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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
A clean slate for commenting on today’s session.
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I think it may actually be important whether a formal definition of ‘slate’ can be given. Saying they are easily recognisable is not the same as giving a formal definition, but it makes it plausible that one could be constructed.
If a formal definition can be given, then this proposal gives the administrators no more power than they already possess. The membership would have democratically adopted a rule, which the administrators would be charged with enforcing, and which they could enforce quite mechanically, just as they enforce rules about real existence of members, as rcade says, or about length, date of publication and so on.
If a formal definition can’t be given, then the proposal would be to give the administrators a discretionary power. This might be more problematic, though they have discretionary powers already, when, for instance, the definitions of categories are unclear. If they went by their normal practice they would exercise this in a minimal way, not ruling anything out of order unless it was very obviously a slate. (Witness their accepting Lovecraft as a fan writer – however, if voters claimed that John Scalzi was a semiprozine they would presumably overrule this.)
In any case, I don’t see anything resembling dictatorship here. It’s not being proposed either that the administrators should decide who should receive a Hugo, or that they should make the rules. The voters will do the first, and the business meeting the second, as always.
For anyone who hasn’t already seen it, it’s really worth taking a look at the Midamericon document (here: warning, PDF file) which shows how EPH would have affected this year’s ballot.
The interesting things, to me, are the areas where there’s no practical effect (same lists of finalists). There are things like Best Novel, where there’s sufficient interest that the slate gets organically outvoted, as it were… then there’s things like Best Editor Short Form, where people are often unsure about what to nominate, so the slate gets to dominate on purely numerical grounds… and then there’s Best Semiprozine, where (I think) there are only so many plausible candidates anyway, so opposition to the slate tends to cluster around a few – which, to the EPH algorithm, “looks” the same as a slate.
It’s an interesting document, and it does rather demonstrate that EPH is part of an answer, but not the whole of one.
Actually, can we work out the effects of 5/6 just by adding the top longlisted nominee in each case?
There’s a new Hugos discussion thread over at Whatever, including some well-earned praise of Pat Cadigan’s emceeing. (Pat has been sitting near me and my wife in the Marriott lobby.)
Some interesting comments from John Scalzi on the business meeting decisions.
He says Hugo administrators ” should also just simply note that they reserve the right to discard ballots that show obvious signs of slating.”
He also raises a question I haven’t seen before: Should we ban Castalia House and all projects Beale has a fiduciary interest in from appearing on a Hugo ballot?
@rcade,
It’s been raised before. The problem is that it would have to be explicitly written onto the WSFS constitution via a rule change, which IMO has no chance of getting through a Business Meeting. It would also give him the type of attention he craves.
@rcade
He also raises a question I haven’t seen before: Should we ban Castalia House and all projects Beale has a fiduciary interest in from appearing on a Hugo ballot?
That was discussed pretty extensively here months ago. Bottom line: too incendiary and too easily gamed. It also would do nothing for hostages or troll works. It’s a bad idea.
Mmm. The thing about 5/6 is, if a slate dominates five nominations in a category, it automatically puts one “organic” nominee into the finalists… but, if the slate doesn’t completely dominate a category, it is just as likely to put a (failed) slate candidate back onto the final ballot.
The results of this in this year’s Best Novel would be particularly distressing, I feel. (I swear to God, he’s no relation!)
Actually, 5 and 6 is not “just” as likely to put a non-slate nominee back on the ballot. Based on a quick analysis of EPH as applied to 2015 and 2016 data, which I did before I made my opening speech in favor of 5 and 6, there’s a 75-80% chance that 5 and 6 puts a non-slate work on the ballot, and about a 20-25% chance that it puts a slate work that EPH took off the ballot back onto the ballot. I argued that was a good trade-off, and the meeting agreed.
(And yes, Andrew, 5 and 6 just takes whatever was 6th on the EPH longlist and puts it on the ballot.)
Well, if you’ve crunched the numbers and that’s what they say, fair enough. (It’s just that some of the sixth-place stuff this year is… particularly unfortunate.)
I listened to the audio of Dave Truesdale’s panel.
