Fantasy Intellectual Teams Rules

Terminology

Each contestant is an owner who picks a team of intellectuals. An owner wins if the intellectuals on his or her team outscore intellectuals on other teams.

The Draft

For the draft, the commissioner's office will randomly select the draft order. Consider a league with five teams, each picking seven players. Suppose that the order for the first round is that Team A chooses the first player, followed by B, C, D, and E. In the second round and third rounds, the order will be reversed. In round 4, we revert to Team A going first, in round 5 we revert to Team E going first, and we continue to alternate. The draft will be held live, but owners are expected to submit a list of desired players to the commissioner's office ahead of time, so that in case an owner cannot make the live draft the commissioner's office will make selections from the owner's list.

Point submissionn process

Each owner is responsible for submitting points for that owner's players. I anticipate that there will be a form for doing so, and a report that all owevers can see of approvals/denials of point requests for all leagues. If you own a player that is also owned in a different league, you may copy approved point suggestions from that other owner.

The Scoring System

A key element in each scoring category is a specific proposition, called the question. In a formal debate, there is a question, and one side argues in favor of the affirmative and one side argues against it. The question should be stated as a complete sentence, if not by the player then by the owner claiming the point on the player's behalf. An example of the question might be "Will a minimum wage increase of $4 reduce low-skilled employment by 500,000 or more?"

A less precise but still valid question would be "Would increasing the minimum wage would be bad for low-skilled workers?" If the proposition is too vague, such as "Arguing against a minimum wage increase," it is not really a question. The difference between approval or denial is likely to depend a lot on whether there is a clear question.

There are eight scoring categories: A (devil's advocate), B (thinking in bets), C (caveats), D (debate), K (kick off a discussion) O (open to reconsideration) R (evaluates research, S (steel-mans other point of view)

Criteria for each point

In the following, "you" refers to a player.