ways to get power on questions, or to generate bonus leadins.