As Doctor Science Suggested.
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File 770
Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
As Doctor Science Suggested.
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first post!
[rock-stalk]
Miss ya, Mike.
Sacrificial Second!
premature fifth!
(I swear it’s never happened before!)
Interesting. Very interesting.
Congratulations, Mike, on the 2 Hugos; also, may your health continue to improve.
Worldcon filers: the meetup was quite enjoyable.
Good to know you’re still (virtually) present, Mike.
Second Fifth is the Best Fifth!
Meanwhile in other exciting news…the Dragon Awards website has still not been updated. http://awards.dragoncon.org/
The last post was April 14.
Camestros, huh. And voting is supposed to close in a week? Doesn’t bode well for the award, I’m sorry to say.
airportstalk
I was able to vote in the Dragon Awards. They e-mailed me when voting went live.
Also: Mike, I can’t wait for you to be back up and around with things back to normal around here.
Yes, I got an email for the Dragon Awards: they’re using a survey site to handle the voting.
Haven’t been around lately, for various reasons, but Mike: Congratulations! and Get Well Soon! (Please. I feel so out of touch without regular Scrolls . . . )
I wanted to comment on what I think remains to be addressed in terms of Hugo voting proposals.
To begin with, I realize that ratifying or passing 4 more-or-less complex voting proposals in one year is huge. Even if just either one of the two proposals that needs ratification next year makes it, and nothing else, we’ll still have what I’d consider acceptable slate resistance going forward. So, yay.
But if I were designing an ideal system? There’s three things I’d still change, plus one minor clarification; stuff I didn’t bring up this year, because it’s relatively minor, and we had enough on our plate with the major stuff.
First, the minor clarification. I think it’s important that next year the Business Meeting pass a statement about 3SV to address the real concerns that it would increase negativity. Here’s the kind of wording I’m thinking of:
So, the three actual amendment proposals which I’d support are:
+1 (or 2) against trolls: during the 3SV voting, nominators who were also voters would have the right to add 1 (or 2) additional work per category from the longlist to their nominations. This would be counted through EPH, identically to the nominations which came before. (An additional nomination for something the voter has already nominated would thus have no effect.)
Shields up: The 3SV ballot would have 3 options for each work: eliminate (as already described in 3SV), extend (the finalists would be the top of the EPH list, down to the Nth who did not get voted “extend”. So if a “human shield” was on a slate — say, Seveneves — got voted “extend”, and made the top 5, there would be one additional finalist in that category, to ensure that a slated work wasn’t pushing something off the finalist list.) Votes for “eliminate” would also count as votes for “extend”.
Majority judgment for the final round: This is less urgent and not really related to slates, but IRV is not the best system for the final round. Majority judgment works as follows:
-Voters grade each candidate using 5 categories: (perhaps: “outstanding”, “very good”, “good”, “reasonably worthy”, and “unworthy”). They can give multiples of the same grade or skip grades as they see fit.
-The “outstanding” votes are tallied. If any candidate has a majority, they win.
-The “very good” votes are added to the tally. Again, any candidate with a majority wins.
-As above with the “good” votes, and then with the “reasonably worthy” votes.
-If no candidate gets a majority of “reasonably worthy” or above, there is no award in the category.
-There is some clear tiebreaker for cases where two candidates have the same median (reach a majority at the same time). Several sensible tiebreakers are available and generally speaking they’d all agree.
This is actually easier to run than IRV, more robust against changing if a ballot or two is re-tallied or added, less prone to prematurely eliminate a popular work, easier to explain, and results can be presented graphically in a more intuitive way. So, while IRV is not broken yet, it might still bear fixing.
BTW: Congratulations, Mike!
[ticky]
My feelings on 3SV became more negative towards it during the discussion we had here. However, what I think is the appropriate alternative (remove works on extended eligibility grounds) is a non-starter because no admins would want that power – and the discussion on +2 showed that even a relatively benign power to admins was not liked.
To revisit briefly: two related problems:
1. slates and slating – aka Sad Puppy tactics. Trying to control the list of finalists.
2. griefing – aka Rabid Puppy tactics. Trying to make Hugo voting an unjoyful activity. Trolling by polling.
