By Bruce Schneier: Jameson Quinn and I analyzed the E Pluribus Hugo (EPH) voting system, proposed as a replacement for the current Approval Voting system for the Hugo nominations ballot. (This is an academic paper; the Hugo administrators will be publishing their own analysis, more targeted to the WSFS Business Meeting, in the coming weeks.) We analyzed EPH with both actual and simulated voting data, and this is what we found.
If EPH had been used last year in the 2015 Hugo nominations process, then…
The number of slate nominees would have been reduced by 1 in 6 categories, and by 2 in 2 categories, leaving no category without at least one non-slate nominee.
That doesn’t seem like very much. A reasonable question to ask is why doesn’t it reduce the number more. The answer is simply that the slate was powerful last year.
The data demonstrates the power of the Puppies. The category Best Novelette provides a good example. This category had 1044 voters, distributed over 149 different works with 3 or more votes. Of these voters, around 300 (29%) voted for more Puppy-slate works than non-Puppy ones, and about half of those (14%) voted for only Puppy-slate works. These numbers are also roughly typical. The other 71% of the ballots included under 3% with votes for any Puppy work (this is relatively low, but not anomalously so, compared to other categories).
Despite being a majority, the non-Puppy voters spread their votes more thinly; only 24% of them voted for any of the top 5 non-Puppy works. This meant that 4 of the 5 nominees would have been from the Puppy slate under SDV-LPE or SDV.
(SDV-LPE stands for “Single Divisible Vote – Least Popular Elimination,” the academic name for this voting system. SDV is “Single Divisible Vote,” a long-standing and well-understood voting system.)
To further explore this, we took the actual 2014 Hugo nominations data from Loncon 3 and created a fake slate, then analyzed how it affected the outcome at different percentages of the vote totals:
In Figure 1, we assume perfectly correlated bloc voters. They vote in lockstep (with minimal exceptions to prevent ties), and their five nominations are completely disjoint from the other nominations. As you can see, both SDV-LPE and SDV reduce the power of the bloc voters considerably. Under AV, the voting bloc reliably nominates 3 candidates when they make up 10.5% of the voters, 4 candidates when they make up 12.5%, and 5 when they make up 19%. Under SDV-LPE, they need to be 26% of voters to reliably nominate 3 candidates, 36.5% to reliably nominate 4, and 54% to reliably nominate 5….
Figure 2 simulates a more realistic voting bloc. We sample the actual behavior of the bloc voters in the 2015 Hugo nominations election, and add them to the actual 2014 nominations data. For the purposes of this simulation, we define bloc voters as people who voted for more Puppy candidates than non-Puppy candidates. In this case, the actual bloc voters did not vote in lockstep: some voted for a few members of the slate, and some combined slate nominations with non-slate nominations. For the purposes of the simulation, when they voted for the nth most popular non-Puppy candidate in 2015, we imputed that into a vote for the nth most popular non-Puppy candidate in 2014. In this case, SDV-LPE and SDV reduce the power of those voting blocs even further. Under AV, the voting bloc reliably nominates 3 candidates with 14% of the voters, 4 candidates with 17% of the voters, and 5 with 39%. Under SDV-LPE, they need to make up 27.5% to nominate 3 candidates, 38% to nominate 4, and 69.5% to nominate 5….
The upshot of all this is that EPH cannot save the Hugos from slate voting. It reduces the power of slates by about one candidate. To reduce the power of slates further, it needs to be augmented with increased voting by non-slate voters.
There is one further change in the voting system that we could make, and we discuss it in the paper. This is a modification of EPH, but would — for the slate percentages we’ve been seeing — reduce their power by about one additional candidate. So if a slate would get 5 candidates under the current system and 4 under SDV-LPE (aka EPH), it would get 3 under what we’ve called SDV-LPE-SL. Yes, we know it’s another change that would require another vote and another year to ratify. Yes, we know we should have proposed this last year. But we had to work with the actual data before optimizing that particular parameter.
Basically, we use a system of weighing divisible votes named after the French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë, who introduced it in France in 1910. In EPH, your single vote is divided among the surviving nominees. So if you have two nominees who have not yet been eliminated, each gets half of your vote. If three of your nominees have not yet been eliminated, each gets 1/3 of your vote. And so on. The Sainte-Laguë system has larger divisors. If you have two nominees who have not yet been eliminated, each gets 1/3 of your vote. If three of your nominees have not yet been eliminated, each gets 1/5 of your vote. Each of four get 1/7; each of five get 1/9. This may sound arbitrary, but there’s well over a hundred years of voting theory supporting these weights and the results are still proportional.
