I think i made it through 20 pages. Assumed or got the impression that it was new agey. The only thing i dislike more than libertarianism is new agey stuff. (I’m probably wrong, but I have anti-zen inclinations.)
We lost our first round in the regional to a team from a Catholic school who knew Waterford Crystal. Still annoyed. Then we went on to not drop a round, winning our group and the final the next weekend.
The other team was making gallows humor jokes about our utter dominance in the final. Felt good.
I basically showed up at the HS quiz bowl team trials. You were supposed to be nominated by a teacher, but none of mine liked me enough, or maybe they thought I would blow it off - which is very fair. By leaving me out they made me super motivated. I went on to be the team captain. I’ve always liked trivia and I’m a good guesser.
Apparently the famed separation was unsuccessful. Probably not really a viable procedure under the best of conditions. But if he was such a great doc, why did he become a political grifter?
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I get my spice from sheer volume.
I identified a lot with the narrator and thought I was looking at one possibility for what my future could look like.
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Haha, I have a couple good stupid memories.
We had a bonus set at a national tournament against Torrey Pines about the cartoon Thundercats. None of us had seen it. The other team was cackling it up, they just loved answering the questions. It was one of the nerdiest moments in the nerdiest activity.
We tied a game once. We swept our opponent’s bonus set which was seemingly impossible questions about warplanes used in Vietnam. This guy on my team who was an incredible weak link but whose sole interest was military stuff and who was only playing because of illness just crushed it. He later fought in Afghanistan, then became an contractor in Iraq. Then he killed himself.
Most absurd one was at Vanderbilt. Question about John Locke, my teammate rings in and says “John Locke.” Moderator says nope. Reads the rest of the question, the other team answers “John Locke.” Gets the points.
Well, we had no coach in the room and I am pretty unhinged facing injustice. I ask the moderator what’s up, he says he heard us say, “John Lack.” Now, in most situations, normal human beings from the other team would say, nah, he said John Locke, but nope, not this time.
I just went off. I was like, yo, moderator, first of all, you need to use your brain. There are lots of different accents here. Do you know who John Locke is? Is he a really unknown person? Have you ever heard of John Lack? Ok, so do you really think someone would answer that?
Moderator doesn’t budge. So I start interrogating the coach. I don’t remember which team it was, but it was some mediocre Southern school. I’m sure they could not believe the tone I was taking with the coach. The coach and all the members of their team insisted they didn’t know for sure what we said. I said, “You guys are classless. Absolute scumbags and morons. This is absolutely pathetic.”
Well, pearls were clutched. The game got stopped and they went and got our coach out of another room. Coach gets dragged into our room. Not much happens but he has to tell us to let it go. The game was a preliminary round game and didn’t matter much, I wanted to walk out. But we didn’t. Once it became apparent we were going to win, I started ringing in and guessing “John Lack” for every question.
Oh, last one. We had two high schools on the same campus and we used to practice with each other. We were probably the 2nd best team in the state, they were 4th. They were very good although the gap was clear. Still, we went 14-0 against them in formal competitions my senior year, which is absurd and so unlikely. The last one was a sick comeback in the quarterfinals of the winners bracket at the state championship. I think we got the last nine toss-ups including one that started “what is the limit of x” and I just rang in and guessed 1 because they were much better at high level math than us. It really was mental with them.
Also, F anybody who went to Brookwood Academy. I am forever their bitch.
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The methods are basically the same for two. Trolly method for two:
P = 1-[(1-a)(1-b)]
P = 1-[1 - a - b + ab]
P = a+b - ab
The way that you’ve stated your method, adding probabilities so that your first term can go over 100% (sometimes) is just not intuitive (at least not to me), so I’d have to start from the Trolly method to understand it.
If we had 3 days of rain and we wanted to figure out if it rained exactly 2 out of three days, I’d just sum the combos individually. So,
P= ab(1-c) + a(1-b)c + (1-a)bc
For at least 2 out of three days, you would add an abc to above. Either way, I think that comes out to a different answer than what you gave, which means either your method is wrong, or I didn’t understand the question.
