What’s it like to be one of the Jeopardy clue writers? | Hacker News Reader

What’s it like to be one of the Jeopardy clue writers?

tv.avclub.com

53 pointsfern1222 comments

> And you don’t want stand-and-stares; that’s the one thing we’re always trying to avoid.

This reminded me of this recent one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h33u2eeVqXo

Haha, when pop-culture knowledge meets specialized "high school clique-esque" category of questions. This is kinda funny to me but I feel like it shouldn't be.

I'm nearly 100% certain all three of the contestants would run circles around me in 99 out of 100 categories but this entire group of questions made me feel like I could be a Jeopardy champion.

> This is kinda funny to me but I feel like it shouldn't be.

It's funny to me too and I don't even know any of the answers. I think Trebek really showed why he's the host because his comments MADE this entire thing a funny moment rather than an incredibly awkward waste of air time.

It’s not surprising that this would happen occasionally, given that there are only 3 contestants per show. Most shows will have someone who knows football, but of course not all.

Entire category stumpers are probably somewhat but not extremely rare, but this one is going to get more media coverage but it aligns well with the narrative of “look how bad these nerds are at sports knowledge.”

It was an interesting read... that I couldn’t finish because the page kept crashing until my browser (Safari, iOS 11.2.5, iPhone 8) finally gave up on reloading it. Even made my phone warm up at one point.

Happens too often on Gizmodo Media Group sites (I’m on Jalopnik almost daily.)

Same. Horrible user experience for what seemed like a decent article.

However, using reader mode on iOS Safari keeps all the ads out and it then reads fine.

The latest AVClub redesign was a real disaster IMO. I know they were just standardising across sister sites but it's gone from a really clean, lovely website to a confusing mess.

Another! problem! with! the! article! is! the! excessive! use! of! exclamation! marks!

The page is compatible with reader mode.

It reminds me of the role of DMs in RPGs: creating a small world in each question, category, and show for the player to interact with.

This is a trade site? It might have been interesting or helpful for readers if they'd asked about salaries in the field (not necessarily what the subject earns directly, more in general).

> This is a trade site?

If you're talking about the A/V Club, it's not a trade site; it's a pop culture review/etc. site.

>I have areas of knowledge—I know literature, sports, a few others—but one of the interesting things is that you’re always trying to write things that are accessible, and if it’s a subject you know a lot about, then there’s a danger of writing things that are too esoteric. Which might happen to me with English literature. But if I’m writing physics then I can be pretty certain: If there’s something I’ve heard of, then most people have heard of it, and so it’s easier to write things that you don’t know about.

I've noticed Jeopardy placed massively disproportionate emphasis on sports and the humanities compared to science, and I guess this reveals why. The writers don't know anything about that sort of thing, and so their threshold for "too esoteric" is extremely shallow for any STEM topic. Meanwhile, because they do really intimately know classical novels or football or such, they don't consider asking what team won the 1979 Superbowl or asking about a tertiary character in Crime and Punishment as being the least bit excessive. I guess there's really nothing that can be done - they even are aware of the problem but still can't seem to fix it - and it's not too big a deal regardless. I still try to catch the show every chance I can.

I suppose literature and sports are understandable to everyone. People might not know the individual fact but they understand the meaning and can at least try to remember something. In STEM, you'd get "stand-and-stare" with any technical term where the entire field is completely alien to most viewers and players.

The same effect happens in casual conversation. Arts majors have all kinds of accessible topics they like to talk about with anyone, but a programmer can't even begin to say something about stacks or garbage collection or whatever with a non-programmer. It's a totally walled off other-world for most people.

Arts majors who talk about the details of a particular pigment, or chiseling techniques will be about as well received as programmers rambling about stacks. Technical details are rarely relevant to those outside the profession.

People outside tech have lots of questions and interest in talking about tech. Product decisions are more accessible and meaningful than implementation details.

But they don't really ask stuff like that. Here are a bunch of Crime & Punishment questions:

j-archive.com/search.php?search=crime+and+punishment&submit=Search

Even a $2000 American Football question has a lot more hints than 'who won the Superbowl in 1979'

"THE CENTRAL POWERS $2000: The last season for the AFC's Central Division was 2001 & this team with Kordell Stewart at QB won it"

> Even a $2000 American Football question has a lot more hints than 'who won the Superbowl in 1979'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h33u2eeVqXo

If you watch this clip which I linked in another comment, this is a clear football category. I consider myself a casual watcher (enough to know about scoring, downs, players in a game, etc.) but even the $200 question stymied me, not to mention all of the other ones...

None of these questions are of the type 'who won the Superbowl in 1979', even when the category is straight up football. I couldn't answer the $200 question either - I don't watch football at all but I've heard of 'option play' so it can't be that esoteric. And the question tells you exactly what is!

The GP was saying they ask things like who won the Superbowl a particular year or are about obscure Dostoyevsky characters. I don't think they do. They do ask question that easily stump people who know next to nothing about football. I'm sure they also ask questions that people who don't know who wrote 'Crime & Punishment' can't answer. But neither of these things are evidence they casually ask deep arcana about football or literature.

At least with literature you can reasonably expect that each participant had it as high school topic, so some knowledge about literature was forced down on them. With football it's more binary: you either are interested in it, or not, in which case your knowledge is zero.

There’s another effect you didn’t mention. Jeopardy contestants qualify by answering clues with the same distribution of topics as the show’s clues, and most contestants have probably watched a lot of Jeopardy before competing.

I watch a lot of University Challenge, a British quiz show for college students, and the effect is very noticeable for an American like myself. Questions about American history tend to be easy American high school material, while questions about British history are often very obscure to me.

Jeopardy is awesome, I try to watch it every night if possible. The only reason I use the TV antannae.

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