I still think 1. is actually a more or less solved problem. No Award in 2015 did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of demonstrating a deterrent against slates and EPH does more by limiting their impact (and 4&6 and EPH+ etc). The structural supports the social – structural (systems that limit the impact of slates), social (potential slaters see that the tactic doesn’t get them what they want). The Sads themselves have retreated to a dark corner mumbling about dragon awards and the martyrdom of ST Jerry of Pournelle.
Which takes us to 2. 3SV is the proposed solution. By using members as the filter, pointless or abusive works can be removed before final voting. It does, potentially, do lots of good things, in particular, remove works that will never win out of the way of serious contenders.
However, by its very nature, it asks members to engage with trolling and griefing. Further, because members are dealing with the long list, the bar to get something onto the list whose purpose is merely to disrupt or insult, is much lower.
@Camestros Felapton
To be honest, I’m at the point where I’m not even going to speculate until we have data back. If Beale and his band of idiots merely pack up their toys and move them to the Dragon Awards, none of these proposals should harm of hinder honest nominations in major ways. If he doesn’t and wants to pay for a third year of being drubbed like the morons he and his followers are, we’ll be able to evaluate the effectiveness and see how the mechanics hold up on real time.
I think 3SV has some challenges, but I don’t think it’s possible to do anything but guess at the impact once implemented yet.
::ticky::
True. Vox’s new spin is that he has brilliantly tricked the Hugo Awards into full SJW convergence forcing us through his mind games into voting for women and other kinds of obviously-not-good-sf-writing-people which will destroy the Hugos because of girl-cooties. A corollary of that particular victory condition (where by Vox wins by books and authors he hates winning prestigious awards) is that he can now leave us to wallow in the utter disaster of the SJW converged Hugos in which we get to vote for great stories by exciting authors.
So, I’m genuinely hopeful that we won’t see much from the Rabids in 2017 (great for the Hugos – appalling news for my blog traffic).
A majority of votes cast or a majority of outstanding votes cast?
Sounds fun. I like the way it builds in No Award without voters “no awarding” somebody per-se.
Thanks for the new thread Mike. Keep getting better. Miss you and your levelheaded commentary.
I agree with @Camestros Felapton on 3SV. Let’s ratify 3SV and EPH+ next year.
@ Jameson Quinn: I like Shields up, though am currently moderately hopeful that it won’t be necessary, as I expect current measures to already be enough to fully take the joy out of ineffective trolling. The more I’ve thought about +x against trolls, the more I dislike it for changing the nature of what reaches the final ballot. As for Majority judgment, I can totally see why it would be better, but suspect it’ll be seen as fiddling with things for the sake of it, and you’d have an uphill battle convincing the business meeting that it’s worth it.
Thanks, btw, for all your efforts in getting us this far!
Chuck Tingle has doubts about this theory. 🙂
After so many years of this petty foolishness, I’m convinced that back when Beale was a little kid, a big kid named Hugo beat him up and stole his lunch money.
True. Vox’s new spin is that he has brilliantly tricked the Hugo Awards into full SJW convergence forcing us through his mind games into voting for women and other kinds of obviously-not-good-sf-writing-people which will destroy the Hugos because of girl-cooties
I love girl-cooties. I look forward to many more years of SFF with non-white and girl-cooties rubbing all over my SFF. *shivers at the thought of so many new and different adventures*
DragonCon continues to do nothing to promote the award. I did get a reminder email since I haven’t taken and submitted the survey yet. I wonder if they will even say how many people participated.
I understand that there probably isn’t the energy to pass Majority Judgment; people don’t want to fix what ain’t (particularly) broken. That’s OK. I was just putting it out there, in case people wanted to take it up.
Majority of votes. So if 100 people voted, and work A got 30:21:19:20:10 for O:VG:G:RW:UW, while work B got 49:11:10:10:20, then they’d both reach a majority at “very good”, but work B would win any reasonable tiebreaker.
I haven’t received any e-mail regarding the Dragon Awards, although I registered to vote. Maybe I’ll try re-registering.
Some of the more twitter vocal RP supporters seem to think the Dragon Awards will prove them right. They do not seem to understand how logic works.
Also, my thoughts/opinion of VD and his “Dread Elk” remain unchanged from when they received their first Hugo drubbing. He/they are an asinine irritant, nothing more. Zero long term effect on the Hugo award.
@Jameson Quinn:
Oh goodness.
This sounds terribly cumbersome to the actual participants, and dangerously tailored to our very specific situation.