Mr. Truesdale’s point was demonstrated perfectly by his being kicked out of WorldCon. He had a disagreeing viewpoint, obviously, but he was extremely mild in his tone and comportment. This is an argument? Please! I have something worse with my wife at least every 24 hours and we are quite stably married for 11 years.
If he was kicked out for this, then SF/F must be intellectually dead. If this extremely mild level of disagreement is not allowed then is this a rejection of our whole history of intellectual tradition? The Socratic method, the adversarial system of justice… argument has been at the center of intellectual life for millennia. What ever happened to overcoming bad ideas with better ideas? Are Mr. Truesdale’s opponents so cowed by the force of his holy truth that they regard it as irrefutable? What if the argument remains open and festering. So? Are we not adults? Can we not handle the presence of different factions? Is this North Korea?
And what on Earth is the point of a **panel discussion** if exceedingly mild disagreement is not allowed? Doesn’t ‘discussion’ pretty much mean that there are different viewpoints? Didn’t Truesdale choose exactly the forum where you are supposed to air such things?
These threads exhibits a tremendous outpouring of brainpower over the question of what to do about Vox Day. Yes, he’s a jerk for going outside the system (and indeed wanting to burn it down, apparently). But it seems there is no way for anyone to disagree inside the system, if such mild disagreement brings banning of a lifelong laborer for the cause of SF/F.
With Semiprozine, I think the success of the slate under EPH is caused by two things: a. They backed two of the most likely candidates. b. After that the field rather falls to pieces, and nothing else could muster enough votes to outweigh the slate. (Interestingly, the sixth nominee on both systems is Lightspeed, which is no longer actually a semiprozine.)
Cheryl:
Yeah. Whoever that was who tried to adjourn sine die, to avoid voting on EPH+, so as to “kill it right now” was particularly baffling. After experiencing the bulk of the meeting, did he really think the voters there had any real desire to “kill it right now”? I think the same person (or someone near him) tried to call for a serpentine over a vote that had been lost something like 80-20. What, was counting the exact numbers going to miraculously change the results?
I was very pleased with the results of the business meeting this year. All of the slate-fighting amendments (except for the “let the admins add choices” one, which was never going anywhere) got passed, with added wrinkles to give future business meetings more flexibility in the event that strategies proved counterproductive or useless.
[I was a little perplexed by someone arguing against the suspension clause by saying it would always be one year behind, when the alternative, if there wasn’t a suspension/ee ratification clause, was always being two years behind.]
Missed most of the discussion here, since I was running around the con or exhausted from running around the con. But I had a great time and am looking forward to catching up.
Johan P — it’s not a fallacy — we are discussing power here:
Award Administrator(s) — not knowing if this one person (dictator) or several (oligarchy) get to make the decision to discard votes deemed to be for a slate.
If the Admins don’t have this power, then it would be in the hands of the voters to make the decision as to the appropriate actions re: slating, currently the solution is EPH, with additions coming down the pike.
Just so you know, I’m coming at this as someone who has been part of a fan award process as an administrator. There were occasions where there were ballot stuffing attempts, and we did throw out those ballots — BUT the entire concom was consulted, shown the evidence, and agreed that this was the correct course of action. The admins did not have the decision resting on just their shoulders.
I guess I’m angsting for the administrators here — I can understand why they would rather not be the ones to throw out votes. It really would open a very large can of worms…
An interesting thing to look at in the EPH analysis doc is to compare the EPH “points” against the straight nomination numbers. You can see very clearly that EPH is dramatically reducing the power of slated works while having a much lower effect on non-slate works. While unfortunately the starting power of the slate was such that EPH would only have had a moderate effect, it’s clearly doing its job as intended.
I’ve argued for some degree of human intervention in the process to stop griefing but I don’t think it is wise to do it as an anti-slate measure.
On sixth place stuff and generally: I think the willingness of pro-puppy authors to participate in shenanigans will decrease. Vox likes all the fuss but individual authors with fragile egos don’t like coming last (without naming names).
And while perusing the comments at Whatever, I finally figured out what was bothering me about discarding votes. It boils down to one thing: disenfranchisement.
Discarding votes seems wrong because people are paying for the privilege of voting. I would have no problem with throwing out the votes, IF people were refunded their money when this happens, especially those where the voter bought a supporting membership.
