Week 232: Some of the Courage to Commit Stupidity
For my birthday, I gave myself one assignment, to do something to expand quiz bowl that had previously scared me. This isn't a conquering my fear thing, it's a quiet the doubts in the back of the head thing. I've had the double clutch on pushing out some bulk emails for years, and when you're pushing for more events, and making contacts with people who aren't necessarily friendly to your offers, it can shock you away from gripping the door handle and walking in. I didn't need the courage to conquer my fears, I needed what meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes termed "The Courage to Commit Stupidity."
Allow me to interpret this for you. I have an issue with heights. Not a crippling level of fear of them, but I do not like to fall and my concern with them kicks in at a much lower height than most people. Put me on the edge of a four-foot stage and ask me to jump off, I look for the stairs or I sit down and push myself off. My natural instinct is to be extremely wary of putting my body in such a position as needing to stick the landing, because I’ve landed badly often enough that I don’t like the feeling or the odds. If I can find a way to not need to stick the landing, I take that path.
I have a similar issue with having to defend myself from online attack. When I'm ambushed, I'm fine defending myself and my points of view. I don't have to stick the landing, because the collision with the ground had already landed. But I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing and perfecting things that I write because I am worried about blowback from a misinterpretation. I assume the worst possible reaction from the other end of the messsage, when it never actually happens, and the most common reaction is no reaction, the second most common, a simple No. I can overcome that by giving myself urgency and purpose in the need to send the message; I was able to contact all the old NAL leagues in three days because there was a real danger of them being lost forever. But if I'm not pushing myself into action I sometimes hold myself back in inaction, and I need a reminder that an action even a stupid action is necessary and better than no action at all. One time I found a black go stone on the ground, and I kept it in my pocket to remind me to move first. Even if the move is stupid, the worst it will cause is a “no.”
I’ve had urgency guiding me this summer, lots of places that I worry will simply disappear if they aren’t aware their supplier retired this year, but there are places where I didn’t have the propulsive urge to help guiding me. And my birthday was the time for me to force myself to action.
I sent three packages of emails out yesterday. The first was to a figure of some renown in quiz bowl before the internet (I'm holding back the name until it appears on the NAQT website.) He's achieved a fairly large amount of success in his field, and I've wanted to add him to the list of "notable people who played quiz bowl" for some time. I wanted to do this because he's in a position to get people on teams thinking about interacting with their schools in different ways, and that's not going to happen with the current students at colleges without prompting them. The realization that I was double clutching on this came when I ordered myself a new copy of the map of US colleges.
The map of colleges. https://hedbergmaps.com/collections/colleges
I had a copy of this and its companion map for community colleges hanging in the office of my bachelor apartment, and I suspect it's now wedged in one of those tubs in the basement garage. To borrow a term from Douglas Adams, these maps are for me the equivalent of the Total Perspective Vortex, crushing the spirit when you first see the scope of the task in front of me. The total perspective vortex of these maps is that once you see it, you realize we cannot truly expand quiz bowl to the size and scope I would like to see by relying entirely on the influx of our current set of high school students into colleges. There's just too many random chances that have to go right for this to be an effective path. You need to figure out how to work at a bigger scale and with force multiplying attacks on expansion and outreach.
The courage to commit stupidity here is in making steps along this path, knowing how long it is and how much time it will take.
The second action was that I finally pushed the button on the radio letters. After hemming and hawing and futzing with the letters for two weeks, I just gave myself the excuse to stop trying to get it perfect and just get it done. What had slowed me down with this is that some of these productions in radio have the least connection to quiz bowl. They are running massive tournaments, and use questions over the course of months. But their matches are incredibly short, like a match can be over for the program in five questions. It's a format that has worked for these radio stations for years, even if we may find it fatally flawed. But they will still always need questions. It may not be until next year, but there will come a moment when their questions are all used, or obviously out of date, and they realize they can't continue the way they have. And if no one has reached out to them, and they don't know that other ways exist, they'll choose a worse option than ordering new questions.
If someone from the circuit were exposed to these competitions, I honestly think they'd twitch out. And that's the point of having the courage to commit stupidity. There's too much of a peer pressure in the circuit to keep the circuit together and not invite possibly rogue elements who might like their questions not just a little but a lot different.
I should stop worrying about what the circuit thinks of engaging with these organizations. It's only through engaging with them that we can expand their programs to accomodate more questions and less abrupt formats.
The third letters were to an organization in an area that isn't a quiz bowl hotbed. In fact, it's an area where the only prominent form of regular academic competition is Academic Decathlon. I haven't sent things up to Alaska in five years. I tried a couple of schools the year before COVID hit, but the problems of distance and weather, and size of schools made me doubt it could ever have enough interest for quiz bowl. Even if I got the spark going at one school, I didn't have a plan for getting multiple teams together, or a person on the ground to make that happen.
What changed about this situation happened during the summer. I looked into a few leagues which like the late National Academic League, used teleconferencing as a way to bring teams together cheaper than traveling across town. (Or in one case, traveling 40 miles to the next school in the desert.) I started to realize that the tools that quiz bowl developed during COVID, could be used in less densely populated states to build competitions. And further, by removing the need for travel, quiz bowl suddenly became price competitive with other competitions. If I could give that use case to the right person in a distant state, they might see the value of it. So I found the organization that did academic competitions like Academic Decathlon in Alaska, and gave them a ping.
I haven't heard back yet from this one. It's a shot in the dark, and there's a lot to consider besides just asking them if it's worth considering. But I feel like I had a breakthrough, because I gave myself the courage to commit stupidity. This isn't a fully thought out plan, and if I'd polished it completely to where it would be obvious to me, it would be too late in the year, and too much of my information, and not enough of their knowledge of how it could work from their perspective. They already know whether the idea is feasible, they just didn't know the idea. If it is feasible, it will spark them to action. If not it won't, but it still might spark some other thought.
And so my birthday wish to you is for you to have the courage to commit a little stupidity this week. Dust off the old plan you've forgotten about, and see if things have made it more favorable. Talk someone into considering quiz bowl that you never thought about inviting. Just generally realize the fall from a small height doesn’t hurt like the fall from a great one.