Rhino wrote:
1) Which Roman emperor declared Christianity the empire's official religion in 325?
Good basic general knowledge question, right? You may know it. You may not, but you could have learned it from school, from reading, from church, from movies, from any number of places. But the four distractors were Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Caligula and Nero. Now straight away anybody who can read that question can probably eliminate 1 and 2 who were not Roman and two of the most famous names in history.
I would be willing to wager than 80% of people who go out to play trivia, and probably 90% of those who don't, have no idea that Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan were not Roman.
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Anyone with a smattering of knowledge on the subject even if they don't know the answer would probably know that Caligula and Nero came a couple hundred years or more earlier
Also highly, highly unlikely. I'd wage 98% of people don't know this.
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so you have a 33% guess for a room temperature IQ and a 100% certainty for an average intellect even if they have no clue about the answer without seeing the choices.
Not to go off-topic, but you're still erroneously conflating intellect with trivial knowledge. The vast majority of people have absolutely no reason to know, or if they did know, to remember, the things above, immaterial of the level of their intellect.
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These in short order got me thinking and I am nigh positive I have NEVER seen a stupid distractor (Tiefly, El Puko etc) on a PC question, and that I have always seen very silly distractors on most "academic" questions. EVERY PC question I saw last night listed a full slate of distractors that at least made general sense. If the Q was about an actor, all choices were actors and so on. How many times have Geography questions about Africa only listed 1 or 2 African places on the other hand, or science questions about metals listed three nonmetals?
That's because they're trying to keep your "average" person in the game (and, IMO, going about it all wrong). Your distractors may help people, but in likelihood won't help anyone but people with your level of knowledge, which far exceeds the average player -- so a few throwaways _may_ help them increase their score. They're more likely to know the entertainment or PC questions, so the distractors really aren't that necessary (to be fair, I've seen stupid distractors in many, many PC questions -- granted, not of the Tiefly Level). I can say with absolute certainty that of the 20 or so people I regularly play with, possibly 3 or 4 of us have the knowledge you're talking about -- and they're a group of players who will regularly Top 5 games.
To be pessimistic, it's also possible the people writing the questions are too uneducated to come up with five good answers, whereas on things they know (PC), they can come up with plenty.
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Off base or not? Pay attention and let me know - tell me if you see as many patently absurd distractors on PC questions as academic ones.....
I think you're not off base. I think there are far more in academic questions than in "PC" questions. By the same token, I don't think a lot of the things you think of as distractors are actually so for the average player -- and especially not for the type of player they're trying to get; they're more -- IMO -- a softball to the "good" players. That's not a knock against you at all -- you're very knowledgeable; with that knowledge unfortunately comes the tendency (or perhaps a variant of hope) to assume the rest of the public isn't as uneducated as you might fear they are.
Grab yourself some random people and ask them about Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, in whatever variant you want; I think you'll be surprised by their answers, or lack of.