A topic thread for your comments about WSFS rules changes.
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A topic thread for your comments about WSFS rules changes.
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I hope you’ll comment less on how I choose to participate here.
I guess we can both hope.
@rcade
I was of the same opinion (that we just needed to empower the admins to delete “obvious trash”) but I gradually gave up on that idea. My best idea along those lines (in my opinion) was to let them disqualify things but then let the membership overrule them. The way this would work is that anything disqualified by the admins (for any reason) would appear on the final ballot with an asterisk and an explanation of why it was disqualified. Voters would be allowed to rank those works anyway, and the disqualification would be nullified for anything that ended up above No Award on the final ballot.
You could fine tune it a variety of ways (e.g. make it a special committee, not the admins, and even pick different experts for different categories), but what I liked about it was that it added almost zero work for the ordinary members, and the members would still get the final say. In fact, it would work with the old approval-vote system–it wouldn’t require EPH.
Anyway, everyone hated the idea, and I never tried to write it up.
@rcade, and people responding to rcade – including me -, we are letting ourselves boil over some. Think of our gracious host on his bed of suffering, and have pity, lest he be driven to gouty fits of rage or something else Dickensian. It’s a good time to pause for a moment and reflect on whether it’s worth proceeding, and if so, how.
Bill:
I voted for a specific Prince Valiant story (The Legion of Hun-hunters). For some reason, the administrators seem to have merged it with more generic Prince Valiant votes.
@Bruce Baugh It’s a good time to pause for a moment and reflect on whether it’s worth proceeding, and if so, how.
Agree.
The thing about giving admins untrammelled powers to toss out “obvious trash” is, it opens the doors for an admin to look at something and say “I don’t like this; I have good taste; therefore this must be bad; I’ve spotted that it’s bad quickly, therefore it must be obviously bad; therefore it’s obvious trash; therefore let’s get rid of it.” You might say that a fair-minded person won’t do this; I’d argue that, in practice, fair-minded people do it less often than biased people, but they still do it. I at least try to be fair-minded about the stuff I read and comment on, but I’d be ashamed to say how many times I’ve gone all the way down that line of thought in half a second flat, without even needing a warm-up.
And the obviousness of trash is… kind of subjective. Case in point: I was browsing through Rocket Stack Rank the other day, and… well, it is an immense boon in many ways, and I would even call it an indispensable resource, when it comes to listing short stories in current publications… but it is painfully apparent, reading the reviews, that Greg Hullender and I have almost diametrically opposed tastes when it comes to SF. He is routinely dishing out two-star reviews to things I nominated for a Hugo, and handing out four or five stars to things I would only use to line the budgie’s cage with.
Now, this is a matter of subjective, personal taste, and there is no point arguing about which one of us is “right” about these things… but, suppose I became a Hugo admin? It’s not impossible – it would take a lot of work on my part, and maybe a few judicious assassinations, but it’s not impossible. So, suppose I’m in that exalted position, and I’m given those powers – what is to stop me (by my own lights, quite honestly) looking at some stories, and checking up, and saying “huh, Greg Hullender likes these, they must be rubbish, let’s bin ’em”? I’m guessing Greg wouldn’t think that was fair. I’d guess, too, nobody else would think that was fair. I don’t think it’s fair.
So that’s why I don’t think admins should have arbitrary powers to exclude things. Let’s have 3SV (or something similar) and leave it to the membership at large to decide what’s trash. (OK, it’ll still be a subjective decision – but this way, it gets to be everybody’s subjective decision.)
Not necessarily. The long list of “also-rans” only goes down to 15th place, or what ever gets at least 5% of the nominees (whichever is longer). In the case of Graphic Story, anything that received 1 to 4 votes won’t be listed.
Kurt – the Flash Gordon story which was on the ballot, which is what we were actually talking about, was entirely in the style of the three panels I linked to earlier; I read it all before voting (and gave it my top vote). The issue under discussion is whether a work in that style counts as a graphic story. I’m pretty content that it does.
That’s fine. Judging by the entire story is fine. Since FLASH GORDON did slip in and out of that style, I would nonetheless advise people not to judge by three panels.
Since you didn’t, there you go.