Does this make sense to anyone, or am I just being weird?
I think that makes sense and is a legitimate concern.
Having said that admins may be faced in the future with genuinely dodgy voting of one kind or another (as has occurred in the past). Sockpuppet voters could be a genuine problem if somebody wanted to spend money on disrupting the Hugos.
@Kurt Busiek – Yeah. Whoever that was who tried to adjourn sine die, to avoid voting on EPH+, so as to “kill it right now” was particularly baffling. After experiencing the bulk of the meeting, did he really think the voters there had any real desire to “kill it right now”?
I won’t use names, although I remember his. He was a repeat participant in the Doing Things Few People Agreed With While Being Aggrieved Olympics, and much of his participation baffled me. I wondered if it was part of a running tussle with SMOFs, because his generally wasn’t even close to a common minority opinion.
@Lori Coulson, I don’t think you’re alone in that concern. It might be adjacent to Geek Social Fallacies, but that desire to not disenfranchise for holding an unpopular opinion is pretty powerful. I think half the attendees at the BM would agree with you.
Rcade — my apologies at going off over the Hugo Award voting process. My frustrations with the current US political process (re: voting rights and their suppression) was one of the things unconciously driving my statements. Now that I know the source, I can look at things with much less passion, and I’m certain that preventing people from voting is not something the Hugo administration would do.
@Steve Wright:
Well, if you are, then possibly the allele for fustian is recessive, which would be good news for the future of human genetics.
This sounds about exactly what I would have seen as the best solution regarding the Hugos.
It might be adjacent to Geek Social Fallacies, but that desire to not disenfranchise for holding an unpopular opinion is pretty powerful.
But slate voting is not the same as holding an unpopular opinion. No one is suggesting that ballots be thrown out because they vote for John C. Wright. Obviously if people actually vote for his work because they like it, their votes should be counted. Slaters frequently suggest that it is their opinions that have led to the opposition to them, but this is missing the point. The objection is that they are trying to subvert the process, and if their ballots were thrown out it would be because of that.
Cheryl S.
Gentleman in question is very much a SMOF, part of the circle of hard-working MCFI people from the Boston area. He’s a little cranky.
I happen to have been against just about every thing he proposed at this Business Meeting (can’t recall whether I can say ‘absolutely every’), but the thing is that any member may move for adjournment sine die at any time, and the assembly can then say ‘no’ with varying amounts of swiftness depending on degree of support, from debate and voting it down to failure for lack of a second. When someone makes that motion, everyone knows it’s a ploy, but also feels the pull of it all being over and getting your day back.
By the way, it’s quite unlikely that any rejection of votes would ever actually happen. The primary proposal is that a rule be made banning slates. If such a rule were in place it’s unlikely anyone would actually launch a slate. The question what to do if they did is secondary; the administrators would have an obligation to enforce the rule, but if they wanted to consult the whole committee rather than act on their own, that seems entirely fair.
@rcade:
And you would undoubtedly be surprised how many members would be up in arms over this, and not just because it hands VD the high ground; I was at the meeting where an apparently sensible step taken by an administrator was … discussed (1994, shuffling works between adjacent categories).
and
Buying and filling out memberships in other people’s names is fraud; this is not. “You keep using that word…”
You’re entitled to your opinion; after >40 years in fandom, I think fans are still more concerned with overall results rather than immediate satisfaction. And where do you get “5 years”? 3SV looks promising for 2018.
@Steve Wright: well said!
Apology accepted. I share your frustration about attempts to restrict voting rights.
Thanks!
Voting a bloc of candidates because someone told you to, not because you consider them the best works of the year, fits the term fraud. There’s even an attempt for personal gain since so much of the bloc is financially affiliated with Beale.
The overall results are two spoiled ballots and two award ceremonies in which we often had one unslated work or none to choose from in a category. We don’t get those years back. Authors who missed the cut because of Beale’s nonsense may not get another shot at making the ballot. Authors who took themselves off the ballot to protect the integrity of the Hugos may not get another shot.
If it doesn’t get fixed until 2018, that means we lost the nominating process to a malicious clown from 2014-2017. That price is too high. I wish we could act faster.