Implementing SDV-LPE-SL using the actual 2015 Hugo data:
SDV-LPE-SL comes even closer to giving slate voters a proportional share, with 7 fewer slate nominees overall, and only 1 category without a choice between at least 2 non-slate nominees.
For the perfectly correlated voting bloc simulation:
Under SDV-LPE, they need to be 26% of voters to reliably nominate 3 candidates, 36.5% to reliably nominate 4, and 54% to reliably nominate 5. Under SDV-LPE-SL, they need to be 35% for 3, 49% for 4, and 66% for 5.
And for the more realistic voting bloc simulation:
Under SDV-LPE-SL, they need 36% for 3, 49% for 4, and over 70% for 5.
That’s a big difference.
Here’s our paper. It’s academic, so it refers to the voting system by its academic name. It spends a lot of time discussing the motivation behind the new voting system, and puts it in context with other voting systems. Then it describes and analyzes both SDV-LPE and SDV-LPE-SL.
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@Martin,
What you propose would mean sending my nominations to a third party, one that’s not the Worldcon committee appointed to administer the Hugos. Who would that third party be & what sort of checks & balances are going to be in place? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
And even if it works as intended, I’d end up being part of another slate. It might be one that reflects the majority of nominators, but it will still be a slate. Competing slates is a path we have tried very hard to avoid ever since this kerfuffle began. No, just. No.
I tried to understand the Omnibus-proposal again, but there’s just so many moving parts.
First step seems to be to increase the possible number of nominations per person to 10. This will have an impact on nominees as it would give more power to those that nominate more works (most possible read more also). I do think this will lessen the chance of outliers to win. Pros and cons in that.
Second part:
That seems to be more or less the same as creating the longlist in Double Nomination or 3SV, apart from not having a fixed number, right? And the idea with a 5% treshold seemed to be not working as it would get too few candidates.
Then the third part:
I don’t understand this. Isn’t the idea that the voters will have to make a new nomination from the list created in second part of the proposal? This description makes it seem like they could keep elements that have been eliminated.
Maximum one per candidate or can you cast several on one candidate?
Does this mean:
1) Any voter who is eligible to vote (i.e every member of Worldcon).
2) Any voter who has voted at all for the Hugos.
3) Any voter who has voted in this category.
I’m still not happy with downvoting, but think this might work better than 3SV as it gives a reason for people to participate even in years without griefing in the first round.
Personally, I would prefer that nomination in first step of Omnibus is done as per usual. And to have either a fixed number of resulting nominees or at least a minimum one.
If so, the only thing we would have to do when deciding which of the multipass (bigbaddaboom) proposals we preferred would be to compare the middle steps between them. It would make everything so much easier.
EPH+ added to the Slate Simulator (https://hugoslatesimulator.herokuapp.com/) for those who like to play with the different options.
Preliminary run-throughs does look like it definitely decreases nominees from the strongest slate, and seems to favor natural nominees slightly over weaker slate picks.
A simple explanation of why increasing the number of nominations (under EPH) helps non-slate nominators more than slate nominators:
The more nominations there are, the higher the divisor for the slates – so under 10/5, the slate votes are divided by 10.
But non-slate nominators are only likely to pick one or two of the possible finalists anyway. So their vote will have full or half value (once the long tail has been eliminated) almost regardless of the number of possible nominations – but increasing the number of picks increases the chance that a non-slate nominator picks something that might get on, rather than picking five “long tail” works that few other people picked.
Personally, I’d go for something like 20/6. My only concern here is BDP(SF) where I suspect people will nominate every episode of their favourite TV series – but I think the “multiple nominations” rule will resolve that.
I can’t see how 20 nominees would be about quality instead of quantity. No thank you.
Incidentally, a rule I’d like to have for BDP(SF) once you can only have one nomination per TV series: nominators may indicate that their nomination can be counted to any other episode of the same series. (ie add a tickbox on the website and on the paper nominations ballot).
