Linked bonuses do perhaps reward the specialist as much as the generalists. So? [speaketh the specialist] This is the classic argument about the balance between depth and breadth (the ACF vs. CBI continuum). It also depends on how the tournament is distributed. To take Jer's example 1 modern dance per tournament may be enough ( it seems that # music >> # dance questions, which is fine, the amount of time listenting to music >> time spent dancing or watching dance), but that doesn't meant they shouldn't be together. To open up a different can of worms. Why are bonus parts thematically linked? 30 points on the same topic is much more likely to draw on 1 person than is much more than the 10 points a tossup adds. As a preference, I tend to lean toward somewhat looser linking, with the occassional tight linking, or linking without linking (The "Baroque means no Monet" type of transition ... after the Monet tossup), which is still about art, but not Monet or even impressionism. I too would like to see more interdisciplinary questions. The question distribution at DeepBench was rigid to avoid the Dead White Males problem Willie and others have pointed out, ensuring that at least history and literature considered something outside of North America and Europe. It was not rigid to keep people in their academic silos. Moreover I would like to see more questions that genuinely require teamwork. The Name Game questions (Hey Jude the Obscure) does that, but surely there are other clever bonus format that can do the same. This requires creativity, which people seem to be spurning in favor of consistency and ease of writing. I will note that few "official" tournaments design bonuses for creativity, which leaves it to the independent circuit to experiment.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:45 AM EST EST