Zach Gozlan

Hahahhahaha right how dare people be excited about the coolest thing they've ever done

An excerpt from an article I wrote for defector explaining jeopardy has never asked about Christian Pulisic

A clue from yesterday's game (feb 18 26) with the answer being christian pulisic

Another excerpt from my article where I mention a stereotype that jeopardy contestants dont know the starting qb for the bills

A clue from the same category yesterday where the correct response was josh allen, and ken Jennings making a crack about "the stereotype"

🤔

How Contestant Alison Betts Gamed 'Jeopardy!' -- And Went Viral 'Jeopardy!' winner Alison Betts explains the wagering strategy that led her to a come-from-behind victory and the Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament.

YES I WROTE ABOUT THE FINAL JEOPARDY WIZARDRY www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv...

While the questions themselves usually don't reference athletic teams, that knowledge definitely helps (and further separates basketball/football from the pack)

One postscript for this, prompted by yesterday's game: while I think the "sports" part of "college sports" pushed those categories to the sports zone of my data, there's a not-insiginficant number of questions about colleges and universities I sorted to geography

Thanks for having me @ewpod.bsky.social !

a black rectangle with the words "abolish ICE" in the center, in white text

Oh yeah it's very experience-based

Happy to refer you but for the sake of this conversation its just another trivia game with available stats

i gave the LL example (1) to plug the 1ds and (2) just to show two very different questions, one mass culture and one academic, that played the same to ~25,000 people who do LL

learnedleague is different because the guy who writes it aims for 50% over time across all questions and has been known to add/remove hints from clues between early and final releases to help things net out in aggregate; different incentive structure (and somewhat different audience)

i think jeopardy's aim is just to make sure clues of the same value play at about the same level. and they basically do! i don't think the differences i found across topics are that dramatic, i mostly just cared about showing the trope was wrong

is what they choose to make a $200 sports clue *easier* than an equivalent $200 literature clue to account for the contestant base? i don't know how to answer that question. maybe some sort of weird RCT where you make a bunch of random people play j! and see if the results are different

I get where you're coming from I think, it's just really hard to answer because while it's obvious that some questions are easier than others within a topic ("first president" vs "fourteenth president"), it's hard to assign like. "absolute" difficulty of a question

Howdy. Welcome. I don't have a second idea at this time but I do have a link to my local mutual aid group if you're here anyway: www.dcmigrantmutualaid.org/donate

!!!!

thank you!

All jeopardy contestants know each other and I've already thanked them for not making me look stupid today

Someone asked me what the by-sport breakdown was; I don't have one but I'll probably build one this weekend when I'm snowed in.

But I'll tell you right now there isn't a lot of hockey in there.

(these are very small numbers but you can invert them: only about one in ten $200 clues yield an incorrect response, but closer to one in five $2000 clues do)

Definitely worth a crack! One thing I mentioned in the article but didn't include as a table is that I did look at how many times a wrong answer was provided per clue, and the results weren't meaningfully different; I suspect zero-guess clues would look about the same

and i'll never know as much about it as those guys on reddit who debate which era had the best set design

Very curious too, I've seen the "Black Jeopardy Misses" compilations (and had some of them myself on the pop culture spinoff) but could be the same selection bias as with the sports stuff

If I get to it I'll let you know for sure

the guy who wrote the defector article and two unidentified women in a screen grab from the new york post about missing a clue about denzel

not to spam your mentions today but: yeah

Thank you and also thanks for knocking over the first domino that led to me and my friends winning a bunch of money

One thing that's weird though for me (anecdotal, not a data-based conclusion) is that I usually find the Sports 1DSs to be BRUTALLY competitive, maybe because there's a pocket of LL users who ONLY know ball?

Some of this probably has to do with Thorsten trying his best to keep everything at 50% overall on aggregate while the Jeopardy! have a pretty clear pattern against asking sports toughies.

Very plausible! While I liked that my data lined up pretty well with LL category ordering, it's possible these are more different groups than I'm implying in the article - I estimated once that 20% of LLamas are Jeopardy alums, but people can have common names.

Nerd-Jock Essentialism Is Alive And Well And Living On Bee Sky Dot App

139 comments on the article

#h2p

Thank you so much for being my sherpa into the world of sportswriting for this btw