I acknowledge that canonicalisation of the ballots may make this more trouble than a Hugo administrator can reasonably be expected to deal with – if so, I’d withdraw the proposal.
As the administrator, you’d effectively be counting which five (or six) series get a finalist, either through EPH or the current system, and then separately counting within each series to see which episode gets onto the list. To that extent, it would be counted much like an open-list election (like Belgian or Dutch general elections, for those who know about those).
There would still only be five (or six) finalists. You’d just list everything you read that year that you thought was worthy of a Hugo. It’s not hard to read 200+ short stories a year if you concentrate on short stories. If you nominated just 20, that’s like nominating the best five novels if you read 50 a year.
Instead of “pick the five best things you read”, it would be “pick everything you read that is worthy of a Hugo”.
There might be an extremely small minority that can find 20 items, but for most people it would mean throwing in everything that was kind of good.
It is hard to read 200+ short stories if you do not concentrate on short stories. Most people do not concentrate on short stories now. Should we base our system on totally different reading patterns than those that exist today? I’m skeptic.
I’m also skeptic on how to get people to nominate 20 items for Best Related Work, the category that was lost. And how many people can even name 20 fancasts, much less 20 Hugo worthy ones?
I never liked EPH, but only because it can be perceived as a ‘black box’ by most; trying to explain why t isn’t is tedious (no short, pithy, unambiguous answers for those whose eyes glaze over as soon as you say “percentage”); years ago I proposed something akin to 3SV in discussions addressing other voting issues. I believe that 3SV will have most of the desired effect. Additionally, the results (all three stages) will, I expect, clearly reveal the situation to all and sundry.
But as others have previously pointed out in this thread, WSFS is constantly playing catch-up with Beale. No surprise, there’s a built in 3 year lag to dealing with whatever new wrinkles he comes up with (recognizing it, proposing a solution, ratifying the solution) and WSFS can never win the race that way.
It needs to get out in front of the issue. I think WSFS needs to empanel a “worst-case scenario” committee that will actively “game the system”, present its findings and suggest fixes (for proposals). (What if Beale “hires” more voters, etc).
I also think that we’re going to be with “Beale in Best Editor until the heat death of the Universe” if we don’t address the other big issue in the room: the cultural one. WSFS NEEDS to publicly and relentlessly make it known that the kinds of actions taken by SP & RP are not acceptable; that fandom has a long history of inclusiveness and that it has repeatedly rejected attempts to game the award because doing so ultimately hurts everyone involved.
Its not enough to have sites like File770 discussing this; at least part of the reason that we are dealing with this issue is because there are many fans out there who simply do not have the background and experience with fandom to understand this cultural imperative; we need to make sure that the fannish way of doing things is at least as widely distributed as are the messages of the bad actors.
Getting that message across will take years; it needs to go directly to the next generation of fans and should be acknowledged every time the Hugo Awards are mentioned.
The rule is that only “lesser changes” are allowed. That’s not at all the same thing as “minor changes”; it means, closer to the status quo than the proposal as originally passed. As Kevin Standlee explained it to me, the reasoning is that it allows people who don’t care about the proposal as it passed, but would oppose anything bigger, to safely not attend the Business Meeting.
For instance, if instead of passing 4/6, we’d passed 15/5, then this year we could change that to 7/5 but not to 16/5.
So if we’d passed EPH+ originally, we would be allowed to change it to EPH this year, but we can’t go in the other direction.
Status of this conversation, as I see it:
Proposals up for ratification this year: EPH, 4/6, 5/6, and !5%. I think people are coming to understand better how these would work and interact, and making their choices as to what they’ll support. I don’t think there’s any big hurry on this.
Proposals that have been brought up for next year:
There have been several suggestions that seem to have been roundly rejected, such as the idea of sending all honest ballots to a third party who would then tell everyone how to vote so as to get the right winner.
I think the sentiment seems to be generally against A+2 (admins arbitrarily add 2 as needed). Some people support it, but others point out that admins probably don’t really want that burden of responsibility, and I don’t think this proposal would pass the BM.
As far as I can tell, most people in this thread seem to be generally positive about EPH+. I realize that it would still be a challenge to get it passed by the BM but it seems so far that it may be worth trying. If that’s the case, I think I’ll try to do the same thing I did last year — fundraise so I can attend the con. I also think it may be worth beginning to create language and FAQ for an EPH+ proposal. This will be a lot simpler than EPH was, because after all it is a relatively minor change.