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You’re nothing but a tiny sac of biochemicals that needs to eat other tiny sacs of biochemicals for yours to keep reacting. Eat Arby’s.
Yeah I don’t know what I was thinking. Clearly 76% isn’t the right answer for my 2 out of 3 scenario. It’s 36% as you got.
Apparently I got it mixed up in my head all these years. It’s one minus the probability of both events, not the sum of each event minus the probability of both.
That is an entertaining and baller story about Locke, especially saying Lack after locking it up. I wish we had quiz bowl in HS. Friends did debate but I considered it borderline unethical for not being focused on truth. (Semi-problematic given my career, but not always because the easiest way to prevail in law is to be on the right side of an issue and be able to prove it.)
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Now, tell us how you feel about DCC.
OK, I guess I realized another way to think about it. It’s definitely more brute force than the Trolly method which is my go to approach.
Wait, WAT? HS academic debate is a game. Truth has nothing to do with it.
Did you have ethical problems with poker? That’s not focused on truth either.
Bluffing isn’t a lie. It’s an either/or statement.
That may be. Nevertheless, I’m gonna stand by poker not being focused on truth. You often are attempting to mislead opponents by representing something that you don’t actually have.
One problem you might have with quiz bowl is it’s not focused on real knowledge. I loved it, but it instilled some bad habits in me and probably replaced what would have been real knowledge with bits of trivia.
For example, I was probably top 10 in the country in a number of liberal arts categories my senior year. I knew all of the minor works of literature by major authors. I knew all of the minor characters in major works of literature. I knew all sorts of useless biographical facts. To be fair, I did read a ton, and learning trivia inspired me to read more sometimes. But more cynically, I could also tell you the composer of most major pieces of classical music. I don’t know squat about music. Sure, I was better at the categories I cared about, but I would have wiped the floor with most people who actually do know and care about classical music just because somebody gave me a big packet of shit to memorize and I liked to win. That’s just stupid.
A ton of it was memorization. It was rare you got rewarded for having deep knowledge of something. You get dopamine for being able to recognize Crime and Punishment–a book not that many high schoolers have read–when the question mentions Zossimov while the other team is waiting for the obvious Raskolnikov. Pretty silly.
This always felt inauthentic. But it was a fun game.
Well, I did do academic decathlon and sports, but I was mainly into AD because I was good at tests and would do the reading for it. I learned a decent amount about the civil war, 20th century art movements, and the space race. However, the team was good but not gung ho. The coach let me get away with not prepping a lot, such that I gave an extemporaneous speech as to why Nietzsche was “someone I admired”. My understanding was too shallow and not conveyed well, and (in any event) I stopped admiring him much a few years later.
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Being exposed to a new philosophy is very dangerous. I think there’s a natural attraction to it especially among people who suspect something is deeply wrong with the things most people passively accept. It’s like, oh holy shit look at this cool new way of looking at the world that I hadn’t thought of before and few around me actually know about, I’m awesome! This effect is pretty strong in high school I think. In part because like, it is awesome to look at the world in a new way.
It’s been almost 20 years since I absented myself from the qb world, quitting cold turkey. This thread inspired me to check up on a few things I was a part of for the first time in over a decade and it’s nice to see that those things are still running.
I applied what I now understand as game theory concepts, understanding that my knowledge is imperfect and partial and that I should have a willingness to guess based on what I felt was my probability of getting things right, understanding that this was affected by the strength of my opponents and teammates.
I had a tendency to study the things that other people wouldn’t care about. Non-western history. Social sciences. I was known for rebelling against the Great Western Canon in my choices of question subject matter, to the dismay of people who loved that stuff. Even back then, there was always something political underlying how I would approach things.
I think I was an underrated player because people didn’t understand me, but I can brag that I once was the best player on a team that beat a team whose best player was Ken Jennings. I think that, to the extent people might remember me, they will remember me as one of the most insane players on the circuit.
In the long run, my participation in that activity was acquiring data to feed into my quest to come up with a theory of everything.
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College? Beating Ken Jennings is pretty hot.