My opinion has varied over the years, but in a case like that, I’d look to see if there are any sequences where the art is indispensable — i.e., if you deleted all the art, would the text tell the complete story, or if there was any visual material key to the story that was left unnarrated.
But that’s just my opinion; the Hugo voters rendered theirs.
kdb
Nicholas —
I’m not trying to discount your judgement that Ice Kingdom of Mongo is a graphic story. But do you see any meaningful difference between it and Horton Hatches the Egg? Or between it and stories in which the narrative is carried by the text, and illustrations aren’t necessary to understand the story? Is the ratio of text to illustration important?
To me, a key distinction is that without the art, you won’t have the whole story — the pictures have to convey some of the necessary elements of the story.
Blackgate does an excellent synopsis, reproducing a number of installments, of “Ice Kingdom of Mongo” here.
@Bill: Obligatory “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” 😉
Cheryl S.:
I only disagree with you to the extent that WSFS is not essentially any sort of organization — it is whatever the members attending the Business Meeting wish to make of it. The WSFS history doesn’t mean that big changes couldn’t or shouldn’t be made, only that they are unlikely to pass.
JJ:
The Business Meeting overwhelmingly decided not to hear any debate or arguments in favor of the motion. I can’t help thinking that all the WSFS establishment figures telling the meeting how undemocratic and antithetical to the spirit of the Hugos the motion is surely had effect, but we can’t read minds, so who knows. Maybe 95% knew the details of the motion and had a strong opinion about it, or maybe the number was significantly lower and the majority just bought what people objecting to the motion told them. However, the WSFSBM made a decision and that’s the end of the story. My intention wasn’t to start an argument about this and I’m fairly sure the motion would have failed later on with a huge margin.
Greg Hullender:
Something like that would have probably been my preferred solution also. But yeah, the Worldcon crowd seems to hate it for reasons that, to me, sound a bit naive. I think there’s some fetishization of forced neutrality when I would have instead hoped for stronger no-platforming policies against people who want to use the Hugos to spread their racist and sexist ideologies. But that’s just my take on it.
@JJ:
What you said. The assembly gave Lisa Hayes’s strong-administrator (‘Additional Finalists’) proposal a polite but quick and overwhelming ‘Oh, hell no’ response because there’s pretty much universal consensus that Hugo Administrators need to remain neutral technicians and not made into proxies for the voters’ judgement.
And I’m entirely unclear on what ‘beating the meeting to agree’ would consist of. We of the Business Meeting are not known to intimidate well. One rather suspects the commenter hasn’t attended many.
Something I noticed about the Retro Hugo data: (I wrote this as a comment on Steve Wright’s Retro Hugo post but thought it’d fit here as well)
——-
One unusual thing I noticed about the 1941 nomination data was the high participation in novella, novelette and short story. Compare it to the 1939 data from Loncon where there’s a big drop after novel:
1941 (nominations): Novel 352 ballots, Novella 318, Novelette 310, Short Story 324
1939 (nominations): Novel 208 ballots, Novella 125, Novelette 80, Short Story 108
And in particular, the inflated numbers for “If This Goes On…”, “The Roads Must Roll” and “Requiem”, all of which got around 100 more nominations than the 2nd place work. But in the voting stage, there was no such huge gap.
This suggests to me that some Puppies did slate the Retro nominations (those 3 Heinleins were the only stories in the Sad Puppy Retro Hugo list), but they didn’t bother to vote.
Can someone explain why, once 3SV goes into effect (if it does) we need any of the other voting modifications?
As I understand it, the only real issue is that “someone” could produce a slate of 15+ items per category, leading to a long list completely dominated by slated works.
While there remains some potential for that happening, it is highly unlikely that there would be enough participants willing to do that much work
– highly unlikely that some non-slated items wouldn’t receive enough votes to break the slate domination
– extremely unlikely that a list of 15 works on a slate would NOT contain shields (defined here as works that would have been voted for absent the slate).
Given the past two years of voting, it is clear to me that voters are fully capable of identifying “truly slated works”: all they have to do is look at the publicly distributed slates – after making the decision that it is indeed a slate.
The same works that were voted below No Award are very likely to also receive a “Nay” under 3SV, and in sufficient numbers to make it stick on the final ballot.
