> This is a little nutty. It's not nutty; it's based on my experience playing against many different people. Of course, playing style may differ as a function of geography, but this is certainly true on the West Coast. While I'm constantly impressed by the ability > of quizbowl players to divide knowledge into endless categories, this > is a bit excessive. All quizbowl knowledge, consisting as it does of > impetus and response, (or rather clue and answer), seems to me by > nature created equal. To some extent this is true. But in order to respond to clues you ideally need to know what the correct answer is (at least if you want points). If you're someone who just memorizes "clue-answer" pairs, you're not going to do well on a science question because there are many different ways of writing a question on the same topic. A science student will have likely encountered any given topic in his field (at the undergraduate/graduate level) in a number of different situations. Accordingly, he will be able to recognize the answer if the question is written in several different ways. Again, in my experience, there's nothing quite like knowing a lot about a topic like doing 50 problems on it. So unless you've put in an equivalent amount of work, you're unlikely to beat a science student to a science tossup. In literature, on the other hand, everyone is equal because you don't need any special preparation in order to read the book. The same is true in history, to a lesser extent. Obviously, a student of history will have an advantage, but there's no barriers in principle to simply reading it on your own (what I do). All you need is facility in the English language. Learning the ins and outs of science without putting in the time that most science majors put in is much harder, however. >Is it possible that the reason why most science > majors who are quizbowl players are also capable in the humanities is > because of the nature of the distribution? While it's possible for a > humanities student to largely ignore 1\4 of the distribution and > still be a competent player, a science player, especially one > constrained only to physics, has to learn something outside of > science to even be interested in quizbowl most of the time. It's certainly possible. I don't think it's true for myself of most other science players I know, but even accepting this, I don't see what this has to do with the comparative difficulty of learning either subject. >The only > case I see for your point would be the suggestion that more people > simply find learning literature or history to be more interesting > than learning their damn subatomic particles. This is probably true, > but to put it in terms of "easiness" or "hardness" is misleading. One phrase I want to single out: "learning their damn subatomic particles." If you are a humanities player who wants to get better at science, my guess is that you'll try to memorize (sorry, "learn") subatomic particles since you don't know them already. But many advanced undergrads and probably most grad students in physics have already taken one or more classes in particle physics, so they already know about subatomic particles; they don't need to specifically try to learn about them. Note also that many questions written about subatomic particles are usually not written by physics students but rather for people who don't know anything else about physics and need an easy 3-part physics bonus.
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