As for 3SV, DN, or Omnibus: I think the conversation is still ongoing. I think that the term “omnibus” should cover any proposal which includes both 3SV and DN at the same time, not just the specific proposal I made. I’ll try to re-explain my proposal in a separate message.
Arguably one needs to look at the statistical assumptions behind EPH (this is something that most non-statisticians tend to overlook when employing statistics (so no shame there)).
We have discussed this, albeit from a position of ignorance (none of us have ever administered the Hugos). Also, please forgive this nerd post: we’re science types.
The Hugo voting from what can be discerned from the numbers of the past long-lists and also from what has been said in past WSFS business meetings, it seems (and this may be wrong so those who actually know please feel free to correct) that the distribution of Hugo voting is more a single-tail leptokurtic distribution (rather than half of a normal distribution which most know from school). That is, in brief plain language, to say a few works get a lot of nominations and a lot of works get a few nominations.
This means that in a normal Hugo year in all but name there is a pseudo-slate.
Consequently, any system like EPH that serves to work against a slate will also work against the usual pattern of Hugo voting.
Another way to look at this is to consider possibilities of error.
When making a decision you can be right or you can be wrong. However you can be wrong in two ways: these are called ‘Type I’ and ‘Type II’ errors. You can either reject a hypothesis when you should have accepted it, or accept a hypothesis when you should have rejected it. An example perhaps illustrates the point better for those lost.
Consider you are a jury in a court case. You can make a wrong decision two ways. You can either let someone who is actually guilty go free, or you can convict someone who is actually guilty.
In reality (as well as statistics) decisions tend to be weighted one way or another. (To continue the above example, in more liberal societies the guilty tend to go free more than the innocent are convicted. So folk — in theory — are considered innocent until proven guilty in liberal societies.)
With the Hugo voting the presumption (hypothesis) is that the slate voters do not operate in the same way (statistically speaking) as Hugo voters. The alternative view is that they _both_ are selective and so statistically hard to distinguish.
(Here, do not confuse statistical analysis with modus operandi – the above is _not_ saying that normal Hugo voters are the same as puppies. The selection process are very different, but both camps use selection [albeit that one camp tells people what to select].)
This may explain the result above as to why EPH does not have the power in reducing slate voting as was thought.
We have previously expressed this concern online here
http://www.concatenation.org/news/news4~16.html#worldcon16
and here
http://www.concatenation.org/news/news9~15.html#wsfs
I’m skeptical of algorithmic solutions to social problems. Algorithms can be gamed. They also can have unintended consequences (for instance long lists leading to campaigning in non-slate years). Personally this has led me to being one of the few leaning towards an A+2 solution (though DN with unlimited up-votes isn’t horrible). There are legitimate objections to the A+2 approach though.
Thinking things through I’d like to propose a variant of A+2: Juried+2. Allow this year’s WorldCon to empanel a jury to add up to 2 ‘overlooked’ works to next year’s ballot. This removes the issue of admin burden or reluctance to be a target. As an additive solution it adds no burden to the voters and does not create a long list situation of insufficient time to evaluate works. By having the prior year’s WorldCon perform the empaneling it avoids accusations of gaming by the current year’s committee.
Any thoughts?
Some other thoughts and notes (useful probably only to me, trying to define the solution domain):
Guidelines:
Any solution should, to the greatest extent possible, maintain the pre-slating character of the awards.
Boundaries:
There are three stages we can act: Membership, Nomination, and Voting.
Actions:
Solutions would seem to fall into four general categories: Gatekeeping, Filtering, Addition, and Vetoing.
Proposed solutions, each with pros and cons, include –
1. Do Nothing
2. Membership
a) Restrict nominations to attending members.
b) Restrict nominations to a jury.
c) Remove second year nominating rights.
d) Increase supporting membership fees.
e) Ban bad actors.
3. Nomination
a) Implement slate detection algorithms (These were mentioned last year. What would they look like?).
b) Allow the membership to confirm nominations through a long list (DN).
c) Allow membership to deny nominations through a long list (3SV)
d) Empower the admins to remove ballots of bad actors.
e) Empower the admins to add nominees in years with bad actors (A+2)
f) Empower a jury to add overlooked nominees to the short list (Juried+2)
g) Algorithmically filter the nominations (EPH, EPH+, Diluted Nomination, Frozen Nomination)
h) Restrict the nominations relative to the field (4/6)
i) Counter-slating through a third party collation.