You’re asking that instead of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down choice, 3SV expect voters to have informed opinions on “human shield” vs. “crap entry” vs. “legitimate entry, but I don’t suspect it of being a shield entry.”
That’s a ridiculous measure of nuance to expect from a popular vote. That’s a very limited range of options to lock yourself into; it’s brittle in the inevitable case that different categories arise.
Our system will not be perfect. If there’s an entry that’s teetering between “shield” and “crap”? OK, it’ll either be in or out. Either is fine, otherwise there wouldn’t be any uncertainty. Trolls decide to kingmake only? OK, so we’ll get some kingmade ballots, offset by EPH to some small extent, and depending on there being enough clear kingmake-able options.
Trust the voters. They’re the ones who can adapt immediately to the current situation; rules and mechanisms can’t. A kingmaker attack one year might be very different from a kingmaker attack a different year; voters can actually respond to that. And we’re going to need to be able to live with this kind of compromise and heuristic thinking, because complicated options are bad for an engaged voting base and for long-term maintainability.
@Camestros Felapton
I think that there will be an on-line presence similar to this year in terms of grandiose statements by Beale because he likes to pretend he matters, as well as the sad martyr squads like LC continuing to grease their hides in the righteous anger of ‘how they were treated’. But I’m going to be really curious to see the fallout in terms of actual numbers. Beale managed to get GamerGate deadends like Daddy War Pig to push people into buying subscriptions good for two years. Now with actually nothing to show for it, are they going to do so again?
I got some good novel-reading in on holiday recently.
I read The Raven and the Reindeer by Red Wombat – lovely read, raced through it.
Central Station by Lavie Tidhar was a bit harder work. I didn’t find the episodic nature an issue, as I liked the way different parts merged into each other, but despite being very well written the whole thing didn’t add up to that much story when judged as a novel. (I wonder if I’d have had a different reaction if it was presented as a collection?)
I went back and finished A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab which was good fun and immediately leapt into the sequel A Gathering of Shadows. The sequel really matures and broadens the series. I also tried one of her earlier books Vicious but got badly squicked out by the Flatliners sequence and bailed as unsuitable for reading on holiday – I will probably go back to it.
Outriders by Jay Posey – perfectly decent MilSF for reading on a plane, but lacked any extra spark for me.
Currently reading: The Obelisk Gate, of course!
::tickbox::
which will destroy the Hugos because of girl-cooties.
As I understand it, the spread of cooties is now controllable with proper measures. I believe the CDC recommends inoculation of all awards under the age of 75 using the circle-circle-dot-dot protocol.
So, I’m genuinely hopeful that we won’t see much from the Rabids in 2017 (great for the Hugos – appalling news for my blog traffic).
What, you mean Timothy isn’t enough of an attraction? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.
@Tasha
Same here. Please, please get girl cooties and queer cooties and POC cooties all over my SFF.
I’m worried that a rule which explicitly endorses voting things down because they got there through slate voting will be taken as validation by slate supporters. Last year they constantly accused us of no-awarding things without reading them, just because they were on the slate. Some people did, of course, but a lot read them all and made their judgement on the basis of quality. With this rule they could point and say ‘Look, look, the rule actually says you can vote things down without considering quality!’
In any case, as Standback suggests, I don’t think there’s a clear distinction between ‘Puppy’ nominees and shields. The Castalia House material is clearly the one, and The Martian or File 770 the other, but which is Abigail Larson?
Majority Voting as described by Jameson is a very minor variation on Relative Placement (the latter requires unique rankings per voter), which is used for judging things like dance competitions. I’ve put a link to a description of Relative Placement with examples as my “website”.
As far as the “outstanding”, “very good”, etc., proposal, my problem with that is that I may think two different books are both outstanding, but that doesn’t mean I don’t prefer one, or think it more deserving of an award!
I want to be able to say, “this should win, but if it doesn’t, then I’d like to see this, etc.”.
What I would like, though, would be a system like that used by the Debian Gnu/Linux developers: ranked, but the ranks don’t have to be unique. So instead of [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], you can say [1, 1, 2, 3, 4] if you think the top two are equally deserving, or [1, 2, 2, 2, 3] if you think there’s one that’s better than everything else and one that’s worse, but have no strong preference about the remainder of the field.