EPH doesn’t effect the long list – it only shuffles things around between the upper third and lower two-thirds. In other words, it doesn’t matter where an item is on the long list: if it comes from an identified slate, it would receive a NAY regardless of its position on the long list – or, rather, slated items not receiving enough votes to make the long list don’t matter anyway.
IF that is the case, it seems to me that – except for shields – 3SV alone is sufficient to remove obvious slate items from the final ballot. Since 3SV requires some kind of randomizing presentation of the long list, he effect(s) of EPH won’t even be known during the semi-final stage.
So I don’t see why (assuming ratification) we need EPH if 3SV is in effect…?
@steve davidson
We thought there weren’t enough people to game the current system either. And then there were.
If 3SV eventually looks like it would allow EPH to be turned back off again, then I’d like to see a measured decision taken after a few years of real operation. Let’s take the opportunity to bed in a new system that works in all eventualities (or at least as many eventualities as we can forsee, with the flexibility to deal with the ones we can’t) so we don’t have to revisit everything again in a decade when the Peeved Pangolins strike.
And this is not good because…? As I see it, it is one part of handling the human shield problem.
Steve:
The number of votes required to vote a work down in 3SV are so high that it is uncertain if that is ever going to happen. It also remains to be seen how eager the voters are to take part in the second stage of voting.
The proportionality of EPH is going to make the list of finalist a weeny little bit more diverse and likely to include “something for everybody”, which is in my mind a good thing regardless of its effects on slate-voting. EPH+ will probably boost this aspect slightly if it’s ratified in Helsinki. I think EPH would have been a positive reform even if there were no Puppies, but I don’t know how others feel about that.
Increasing the final ballot to include six works per category instead of five will also increase the diversity of the finalists and give us more choices.
Imagine we have 3SV but not EPH, and griefers take it upon themselves to nominate a random 5 of the 6 best-selling works by men. These would not be eliminated, they’d very likely constitute the final ballot, and women would be shut out of the Hugo. With EPH+, the two or three strongest female works would make it, and the number of female winners would be essentially unchanged by the fact that the third or fourth strongest female candidate has been knocked off (along with the corresponding non-best-selling male candidate. )
Of course, in that scenario, a modern Alice Sheldon might still get a rocket, but that’s not much comfort.
@Bartimaeus:
I’d say they were listed rather than slated.
Anyway, what this suggests to me is that the system produced the expected results. The most widely admired works got the most nominations by far, and won but more narrowly in the voting stage. Which is a pity, since the original version of “If This Goes On…” isn’t the version most folks know and is a clear third best next to “The Devil Makes The Law” and “Coventry”.
Well said. There’s a split in thinking I find interesting.
We see the Hugos as an entity that cannot deal with abuse until new rules can be passed because the power of administrators must be limited, but we expect Worldcon to be run by people who use their discretion strongly in response to abuse.
A moderator speaks in inflammatory language before a crowd of 200 and is expelled. Quick discretionary action is widely praised.
An inflammatory work is foisted onto the Hugo ballot as a Best Related Work through bloc voting. It is put before a much larger crowd, where it will forever be associated with the awards of that year, and we reject the idea of administrative action.
If Moira Greyland had delivered her Hugo-nominated essay at a Worldcon panel, I expect she would have been expelled.
To be honest, I kind of expected a big turnout for Heinlein in the Retros – it was a good year for him, and I’m not surprised that his fanbase mobilized. I can’t think of anything that couldn’t have got onto the ballot without slate support; they’re all famous titles, and fondly remembered. The biggest surprise I had, in fact, was “Requiem” not winning in Short Story.
@rcade: I don’t think there’s any “split in thinking” – it’s just a matter of different sets of admins needing, and therefore being given, different sets of powers.
Con committees need to keep the con running smoothly right there and then, so they need authority to act immediately against disruptors and harassers, without waiting on consultation with the whole of the membership. (Considering “fandom as a whole” is still arguing about what should or shouldn’t have been done about Dave Truesdale, this is obviously for the best!)
Griefer ballots aren’t an immediate, “has to be solved right now” problem, so the Hugo admins don’t need that sort of power delegated to them – they can safely be referred back to the membership at large.
Two concerns about EPH: yes, I understand how it works (I think), but despite all of the exposition, there is still too much obscurity for it to ever escape being second-guessed (they diddled the formula to get these results: no, they didn’t. Prove it. Perfect conspiracy theory territory)
Second – we’re supposed to consider it a victory that each category might have one or two legitimate nominees?
