Today's quiz-bowl players would trounce yesterday's quiz-bowl players on today's quiz-bowl questions. But one of the reasons for this is that people practice a specific, fairly well-understood pursuit. I'd also expect the best ACF players to trouce five-time Jeopardy! champions on ACF questions -- and vice versa. Conversely, (given a time machine, so that people are of the same age and "in practice") would yesterday's players have an advantage over today's players on yesterday's questions? If one could weed out the "current events" factor (we knew a lot of inane things in the early '90s based on their appearance in Time/Newsweek), then my impulse is to say no, since there's a LOT more information available now, disseminated a lot more widely. The Internet is largely responsible for this. Quiz-bowl chestnuts are a bit like chess openings, committed to databases and studied in "home preparation" by championship contenders. I imagine there's a lot of potential ego-blow in claiming either way that any given group of players can('t) hang with the greatest. QB tends to breed both hubris and hypersensitivity. The only way to settle things is to grab packs and buzzers (or grab packs and slap) and play. Note though that in a lot of cases who wins a given tournament will depend on desire (and on the hard work generated by that desire). This is a mixed bag, since it's possible (I know from fairly recent experience) to stop caring whether you win or lose. :-) Matt
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:44 AM EST EST