Week 221: A sense of incompleteness
I started writing this evening on the subject of four ways we could find ourselves wrecked by 2044. As I had said last week, I found some of the predicted futures way too optimistic, or making what is a hard problem easy. The ideas I had in my pessimistic analysis were solid and I’ll probably still add the first of the four here tonight, but I got to 10:30 and realized it was not fun writing this, and I don’t like the conclusions I was drawing, which means I’ve probably missed something important in the process of writing this.
I am having a form of writer’s block where you get to the middle of the bit and decide that it’s not going to work. I’ve had this feeling since the end of HSNCT, and while I fought through it to get the articles out, I haven’t shaken the tiredness and general unease in my life.
Part of that is a sense of uncertainty about the future of quizbowl at Seton. Part of that is it’s a long story, and I can’t give it full time to breathe right now. This is the last week of school, things can’t even happen until after this, and what will happen is dependent on things I can’t control, and things that won’t be known. And so I get to this point in deciding whether to tell the story, and decline until there’s some certainty to work from.
Part of this is a sense of missing out. I didn’t travel last weekend to the World Quizzing Championships, and I’m experiencing a little regret at that. After I had been sick, it had been one of my annual rituals to assure I’m fit enough to continue the good fight. I usually impose on Steve Perry to host the Pittsburgh edition, but he was tied up with work this weekend and didn’t participate. You can trace the “overcome with life events” that necessitated him not doing it by following his substack entries. (This is a less than subtle suggestion to subscribe to his stuff.) It seems like he’s got a little sense of missing out as well.
I had done my other ritual in April, taking the Jeopardy! test. Did fine. The news of the other Jeopardy! spinoff kind of caught me in a sense of missing out. Normally I’d have jumped at it, I thought. But in reading over the basic steps I found myself paused because I didn’t know my status. If you haven’t seen the steps, you are to take the test, and form a team of people who also take the test. And while it’s open to everyone, even previous Jeopardy! contestants, I’m not sure about they will want to draw from the NAQT pool again. Officially, there is only the question on the contestant form, and it’s not banning anyone, just wanting to make sure they handle it correctly. I do the test not out of any expectation of getting on, but because it’s good practice and good measure of my recovery. Where I paused on the Pop Culture process was that I don’t want to form a team, and then have two people’s ambitions quashed, and I don’t have any clarity on that.
Having written that out, I’m feeling a bit lifted, at worst, I should just do the test as an exercise, and just let it happen. The way out of the middle of these things is usually to just do something. The way out is usually the way through. Time to start taking it.
In these ways that we don’t make 2044, I’m looking always at the production side. Demand for quiz bowl is always approaching infinity. There is some section of the population that would do quiz bowl every waking minute if they could, it’s just a matter of whether they could make it pay for the writers.
What happens if it costs too much to produce enough questions?
[I'll preface this by saying this is mostly an inflation question coupled to a small amount of it being an AI question, though I suspect that the first attempt to reroute around the problem will be to employ AI, and it will fail.]
Understand that every question has a cost to produce, whether it’s what the writer is paid, the time that the writer invests, or the joy that the writer gets from producing their art. I’m reducing it down to just a financial argument because it is quantifiable that way. Each of those other components can be evaluated in terms of money, but it simplifies the discussion.
We've never had a major inflationary period overlapping with quiz bowl's internet growth phase, until now. The general application of inflation is just that prices increase, but for quiz bowl, it means the value of the writer's labor is reduced. It takes the same amount of time to write the question, and the same compensation occurs, but the value of that compensation is reduced. It can be a rational decision to then apply your labor elsewhere, where you can be compensated better.
The second factor is depreciation of the question's value over time. Questions in residence between unedited and used in an event now are depreciating in value for the writer until they are paid for their work, and are depreciating in value for the distributor until they are paid for the use. As long as that depreciation is negligible with low inflation, this isn't a noticeable problem. This pattern means the financial advantage is to produce, edit, and ship in a near just-in-time method. The problem with that is quality suffers, and the ability to plan for growth of the competition suffers.
The price of a question is set at the beginning of the school year, and that price is fixed based on the price the set of questions is sold at. Providers of questions have little to no experience modeling inflation into their long term pricing model (note how the price of a set of questions or the price of a tournament has been remarkably flat for decades.)
Where this is painful is where you're a single proprietor with limited margin. At that point your work is dying on the vine because you have to build up your supply and wait for payment. As a result your effort is continuously less valuable as your work stays the same. Psychologically, I think this grinding down would lead you to retire, if you couldn't find a way to expand your sales. In fact I think we're witnessing this as part of the reason for the wave of retirements.
The AI aspect of this is that it will be much easier for a competitor to enter the market of short questions and begin to take market share. As the short question market is mostly supplied by single proprietors, with little expertise in AI, and mostly not-expanding, a competitor in the market squeezes all the players. Also these markets are the ones most susceptible to the advantages AI can tout (reliability, quantity) and least susceptible to the appeals that longer question providers will cite (question quality, additional layers of editing, non-repeating.)
If we get to the point where the shorter questions market is squeezed out, I think there's a psychological pattern which would weigh on writers, and limit their production. If we see this for many years, we could see the supply of questions and supply of writers reduce, which makes it harder on everyone.