How is this not a case of griefers determining exactly what everyone will vote for? The single “legitimate” entry in a category will always win; if there are two, there is the danger that they’ll split the vote between them, elevating a slated work to the win.
I don’t want any slated works bearing the title “Hugo Finalist” as they are not deserving of the title. (Not talking “shields” here) – and of course they are using that designation to elevate themselves, their odious little press and the garbage they spew almost daily.
Those against slates are the majority of Hugo voters, yet we’ve voted in a system that gives folks doing their due diligence and playing fair with the system and with fandom only a minority interest in the awards.
3SV: Does anyone really think that non-shield, slated works, won’t receive the same amount of response during the 2nd stage of the vote that they received during the finals the past two years?
I fully expect to see the 3SV vote looking almost exactly like the final ballots did this year and last: the pure bullshit below No Award, mixed results for the shielded works, wins for the single choice in the category when it is the only “honest” finalist.
I expect 3SV to become the most popular voting stage, and I expect that the majority of voters would handle themselves in the manner we hope, really taking a look at the legitimacy of the nomination.
But under the system that is now in place, we will still have roughly 3/5ths of the finalists as nothing more than free promotion and advertising for works that represent things and people that fandom does not endorse.
The Griefers reward is getting that designation – the upset they cause is additional publicity and icing on the cake. EPH does hardly anything to address that. 3SV at least gives us the chance to prevent that from happening.
@Steve:
I disagree with you on several points, but there’s only one where it’s not a matter of opinion. You say that “if there are two [organic finalists], there is the danger that they’ll split the vote between them, elevating a slated work to the win.” That would be true if the final round used plurality voting. However, though the IRV system actually used is not perfect, it would at least prevent the vote-splitting you describe.
I can see the logic of that. What you describe sounds like 3SV — sending an issue to the membership because enough time is available to do so.
Nicholas Whyte:
Andrew M – I share your tastes in graphic novels, I suspect.
I liked Sex Criminals, but perhaps I should have said ‘convergence on perceived quality’. Often a few works stand out as the most significant works of the year, and a lot of people will vote for them; that’s something one can recognise happening even if one doesn’t agree with the actual judgement. I think that Sex Criminals is an example of this, while Schlock Mercenary is an example of another feature of the Hugos – the tendency of people and series with a lot of fans to keep getting shortlisted (in this case every year, except one where it wasn’t eligible). I think this kind of convergence is a good feature of the Hugos, and helps them point out good works (or at least ones that will have wide appeal), and it’s fundamentally different in nature from either organised slates, or ‘natural slates’ of the kind formed by fans of a particular
series or the like.
It’s clear that EPH does penalise convergence on (perceived) quality to some extent, since it penalises all convergence; but hopefully it does not penalise it enough to make a significant difference at levels where it’s actually likely to happen. At the moment, on the basis of one data point, it looks as if it does a bit, but 5/6 is able to overcome the problem.
EPH does not penalize all convergence. It just penalizes all convergence that’s correlated over 2 or more works. Such correlation is probably not a large factor in Graphic Novel, or for that matter in BDPLong. It obviously could be in stuff like BDPShort or short story. (“I get my short story noms from Escape Pod…”)
@steve davidson
You make good points about 3SV, but do those point towards turning EPH off immediately afterwards? I see them as currently being able to complement each other.
rcade on August 27, 2016 at 11:32 am said:
If you authorize Administrators (who have no appeal and no recourse to their decisions, by WSFS Constitutional definition) the right to remove finalists or disqualify nominators/voters for any non-technical reason, then they effectively have the right to disqualify any finalist or voter they personally dislike, and nobody can do a thing about it. You could put high-sounding language into the rules about why they should use such authority, but it’s completely unenforceable.
Tasha Turner on August 27, 2016 at 11:02 am said:
Hugo Award Administration Subcommittees are established by the management of each Worldcon. If the Worldcon doesn’t set up a Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee, then every member of the Worldcon committee is ineligible for a Hugo Award that year.
The appointment is made by the Worldcon Committee, generally at a very high level and vetted by the Chair of the convention. (Who is often a member of the Subcommittee as well.)