@arifel: Thanks! Agh, I gotta read hard for 3 more years… then I get a year off, ’cause ain’t no way I’m making either Ireland or NZ. Whatever your avatar is (snail? mollusk?) it’s cute.
3SV has such a high number of voter requirements that I don’t see how it’s going to help. Cut it in half and it might work. Still, I say let’s try it, with the “may” stipulation.
I wonder if “pissing off the voters and bringing the awards into disrepute” constitutes a legitimate violation of the con’s CoC? Could that be a loophole by which bloc votes could be tossed, much like Puppy Dave got thrown out of MACII? 🙂 Or does that conflate individual con with Hugos too much? Hugo admins still might not want the power. But could each con decide for itself “Nope this sucks”? Or does that way lie anarchy and madness? Discuss.
Ah, fandom. Where an unopposed con bid can finish in third place, and a racist jackass can stuff the ballot, yet he himself can come in 7th out of 5 finalists. We are a contrary bunch.
Pat Cadigan is an international treasure, and needs to be available for as many events as possible to keep folks in line. With or without her minion. We all owe her and her doctors a debt of gratitude.
I commend rcade and Lori for civilly working out their disagreement in an adult fashion. Perhaps File 770 should run the Hugos?
@lurkertype
CoC applying to a slate pusher like VD – all you could do is expel him and invalidate his ballot (no longer member?) and unless he is buying his membership anonymously he’s not been a Worldcon member …
@Steve Wright: For anyone who hasn’t already seen it, it’s really worth taking a look at the Midamericon document (here: warning, PDF file) which shows how EPH would have affected this year’s ballot.
EPH would have saved Nimona.
I looked at Bruce’s eigenvalue proposal. I’ve done work like that for real. I don’t believe he thought it all the way through. It would require a lot of human judgement, if it worked at all.
Hypothetical: Would it be fair for a Hugo administrator to announce, before the nomination period has begun, that any ballot with more than 50% of its nominees from the Rabid Puppies slate will be thrown out?
The ability of the rabids to stuff the ballot would be cut in half. EPH and 5 in 6 would weaken the bloc vote further. The rest of us would be unaffected.
Not in direct response to any current comments, …
I’ve seen a number of comments around the ‘net with wording to the effect of either the slating or the minor shifts that EPH might cause in an unslated ballot “keeping worthy stories off the final ballot.” This framing continues to bother me because there are always many many “worthy stories” that don’t make the ballot for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with story quality. No matter how well the Hugos reflect the will of the voters, even the long list is constrained by numbers to include only a subset of worthy stories.
I know it’s just a short-hand, but there’s always a lingering implication for me that “worthiness” exists only via award lists.
rcade on August 22, 2016 at 4:50 pm said:
Not if they want to remain a Hugo admin.
I’m not talking about it being a unilateral move. I’m talking about it being a Hugo policy.
We know what the Rabid slate is because Beale openly publishes it and encourages it to be followed. We know we hate slates. Would it be unfair to identify a slate and set a threshold for how much a nominating ballot could follow it in order to be counted?
@rcade
This is some of what I meant by a system needing human input. Eigenvalue clustering will (assuming I know what Bruce was talking about) divide the set of voters into two clusters. (It’s the “best” division, in a certain sense.) You could add a known slate as a fake voter and then see which cluster it ended up in.
Then you’d simply discard all the ballot choices of everyone in that cluster.
Trouble is, it can end up choosing some counterintuitive clusters. It might divide the main mass of voters in two for some inscrutable reason, attaching the slate voters to one group. (E.g. people who read print magazines vs. those who read online magazines might end up being a stronger clustering.) Then you’d end up disenfranchising lots and lots of people by accident.
Things get hairy if there are multiple slates. The system might divide the voters in such as way as to put all the slaters into one cluster, but then it might just remove one group. Someone would need to look and see.
And all of this assumes that the admits start off by identifying two or three “known slates.” If you want the system to figure out what a slate is without that sort of input, I think it’s really hopeless.
Upshot: the best you can ask of a clustering system is that it present options (and things to look at) to human operators who will look at its results and use them to make a human decision to exclude certain ballots. It cannot be expected to work automatically.
rcade:
Hard to imagine it passing the business meeting. This is not a power Hugo admins seem to want.
