on 8/5/02 7:23 PM, scqa at no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com wrote: [Quite a lot of stuff to which I'm now replying in a way which I hope won't be interpreted as gratuitious flaming.] Trying (and failing) to keep this short, I would just say that as far as I can see, this proposal and all of the other talk about some national organization have been real short on reasons why this would be a good idea. There are lots of evident reasons why it wouldn't be a good idea. It's difficult to organize such a thing, it is bound to lead to power struggles, half of the QB community will ignore the existence of any such body, a substantial portion of the rest will form their own splinter group in specific opposition to it. In addition, many people will resent it simply because it introduces an unnecessarily bureaucratic and hierarchical element into QB, which is a sure-fire way to make the already difficult process of hosting tournaments and forming clubs even more difficult and unpleasant than it already is. Against this what advantages do we have? --It will make scheduling easier, there won't be conflicting tournaments planned for the same weekend. True, but there are easier and less time-consuming ways to do this, most of them consisting of tournament directors and clubs on a regional level talking to each other and generally getting their act together. --There will be a unified championship. Who cares? At the moment the three formats test distinctly different skills, and are satisfying to different sorts of players. Some people care more about winning ACF, some care more about winning NAQT or ACF. I fail to see who is hurt by having three different championships in what are in fact three somewhat different games. --People will respect us more, and it will be easier to get money from schools. Frankly, I doubt whether anyone will pay the slightest amount more attention to us, or put us on TV. There are many reasons that collegiate-level academic competition isn't on TV any more, and I don't pretend to know them all, but I am completely and utterly certain that the existence of rival formats is not a significant cause. The idea that some TV executive is going to be all ready to put CBI or NAQT nationals on prime-time TV and suddenly back out because she's afraid that the existence of ACF would detract from her legitimacy is simply not credible to me. In general, I think the same probably goes for funding sources. At the two CBI programs I've been in, it was generally assumed that the CBI tournament was the one that the administrators cared most about, for reasons of PR and CBI's links to ACUI and whatever else, and that the administrators did not care what anyone in the QB community at large thought about the relative legitimacy of any of the current national championiships. --It will eliminate the problem of grad students playing for too long. Only if the people in charge agree that this is a problem, and somehow convince a bunch of tournament directors who currently don't care to care. Many people in QB simply don't see this as a problem, or see separate divisions and junior bird tournaments as an adequate coutnerweight. This point seems to me like a separate issue that has nothing to do with the actual question of whether greater centralized organization is good or not. --Other sports have unified scoring systems and general formats, QB should too. There are lots of reasons why professional sports that function mostly as entertainment for audiences and a business for players and owners should function differently from a purely recreational activity whose main purpose is to give pleasure to the participants. One could make the analogy that there are dozens of ways to play poker, everyone makes up weird house rules for Monopoly, whatever. I simply don't view it as that big a problem that someone can say "Joe is a better CBI player than Mary, Mary does better on ACF, they're about even on NAQT, gee, I can't decide which is the better all-round player." If anything, this is an entertaining source of discussion and argument. In addition, it's not impossible that some people prefer having several different distributions, formats and so on to choose from. Personally, I do. In part, I think that this point rests on a philosophical assumption that unity or uniformity is in some way inherently a good thing, which I simply don't share. --It would end inter-format flame wars And replace them with flame wars about all the various things the NCSA leadership is doing wrong, how it used to be better or worse the old way, why the unified distribution should be changed, etcetera etcetera and so forth. Instead of everyone being in different tents pissing out, they'd all be in the same tent pissing inside. --Several other points were made about how NCSA could do things better than any of the current organizations does them. To all of this, I would simply say that if these ideas have merit, they can be implemented by currently existing organizations. Personally, I would flat refuse to play in any tournament that asked me to wear a uniform. --Ben Franklin thought unity was a good idea. If the alternative were getting hanged, I'd agree. Anyway, that's my counter-rant for the day. In general, I guess my feeling is that there are certain inherent disadvantages that go with all centralized organizations, no matter in what field. In many cases, as in the one referred to by Franklin, there are clear advantages that greatly outweigh those disadvantages. In the case of QB, I don't see what those are. Cheers, Kemezis
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