You get on the Subcommittee by volunteering or being recruited, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who volunteers is going to be on the Subcommittee. For example, given the “activist” stance that rcade has stated multiple times, I very much doubt that if rcade, even if they volunteered, would ever be selected to be a Hugo Award Administrator. I do not see any Worldcon Committee wanting to open themselves up to that sort of different grief, particularly inasmuch as it would give their political enemies who have been claiming that the awards results have been “fixed” for a long time. (As it happens, the presence of all these Griefer picks on the ballot pretty much proves that the rampant corruption of which the Hugos have been accused doesn’t exist.)
Of course, rcade and Spacefaringkitten could launch a Worldcon bid, and in particular say, “If our committee is selected, we will take these active steps to rid the Hugo Awards of Griefers, thus…” and if elected could set up whatever Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee they wanted. That’s how the system works. We often think of Worldcon site selection as mainly about picking a site, but in fact it is also picking a committee and that includes picking a committee whose judgement the voters trust.
rcade on August 27, 2016 at 1:38 pm said:
So you’re saying that if I buy a membership for my mother (who is the person who turned me on to reading SF in the first place), that membership should be voided? What if I purchased a membership for an SF/F reading unrelated friend of mine? What if I purchased one to be used as a prize for a fundraiser for my local library?
If you say, “But they were purchased with instructions to vote the ballots in a certain way!” I would reply “It’s not possible to reliably deal with the motivations of individual voters.”
I, as a past Administrator, have seen ballots from members of the same household that were identical to each other. I have my own suspicions about those ballots. But they were legal ballots cast by individual natural persons, and therefore I counted them. Even when they came from a person who I know claims that his minor children (who had memberships with voting rights) are legally his chattel and whose membership can and should be voted however he, the parent, wants them to be.
You appear to want a Strong Man Who Makes Quick Decisions and Hits People You Don’t Like. Remember, WSFS isn’t a representative democracy where you lobby your representative to do what you want. It’s a direct democracy where ever member represents him/herself and only him/herself. If you want to propose rules changes to make Strong Man Take Charge (and can get at least one other member to support you), write to me with what you want them to do, and I’ll compose the technical language to implement it. You can then propose it to the WSFS Business Meeting and try to convince a majority of the members present and voting to adopt it two years in a row. Then you get your way.
steve davidson on August 28, 2016 at 5:06 am said:
I don’t think we do. I wish that Colin had come forward with 3SV last year. I think it would have been embraced as a more plausible solution than the complexity of EPH.
Should the Business Meeting agree that 3SV by itself is sufficient, it has the authority to suspend EPH year-by-year until it comes up for final re-ratification in 2022.
Posting it here as well because a comment thread from more than a few days ago is apparently dead and buried: the higher-resolution and longer-duration segments (natural breaks instead of abrupt cuts every ten or so minutes) video of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting is now online on the Worldcon Events YouTube channel.
Anyone who wonders why this wasn’t online immediately at Worldcon should go read my LiveJournal for the behind-the-scenes aspects of this, including how I was generating the video and uploading it overnight at my hotel stops along the drive home from Kansas City. (And I’m not home yet; I have the last 350 miles from Wendover to Fernley NV to go today.)
Thanks for all your work, Kevin. Hip hip…
It is when the vote buying campaign is conducted in the open, which is the hypothetical we ended up discussing. John Lorentz said even in that scenario the Hugo administrator would not throw out the ballots.
This characterization is like the puppies saying a Hugo voter who no-awards slates is punishing wrongfans for wrongfun.
My position isn’t about people I don’t like. It’s about a voting tactic I don’t like.
We could also persuade a Worldcon after bid acceptance to pick a Hugo administrator who would adopt our approach.
Lorentz spoke for all Hugo administrators a few times in this discussion. If every Worldcon has total authority to pick its Hugo subcommittee, it isn’t set in stone that his philosophy of running the Hugos would be the next administrator’s philosophy.
How has the Hugo Awards managed to pass down a consistent philosophy for the amount of discretion an administrator should use (or more accurately not use)?
@Kevin Standlee
Thanks for answers. Thank you for all you do for Worldcon it’s greatly appreciated.
Thanks for going above and beyond to get those videos online. I’ve never been able to do a task that big on the road while traveling.
