Week 283: It scores the same as real knowledge
Taking from reddit in a more sustainable way than AI.
Bumming around reddit this week I ran into two pieces of utility for the book. Now fundamentally I don’t use reddit all that much, I don’t post or have an account and I wandered over there after seeing the article about them cutting off web.archive.org. But I do have a few r/ that autofill in my browser navigator.
The first was this image found on r/coolguides https://i.redd.it/6p8orgb2jcif1.jpeg
As with most things on the internet most of reddit is crap, reddit r/coolguides is better crap than normal, and more theft than crap, but its still usually only about 10% useful. And in looking at this post, I can confirm veracity of most of this, and most of the rest I can confirm something better than veracity, that they’ve been used as clues before. And I was able to hook in a lesson in quiz bowl that this demonstrates quite well.
[Small aside here: I’m counting “what is given here is one accepted version of the etymology” as not the whole truth. It’s probably an impossible standard to hold an infographic to, but that wouldn’t stop someone from saying I was letting loose reasoning into quiz bowl. Sins of omission are judged mortal by some.]
The lesson here is :It is impossible to separate the clue about the word which titles the concept from the clue about the concept.
Quiz bowl is in one fundamental sense, a language-game in the Wittgenstein sense. We don’t think of it as such because the rules don’t change much from ordinary speech. The main rule that is seen here is that the name of the concept is interchangeable with the word that names the concept. When spoken, X is indistinguishable from “X”.
Why does this matter for quiz bowl? It means that every answer’s etymology is always a potential clue to the answer. Often it will be used as the last clue, because it requires only the shallowest knowledge of the actual subject, and so perceived by the writer as the most broadly known fact about the subject. A collection like this gives you the last clue on 24 possible tossups that might appear, or the leadin or A clue on 24 possible bonus questions, where the answer to part A is now accessible. Either way it’s a leg up on a bunch of particular questions that are likely to be asked (maybe not all 24 will appear at your team’s level of competition, but some will.)
It is impossible to separate the clue about the word which titles the concept from the clue about the concept. So prepare for clues about the word. The answer is the same, and it “scores the same as real knowledge.”
[I frequently use that phrase in reading practice questions where the player gets the wild guess correctly, but it’s a similar sentiment.]
Now the simple takeaway here is that this article could be part of your team’s regular training. The galaxy brain thought should be that anything that this creator makes could be potentially useful. After all they’re describing themselves as etymologynerd, and they are producing one thing that can be used as a study guide; one would think they have others on the accounts they are flacking in their watermark.
The second place I found material this week was on r/quizbowl. I look at it from time to time, and I’ve used it for grist for this newsletter in the past. I don’t believe it to be a main-travelled quiz bowl road, but that’s because it’s where you go if you’re already very online through reddit, rather than really online to talk about quizbowl. So I’m guessing it doesn’t get the scrutiny and support as other forums.
(I believe) A high school student was asking if Otto Dix was worth knowing, despite him never appearing in a question set searchable by qbreader. This is of course a leading indicator, and I would accept that. Personally, I had to review for myself exactly who Otto Dix was. My first instinct was to confuse him with Nicholas Otto, the namesake of the Otto Cycle, an mathematical idealization of a four-stroke engine.
While it’s tempting for me to say “if I haven’t heard of an answer by now, it’s not going to come up,” that’s both inaccurate and not useful for somebody who isn’t me. But I’ll credit the initial query for formulating the right hypothesis: it is a reasonable guess that enough of the circuit’s history of previous tournament packets is cataloged there to say that if an answer isn’t found in that archive, it’s not going to be appearing anytime soon. (Barring of course the era of Kleist, where the sample size was so small you could tilt the frequency list to make something go from never heard to “chestnut” in less than a year.)
If you have to ask "Is this important?" it isn't. There's a long enough list of crises, tasks, and lessons in quiz bowl that if you really think about it, any edge case isn't going to do anything other than fall off the edge.
So when I went back over the Otto Dix article on wikipedia, figuring at least there’d be some paintings I could see if I recognized, I was struck by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Dix#/media/File:Otto_Dix_Sy_von_Harden.jpg
I didn’t know the painting for its artist, but I knew the painting because I saw it most days I checked into my Trello account for inspiration. It appears as the picture in the last item in the Researched column: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jan/19/germany-europes-greatest-artistic-nation-richter-klee-dix-hoch
I had mistaken the painting for an illustration created for the article, and hadn’t thought any more of it. This was a tactical mistake on my part, since I probably would have been more interested in the article and converting it into questions if I had known that it was an actual painting. So I was surprised that I had in fact encountered his work, and even weirder, sort of outside of quiz bowl.
But if it’s taken me four years to see enough synchonicity to even consider turning this into a question, I probably shouldn’t and it should be let free.
Comparing these two gave me an additional rule which I need to tuck into the book. The art movement etymologies would be useful to players in practice, even if they weren’t a top-tier art player or playing top-difficulty packets. Otto Dix wouldn’t be useful to players in practice unless they were playing the very apex of difficulty on a regular basis, and only if those writers started choosing him over another candidate. The former would show up enough in practice that some portion of them would be useful on a regular basis. The latter has never shown up in the commonly practiced corpus, so if you wanted to commit Otto Dix to memory, you’ll have to do the work yourself. From that logic came this generalization of the concept.
The best study guides introduce things that don't require additional spaced repetition to study and memorize. The spaced repetition of their appearing in practices and competitions handle the task of reintroduction to the player.
Finally, I crafted the oddest sentence this week. “No that’s my wife’s copy of Bulgakov.” Though she doesn’t take much stock of my involvement with quiz bowl, and doesn’t really have any interest in it, she is a reader. Which means occasionally, I find myself explaining how I know a lot about some book which she fell asleep reading and got stuck to my back, but I’ve never read the book in question. So when there was a delivery from Amazon and the book one of her patients, a Ukrainian emigre just after the Soviet Union collapsed, suggested she read Bulgakov, she got The Heart of A Dog and The Master and Margarita delivered.
I now find myself both waiting for her to complete them so I can catch up, and a little worried that our black cat, Miss Violet (full name: UltraVIOLET CATastrophe), may take a page from Behemoth’s playbook.