This is a little more complex when you first encounter it, but as a long-time member of the Debian project, I can assure that it can make voting a lot easier. No more tough back-and-forth decisions about third place. Just rank ’em both third!
At the moment, with the Hugos, you can give the same ranking to several works in a category, but only if that ranking is “last place”. (You do this by leaving the works off your ballot.) For any position other than last, though, it’s impossible.
This method also has the advantage of being tried and tested and is known to work very well in practice.
@Standback
Very true. This year’s results show the electorate as a whole were judging the situation with nuance, recognising the difference between griefing and kingmaking tactics, etc.
Tasha & the Sci-Fi Girl Cooties should be a saturday morning cartoon about your space adventures 🙂
Camestros: I’m not convinced.
Last year’s tactic (which even then was more a Rabid tactic than a sad one – BT only gave a full slate in five categories) depended on shutting everything else out. EPH defeats that.
One of this year’s tactics depended on abuse. 3SV, perhaps, defeats that.
But this year’s other tactic depended on kingmaking, choosing among the good or OK stuff; and I don’t think we have seen a way of defeating that yet. In Novella, the category which displayed this tactic most fully, it seems that neither EPH nor 3SV would have touched the result. Admittedly he didn’t win, but in a year when there wasn’t something as hotly recommended as Binti, he might have.
Xtifr: That would also solve the ‘No Award’ dilemma, wouldn’t it? (I.e. that if you want to put something under NA, you have to rank everything that comes above it.)
Slate supporters are going to take anything we do as validation of their agenda. Given that, there’s no reason to concern ourselves with what they will think.
@Andrew M
I think the final voting did a good job of recognising kingmaking in novella. In my count (subtracting the 438 noms Nick Cole got from the RP noms) the organic list would have been, in order:
Binti
Penric’s Demon
The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn
Slow Bullets
Waters of Versailles
With Perfect State and The Builders not making the list.
The final voting ordered Binti, Penric, Slow Bullets, Perfect State, No Award, The Builders. Leaving aside that Perfect State “ought” to have gone after NA on the basis of the noms, that’s the electorate getting the true ordering right, indicating that 3SV or a similar system that depends on the electorates judgement is capable of rejecting spoiler-kingmaker gambits.
Andrew M on August 23, 2016 at 2:22 pm said:
Absolutely.
1. Thing I loved.
2. Thing I loved a little less
3. No Award
3. Thing I would have left off
3. Another I would have left off
4. Thing so horrible I have to rank it below NA.
This is exactly like leaving everything but 1 and 2 off under the current system, except for that last place.
(ETA: if this surprises you, it may be because you didn’t realize that everything left off the ballot, including no award, is ranked equally under the current system.)
Mark: I don’t see that at all. The things of lesser (widely perceived) quality would need more help from the slate, so it’s unsurprising that the voting order roughly follows the slate-free nomination order. But it doesn’t follow that people would be willing to vote down the things that got help from the slate – they didn’t no-award them, and no-awarding a thing is easier than voting it down. The things that did badly did so because of their lesser quality, and 3SV is not supposed to be deployed on the basis of quality.
@Cemestros Felapton Tasha & the Sci-Fi Girl Cooties should be a saturday morning cartoon about your space adventures
I like it. Can we get @RedWombat to do the illustrations? I need a large cast of friends in space with me.
@Cora
OMG how did I forget the Queer cooties? Yes those too. In spaaace.
People are going to be free to vote, or downvote, or whatever, based on any criteria they like. Unless we actually can implement a curse which blasts anyone who votes on anything other than pure artistic merit, and I don’t think we can.
If someone in the 3SV stage looks at the list and says “Nothing that comes out of Castalia House can possibly be any good, I’ll downvote all of those,” there’s nothing to stop them. (It’s not like they wouldn’t have plenty of empirical evidence on their side, either.)
If someone looks at the list and says “Anything that was on a slate can’t be good enough to get onto the ballot under its own steam, I’ll downvote all of those,” it’s a reasonable enough point of view, and there’s nothing to stop them doing that either.
In practice, I suspect people will bend over backwards to be as fair as they possibly can – by and large, they have, to date, and it’s actually rather nice to see it. (I read John C. Wright’s book of essays last year, and Marc Aramini’s 320,000 word opuscule this year, in an effort to be fair*. People will do that.)
*I’m not actually asking for a medal or anything, but, y;know, I wouldn’t turn one down….