@rcade:
No, we most certainly do not. The necessary administrative action started immediately: It took two years’ action by two WSFS Business Meetings, because it required amending the Constitution in which Hugo nominations and voting are defined. WSFS doesn’t devolve changing its Constitution to The Person Trusted by All because 77 years of WSFS history suggests this is a bad idea — same reason it doesn’t permit any single Business Meeting to do that.
Either of those things would be undemocratic. Irrational Puppy whining about WSFS elitism notwithstanding, WSFS is profoundly and militantly democratic. You’d like it to be less so. As their rapid disposal of Additional Finalists motion illustrated, the assembled WSFans firmly refuse so doing.
Jameson:
EPH does not penalize all convergence. It just penalizes all convergence that’s correlated over 2 or more works.
I may be missing something here, but I think that’s what I meant. ‘Convergence’ = ‘votes for A converge with votes for B’, so of course it’s correlated over more two or more works. I suppose you can describe a lot of people voting for one work as ‘convergence’, but I wasn’t suggesting EPH was so perverse as to penalise that.
I’m not sure why this would not apply to Graphic Story or BDP Long. The ‘natural slate’ kind of convergence wouldn’t (actually, there’s a way it could, I’ll check the details in a moment, but it would be rare), but convergence on perceived quality (i.e a lot of people nominate a group of works that are widely seen as the best of the year) could apply anywhere. .
To clarify the above bit about natural slates being possible in Graphic Story; in 2015 the sixth nominee was Saga vol. 4, which if 5/6 but not EPH had been applied would have joined Saga vol. 3 on the ballot. EPH excludes it, plausibly the right outcome. But two volumes of a series being completed in one year is presumably rare.
The problem with thinking that 3SV can work alone to produce a fair ballot is that 3SV does nothing against what I guess I’d term sincere slating.
The Rapid Puppies are an anomaly, after all: in normal slating people are trying to push something they think is good enough, but unappreciated.
It’s an entirely different thing to slate only to damage, to explode heads, as it were.
3SV only removes items that a quite sizable number of the voters agree should be removed, the things meant to make our heads explode.
If it had been in force this year it most likely it would have worked like the voters’ eventual no-award decisions, only proactively, and therefore allowing administrators to fill those slots from the long list, so that voters face a full ballot.
And that is a great, much needed gain.
–though it is worth remembering that identifying No Award directly with 3SV down votes may be an overly-generous estimate of its impact: the number of downvotes needed is fairly high.
But items that are not purely griefers, items which have unduly benefitted from having been slated, will probably not be removed by 3SV.
They will continue to be boosted to inappropriately high places on the ballot because of having been slated, and will push out items more widely supported.
3SV only removes works, so if an item is not outright removed, 3SV doesn’t affect its relative ranking in the long list.
That is, it does nothing to affect the workings of a sincere slate.
3SV is probably enough to protect us from having our heads explode, but it is completely ineffective against more “normal” slating.
EPH/EPH+ together with 5/6 are the other side of the defense of the ballot.
3SV gives us a crap-free ballot, but EPH/EPH+ and 5/6 give us one that more correctly represents the nominations of a majority of the voters.
And I don’t know about other people, and maybe this means that I am a sekkrit puppy of some kind (who knew?) but I really don’t like the notion of some shadowy cabal controlling the ballot, and 3SV alone doesn’t prevent that.
This year’s results show us that it is unrealistic to expect voters to take the extreme hardline position of down-voting all slated material with 3SV.
If they didn’t No Award all slated works this year, they are unlikely to downvote them all in future.
And nor should they; since hostage and kingmaking nominees also have wide intrinsic support among voters.
Eliminating such works entirely via 3SV would be inappropriate.
While 3SV is the necessary tool to combat the current freakish attack by what is essentially a hate group it is not the tool we are likely to need most often.
Normal, sincere slating is harder to deal with and probably more commonly met with.
Of course, there won’t be slating of every category, every time.
But since the vulnerability of the previous system is now a matter of public record, it would be irresponsible not to have safeguards in place.
Insuring that the final ballot is not unduly effected by behind-the-scenes manipulators, seems desirable and necessary, and that’s what EPH/EPH+ and 5/6 attempts to accomplish.