4. Voting
a) Filter the votes by preference ranking (IRV)
b) Veto bad actors (No Award)
SF2 Concatenation:
No. It is not the number of nominations an item gets that is important in EPH. What is important is if they are given by slatevoters, i.e persons a group of persons that all vote on exactly the same items. That is not true for ordinary Hugo-voters, i.e no pseudo-slating of any significant number exists.
This has already been tested with the data from two different worldcons.
Ticking the box I would’ve liked to have had the time to tick yesterday.
Laura on May 16, 2016 at 10:34 pm said:
Is EPH+ different enough than plain EPH that it couldn’t be added this year? Similar to how 4/6 could become 5/6 at this year’s business meeting? Or is that not the case either?
Well there’s a question! Until it comes up on the floor, I won’t rule because to do so may very well influence the Meeting unfairly. But it is certainly a question.
Stoic Cynic:
A+2 would still leave the following on the ballot:
* Dinosaur Erotica
* Gross homophobia
* Gamergate propaganda
* Depictions of violence towards real persons
* Rape accusations against innocents
And the idea that it is an honour to be nominated is forever sent to hell. So no, it is not enough. If I would give power to administrators, it would be to remove this kind of items.
Or, to put Hampus’ statement into more formal language:
Among non-slate nominators (represented both by a year where there was no slate and by nominators who did not nominate any slated choice in a year where there was one), those who nominate one of the top 5 choices are no more likely to nominate another of the top 5 than those who do not do so. (so people who nominated book X are no more likely to nominate book Y than people who didn’t).
A pseudo-slate would be if some voters tended to spot which books were getting the buzz and then pick their top five of those, while others just picked their top five. There’s no evidence of that happening at all.
I see only two ways to go:
* Give administration rights to remove items from griefers.
* Give members as a whole the possibility to remove items for griefers.
All other options are to ask for more griefing.
Thank you, Hampus. I agree with you that SF2’s premise is flawed. The correlation (relative risk) between two slate nominees is much higher than between two popular non-slate nominees. EPH and EPH+ are designed to take advantage of this fact. However, generally speaking, if you try to design a system to eliminate slate nominees entirely, you end up creating vulnerabilities to new forms of attack; that’s why I wouldn’t recommend going further than EPH+.
(In technical terms: EPH+ is the most anti-slate version of EPH possible that still maintains proportionality in a world of two competing slates. Not that anybody thinks that such a world is likely or desirable, just that it’s a useful way to draw a boundary between something that’s tough-but-fair and something that, by trying to be punitive, ends up risking shooting itself in the foot.)
@Hampus Eckerman
OK, option 3(j) empower the admins or a jury to remove works that would tend to bring discredit on World Con.
Politically I hate that option. Censoring the immediate problem I wouldn’t be concerned about with but future censorship leaves a lot of room for abuse, hate, and discontent.
Generally I like the idea of additive solutions to keep options open without distorting the field in non-slate years. Yes, it leaves ugly stuff there in the shortlist but when the current crisis is over (someday) it has the least impact on the character of the awards.
Or the most impact if the crisis lasts long enough, the reputation of the award goes down, publishers moves to another award and so on.
OK, here’s an idea:
For any possible list of finalists, define the “non-slate satisfaction” as the number of ballots that voted for any one of those finalists, minus the greatest number of ballots which vote for any pair of those finalists.
When you’re doing EPH or EPH+ elimination, stop if a further elimination would reduce the non-slate satisfaction by more than 20%.
I can code this up and see how many extra nominees it would have included in each category last year. I suspect it would leave 3 or 4 non-slate nominees per category, but I’m not certain.
This is my attempt to create an automatic system that would work something like A+2.
As many have noted, there are plenty of juried awards. The Hugo is not and should not be one of them.
@Hampus Eckerman:
Yes!
I believe I’ve seen that view expressed. 🙂
@Steve Halter:
It’s all very well to say that. It’s perfectly fine to aim at it. But at some point, people need to be clear-eyed about what costs they are willing to incur.