Also, if you announce that Rabid ballots will be thrown out, what’s to stop Beale from “slating” the most popular choices purely out of a desire for fuckery? Fuckery is his goal, not victory.
Also, if you announce that Rabid ballots will be thrown out, what’s to stop Beale from “slating” the most popular choices purely out of a desire for fuckery?
That wouldn’t hurt any popular choice of legitimate voters. It would just cost the work some bloc votes, but if it’s popular across the entire electorate that wouldn’t matter.
@rcade
If you’re going to go that route, why not just pick a set of “unacceptable” works from the slate and simply discard all ballots that include any of those works? There were at least four or five like that. Simplest of all is simply “discard all ballots that nominated Vox Day for anything.”
But a “no VD” rule would be way too specific, of course. Unfortunately, allowing the admins to decide what an unacceptable slated work is is also not going to fly. And, as I’ve said above, there is no automated process that’s likely to compute this either.
The more I look at it, the better 3SV looks.
There was a point earlier in the year where I would have not only been fully supportive, but would have pushed for any ballots containing all of the following to be thrown out, and the memberships refunded: Safe Space; If You were an Award; MGS V; Castalia House Blog; Penric’s Demon; Vox Day; Kukuruyo. The odds that all these works would show up without being driven by a slate was minimal to nonexistent.
But that was this year. Next year would just see a different griefer tactic, and so on and so forth. I’m not opposed to targeted action – I still think that throwing out those ballots would’ve been a good idea*, I just think that systemic fixes are the way to go.
* = but then again, could they even do that?
It would be lovely to have a magic computer which worked just the way everyone wanted getting rid of the correct bad actors
Take just 3 or 4 popular blogs since SP1 happened and we have 1,000s of comments disagreeing on:
1. Whether we have a problem
2. If we have a problem does it need a solution
3. We have a problem. Should the solution be
A. Give admins power they don’t want & likely wouldn’t use – attempts so far to do this have swiftly been NO
B. Start banning specific people and publishing companies – discussed but no proposals because it’s a bad precedent
C. Find ways which keeps power in hands of membership (3,000-20,000+) and deal with the consequences – this has been the number 1 choice since Worldcon started – many who follow the Hugos don’t understand the governing body is made up of 100-200+ changing members every year
unless their ballot duplicated half a slate (which was the suggested threshold for rejection) simply because the slate choices were popular.
I still remember the gentleman who stood up in the Sasquan business meeting and announced that the whole Puppy Slate thing was a statistical anomaly and that we were unlikely to see a repeat and why are we wasting all this time discussing anti-Slate measures?
@rcade:
What’s to stop him from having a second “secret” slate that is on a “verified members only” site or forum? Sure, it’d leak (this is the internet, where nothing is secure forever) and we’d all know what the slate was – but it’d be much harder to prove in a way that satisfied enough WSFS members
Interesting scenario, but even if Beale put nothing on his slate but popular nominees, it would still be tough for an individual’s non-slate ballot to reach 50% similarity by accident. Could you predict a Hugo ballot the day nominations ended with 50% accuracy? I think I might be able to manage 10%.
If the nomination system warned a voter when they’d made over 50% picks from a slate, rendering their ballot invalid, they could make other choices to avoid their disenfranchisement.
I know my hypothetical isn’t remotely likely to happen, but as we chip away at the problem with novel voting systems and embrace a third voting stage, I think there’s some appeal to taking direct action against the arsonist. We haven’t seen other slates emerge. The problem begins and ends with Beale.
The lack of public attention his efforts would attract.
It would also be tough for him to recruit participants if they had to do it all in secret.
I’d be opposed to any system that says “Don’t vote your tastes, you have to work around an arbitrary list created by someone else.”
It may not be as bad as “Don’t vote your tastes, follow an arbitrary list created by someone else,” but it still strikes me as a bad scenario to put anyone in and thus a poor solution.
Not to mention that such a system would warn slaters to modify their ballots just enough to get through.
It began with Correia, didn’t it? Continued with Torgersen and Beale. But there have been multiple actors in this. The non-Beales seem to have gone off to nurse burnt paws and growl, but Beale was not the origin of the problem and if targeted specifically could work through others.