@Andrew:
No. If works A and B are both generally-recognized-as-awesome, then people are more likely to vote for A and B together, but that doesn’t mean that those who vote for A are more likely to vote for B than those who don’t vote for A.
(As a statistician, I have to include a technical caveat there: insofar as votes for A are weak evidence that the person is voting for more works overall, they actually would be more likely to vote for B, but that’s irrelevant and restating the preceding sentence in a way which avoids that irrelevance would involve brain-melting syntax so I won’t do it.)
tl;dr: EPH does not penalize “generally recognized as awesome”, and so would NOT (contra Dave McCarty’s statements) have an outsized impact on categories like BDP:Long.
No. If works A and B are both generally-recognized-as-awesome, then people are more likely to vote for A and B together, but that doesn’t mean that those who vote for A are more likely to vote for B than those who don’t vote for A.
Yes it does. It means that someone who votes for A is likely to be someone who seeks out the works widely recognised as awesome (as opposed to someone who is a fan of something, so always votes for it), and so is also more likely to vote for B. It may be better to say it rewards non-convergence, rather than that it penalises convergence, but the end result is that the works widely recognised as awesome do less well. (I’d prefer not to say ‘generally’, since that might be taken to imply ‘almost everyone’, and clearly if almost everyone votes for something it will still get through.)
This may not have a likely effect in BDP Long Form, where there mostly aren’t persisting things to be fans of – though actually there are some, e.g. The Avengers – but it would have a clear effect in Graphic Story. And it seems it did. The difference in raw votes between Sex Criminals and Schlock Mercenary was pretty large given the overall figures in this category – it can’t be dismissed as a near-tie – but EPH changed the order between them. Some convergence must have been happening.
@John A Arkansawyer, Steve Wright
Oh no I wasn’t suggesting that the Puppies had any effect. I think the 1941 ballot and winners would have been exactly the same without them.
I was just trying to use the data to estimate that there were atleast 100 people who followed the Sad Puppy list.
(Of course, that 100 might have a lot of overlap with Rabids. Even if it didn’t, it may not have any relevance next year with the Sads seemingly shifting focus to the Dragon awards. But still, it’s interesting).
My attempt to explain the details how EPH works, from start to end, with examples:
http://kjn.livejournal.com/65023.html
(I do not consider EPH to be more complex than 3SV, anyway. From a project workflow and voter standpoint, 3SV is far more complex since it adds more steps and time constraints to the entire process. EPH, on the other hand, only replaces a single step of the full process.)
Kevin:
If you authorize Administrators (who have no appeal and no recourse to their decisions, by WSFS Constitutional definition) the right to remove finalists or disqualify nominators/voters for any non-technical reason, then they effectively have the right to disqualify any finalist or voter they personally dislike, and nobody can do a thing about it.
The administrators have, right now, the power to reject nominations on the grounds that the nominee is not eligible. If I nominated John Scalzi for Best Semiprozine, or Ender’s Game for Best Novel of 2016, my nominations would be thrown out. If the administrators, from whose decision there is no appeal and no recourse, wanted to use this power to exclude things they did not like, they could. They could, for instance, have thrown out ‘If You Were a Dinosaur.. ‘ on the grounds that it is not SF. They could have done things a lot wilder than that. They would have been rebuked for such decisions – they have been rebuked for similar decisions (made in good faith, obviously) in the past – but they could not actually be stopped.
Giving any power to administrators involves the assumption that they will use it responsibly. If we gave them the power to exclude slates, we would have to define criteria for the use of this power. We couldn’t force them to follow these criteria, but then if there’s no appeal we can’t force them to do anything. Some trust is implied by the nature of the system.
Jed Hartman: It’s “Jameson”.
I think the leap in number of of Retro nominations for short fiction can simply be explained by the presence of Heinlein, and also Asimov, and the fact that the Golden Age more generally got going at that time. I’d guess a lot more people are familiar with the short fiction of 1940 than that of 1938.
@rcade
Next year’s ballot will be less effected by puppies that the previous two, since they had to pony up for new memberships after this year.
In addition next year’s ballot will reflect improvements from EPH and 5/6.
The following year we likely will add 3SV as well.
That is, despite the perceived glacial pace of change, the changes have been made.
There is no need now to solve the problem with a massive change in administrative philosophy.