Are you willing to allow genuinely malign actors to occupy half-to-almost-all slots on the ballot in many categories with works the malign actors don’t love for themselves but are, rather, some combination of defacement, slander, abuse and spam, if that is the foreseeable outcome of keeping the Hugos from being in some sense juried? If so, that’s a position one can take, sure.
I think that EPH+ and one of the multiple voting round methodologies gets us to a decent point.
Actually making the Hugo’s juried means that they aren’t the Hugo’s anymore.
@Jim Henley
The problem with allowing removal of works that might discredit the Hugos is effects on non-slate works.
It’s the 1950’s. A book with a non-white protagonist makes the shortlist. Is it discrediting?
It’s the 1960’s. A book with a clearly homosexual protagonist makes the shortlist. Is it discrediting?
et cetera, ad nauseum.
I know we have clear trolling today but granting a power doesn’t ensure it will only be used for today’s problem.
Stoic Cynic:
Agree. And that is why I think that is the wrong way to go. If administration should be able to remove things, it should be because of block voting, not because of works being discredited. If members should be able to No Award things (while voting or during a new phase), it should be because they think the item is not worthy to be on the ballot.
Which in practice will remove the discredited works.
Yes!
The first is giving law enforcement more discretionary powers, the second is empowering the citizens. I go with Option Two.
Hampus’ 2-line summary of an argument made in an earlier thread (waves at Jim Henley) is precisely on target. This is not a problem that can be solved by tweaking of algorithms (although I think EPH should be implemented, as it’s a general anti-slate measure that is completely transparent to the nominator). Of the two solutions, I overwhelmingly prefer some form of option 2, such as DN.
ETA: As Soon Lee nicely put it, option 2 is giving fandom more power to solve the problem.
@Soon Lee
“The first is giving law enforcement more discretionary powers, the second is empowering the citizens. I go with Option Two.”
That is also my very strong feeling.
My heartfelt thanks to Bruce Schneier, Jameson Quinn, and everybody else who’s put time and effort into EPH, and this analysis.
Also, this is a very excellent discussion thread, which I’m finding helpful, clear-eyed, and insightful.
We know that juried awards do not have quite the same character as the Hugo Awards but we also know that juried awards are not appalling or prone to bad behavior.
Add in a jury stage that could do a few things:
1. Standlee’s Plus 2 proposal. i.e. the Jury has the discretion to add additional works to the ballot from the overall set of works nominated. This need not be just because of griefing or slates but just because. That limits the ability for slates to sweep a category (good) but also allows a ‘near miss’ onto the ballot. Voters really only gain by this. Make it up to 5 extra works and slates (but not griefing of other kinds) become moot.
2. Disqualify works nominated for various reasons. This should be still be at the jury’s discretion but on the basis of: stacking/slating campaigns by a publisher as a means of promoting their work, works that may bring the Hugos into disrepute. A publisher slating works onto a ballot is ethically a kind of fraud (i.e. a way of deceptively being able to call themselves a Hugo finalist) – so overall this is a kind of brand protection role.
3. Make eligibility judgements of other kinds. Passing that role onto the jury might make admin lives easier?
I think that would probably work more smoothly that another round of voting and would be adaptable enough to deal with new shenanigans. The issue would be how to pick a jury that could meet and discuss these issues in a timely manner.
This wouldn’t deal with other kinds of ‘rewards’ that may motivate bad actors
@Camestros
I think a jury that could do (1) with the aim of adding interesting or underappreciated works to make a better short list, would need different skills to a jury to do (2) or (3), and the sort of people you’d want doing (1) such as reviewers, editors, authors, well-read fans might not want to be associated with doing (2) or (3) to people they might otherwise have professional relationships with, technically be in competition with, etc.
Camestros Felapton, honestly, from the feedback we’ve gotten, it seems to me unlikely that Hugo administrators want this power. (In fact, I have a strong suspicion that they’d run screaming from it.)
I have no objection in principle to a 15-work longlist from which Hugo voters can then affirm their five (or ten) favorites for eventual voting. I’m a little leary of downvoting. Upvoting makes me happy. (And if you upvote everything BUT the bad actors (if any), you are, in essence, downvoting the bad actors.)
I agree – hence the power rests with a jury rather than the admins. Admins get to kick tricky issues to the jury [or panel or committee or whatever but I think ‘jury’ is the best name]
I don’t think anybody would like to do or 3 and that in itself is a check on the arbitrary power of the jury. You’d want people who would be very averse to kicking stuff off the ballot.
I’d like to see a three-step system, with a fixed number of nominees per voter for the first and second steps and a no vote for the second and third. I’m flexible on the details, but not on the necessity. With two steps for the nomination process and two steps where a nominee can be voted out, a slated work probably won’t make it to an award without general support. It’s extra work for Worldcon, I don’t see a way around that, but the electorate is responsible for the content of the ballot. And, while I’m amenable to banning bad actors outright, a three-step process might achieve the same result through a good winnowing.
I’m willing to use No Award, but I don’t want to use it. A second step is a way for me to vote yes and no at a point where I’m not stuck with the latter, for lack of good work.
–Also, how well does EPH+ work against competing slates? The longer this mess goes on, the more likely we are to see a scenario in which one or more parties step in with their own slates and damn the social cost.
@Camestros Felapton
If a Juried+2 gets any traction I’d suggest appointment by the current year’s WorldCon to act as a jury for the next year’s WorldCon. This would allow time for meeting, discussion, book reviews, etc. It might also reduce backlash, if any, against the current year’s committee since they wouldn’t have made the appointment. Hard to accuse them of rigging any additions the jury makes if they didn’t empanel the jury.
@Mark:
Not at all. The only skill they would need is the ability to recognize when the finalist list has been tampered with, and the only power they would have is the lengthening of the list. They don’t have to choose anything more than how many additional finalist slots to open up.
I still don’t think the admins would be willing to take on that responsibility.
Hmm. What if the second stage of nominating doesn’t require the nominators to upvote or downvote the works but instead how far down the longlist to place the cutoff?
Makes sense.
I was getting really cross with Damien Walters who was giving the admins crap on Twitter for not magically banning Vox. People with a hard and often thankless job don’t need that can kind of rubbish as well. A jury of the great and the good (i.e. no worse than a whole slew of awards) but with very limited powers in comparison with other juries can be the people who get all the associated harrumphing and somebody-should-do-something and bonkers conspiracy theorizing rather than people who are just trying to make something that works and is fun for everybody.
I can’t see that as anything other than semantics. In practice, the jury would be administrators in all but name as they would need access to all raw data to be able to remove bad faith block voters.
Damien Walters is starting to become that person that more or less everyone agrees on being the village idiot.
It is a tad semantics but not wholly. The difference is the jury have a role different to the admins and would be more the kind of people who can put up with stupid crap. Having, say, John Scalzi be an admin is probably not a thing but having John Scalzi on a jury is maybe a thing. OK that is possibly a bad example but the point being the jury would be people willing to put up with some cr@p for a year but not the same time commitment as admins or other volunteers.
I’d imagine the mechanics of the decisions would not be done by the jury e.g. the jury wouldn’t be the people who literally go through the ballot and pull out naughty votes, they’d be the people who say ‘based on this info we have decided that naughty votes need to go’ (or whatever) – they would take the responsibility for the decision and take heat off the admins. The same would go for some of the eligibility decisions, which I should imagine admins hate.
I think this may be a viewpoint which could bring unity to our fractured fandom.
I just posted an updated version of the paper — correcting the various minor errors people have found — at the same link.
I’m not sure if this would need a rule change by itself. If the administration is given more power (i.e to throw away ballots of griefers), they can by themselves delegate the decision making regarding this to a select group as part of the administration.
The important thing would be to decide on what powers a jury/administration would be allowed to have.
@Hampus Eckerman
I still believe limiting any jury to adding a limited number of ‘overlooked’ works is the way to go. It minimizes distortion, keeps reading lists short, etc.
That said there is still the dog feces problem. I think DN or 3SV do not help there though. Even if Beale and Ted’s Slating Adventure gets down voted or doesn’t make the up vote it’s still out there in the record as a Long List Finalist ™.
Maybe we compromise on a rules change several other folks have already proposed? Strip any work voted below No Award retroactively of it’s finalist status. Find some way the Mark Committee can legally enforce that.
Any other solution I can think of to the dog feces problem would have to happen behind closed doors before public announcements were made. Star Chambers are headed outside at least my comfort zone.