As for +2:
I attended the business meetings this year, and I will echo others in saying that the meeting’s rejection of +2 was heartfelt and overwhelming.
My overall impression of the business meeting was that almost all of the people there (on either side) were already quite familiar with the proposals, and came in already well-informed.
There was a lot of material for all of the business meetings to work through, especially Sunday, and a strong will to get it done before adjourning.
There was therefore no desire at all to spend time discussing a proposal that was dead in the water on arrival.
As you have no doubt noticed here, there is a strong notion that nominations and voting are solely the prerogative of the voters – there are juried awards aplenty, this one belongs to the membership.
No one wants administrators mucking about with nominations or votes.
Had there been any desire to examine the +2 proposal more closely, the motion to call the vote without discussion – am I remembering the series of events correctly; was that the motion in question? – would have been defeated and we would have gone into a debate on the motion.
It is not that we were somehow prevented by skillful parliamentarians from considering a new and exciting proposal; we could see what it said, and almost no one supported it enough to force debate.
Given the choice, voters overwhelmingly decided to go directly to vote and cleared it out of the way handily.
In any case, had the motion to call the question failed, debating the motion would only have extended the meeting time by another 20 minutes minimum, and it still have been defeated.
That vote reflected the sense of the room as a whole, and the voters in that room are the governing body of the organization.
Not just the poor schmoes working their asses off to run this thing, the people you seemed to suggest were somehow manipulating all us weak-minded types, but that entire roomfull of people who were missing four full mornings of programming in order to get the voting changes through, to propose new categories of awards, to (snerk) define North America – I liked that one.
That’s what democracy looks like, and I’m very fond of it, even at the worst of times.
I trust the meeting.
People turned up at the business meeting at 10am, the morning after the Hugo celebration, to make this all work.
Some of them (me) came Kansas City specifically to be there.
We ratified EPH and 5/6, we voted for EPH+ and 3SV.
I think we all did a damn fine job, and I’m proud of us all.
Yep, the Hugos got mugged by a mob of puppies.
We can’t make that never have happened.
But for all that the various puppies have done, they’ve never won an award.
And they haven’t made us change our fundamental nature.
Beale can put stuff on his slate and have people nominate and vote for his choices.
He’s a real strong man, and he gets things done.
But that’s him, and not us, and he has not remade us in his image.
We fixed it.
The vulnerabilities in the voting system will be fixed for good in Helsinki.
I don’t see why at this point anyone would want to hand unrestricted power over to administrators who don’t even want it, in order to fix a problem we’ve already coped with.
You say:
We could also persuade a Worldcon after bid acceptance to pick a Hugo administrator who would adopt our approach.
Lorentz spoke for all Hugo administrators a few times in this discussion. If every Worldcon has total authority to pick its Hugo subcommittee, it isn’t set in stone that his philosophy of running the Hugos would be the next administrator’s philosophy.
How has the Hugo Awards managed to pass down a consistent philosophy for the amount of discretion an administrator should use (or more accurately not use)?
So, far as I understand it, there isn’t a separate “Hugo Awards” hanging around telling people what to do.
Rather, there is an overall culture supporting running a functional democracy, as outlined in the group’s constitution – all the ratified voting changes are now part of the constitution, btw.
So you are basically asking a bunch of people who have worked together make a bid and – happy them – won, to go find someone presumably from outside their group to run their awards in a way that pretty much opposes the overall philosophy of the membership, as well as their own thoughts in the matter.
(I can’t see this flying at either Helsinki or San Jose.)
It seems to be almost an identifying characteristic of the people running the various Worldcons and therefore Hugo awards that they do not to want to mess with the voters’ will, as expressed by their ballots.
So, since a constitutional change that would have handed administrators that kind of power failed acceptance in a democratic vote, you are suggesting instead a workaround in which a small group somehow pressures a Worldcon committee to hand their Hugo administration to a group that would ignore the consistent decisions of the Business Meetings and much about unconstitutionally with ballots.
Sounds like an attempted coup, basically.
We could also persuade a Worldcon after bid acceptance to pick a Hugo administrator who would adopt our approach.
Lorentz spoke for all Hugo administrators a few times in this discussion. If every Worldcon has total authority to pick its Hugo subcommittee, it isn’t set in stone that his philosophy of running the Hugos would be the next administrator’s philosophy.