629 thoughts on “Measuring The Rabid Puppies Slate’s Impact on the Final Hugo Ballot”

1. My mother tried to read me Moby Dick when I was eight, as improving literature, but stopped when I burst into tears because I was worried about the whale.

   …mom had some weird ideas about improving literature.

2. I’m with @Sweet. MD is the original X-Files. But most Melville is a delight in one way or another.

3. @Hampus

   By that same logic, the Rabid Puppies did nothing unfair because “Worldcon voters are Worldcon voters,” and thus represent Worldcon.

   @Herman Melville

   I dodged you sucka! Once upon a time I challenged myself to read the classics, and I liked some of them, but then I ran into beasts like, well, anything written by Thomas Hardy, and I decided it wasn’t worth the masochism. I somehow managed to avoid Melville altogether.

   I did like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Brothers Karamazov, and many others. I even liked Robinson Crusoe, right up until that idiot sold Friday and had his conscience assuaged because the guy he sold him to seemed like a nice fellow. Ack.

4. @Andrew M

   So, the 525 voters don’t exist.

   Yep. Well, they voted last year, but didn’t bother this year.

   This strikes me as reasonably good for EPH:

   With EPH, I have the following estimates:
   Slate Sweep: No categories (yay!)

   Slates take 4 of 5: Best Fan Artist.

   Slates take 3 of 5: Best Novelette, Best Short Story, and Best Fancast.

   Slates take 2 of 5: All the rest except the four below.

   Slates take 1 of 5: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

   Slates take nothing: Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

   Note that this assumes that a) EPH never works against organic nominees b) slates only nominate trash that no one except them votes for. In real life, the slates will do better than this.

   EPH will help. It’ll definitely reduce sweeps. But it’s not as good a fix as a lot of people imagine it to be.

5. I’m the person who got 2/3 of the way through MD and was still wondering when “the boring whaling chapters” would show up. I had encountered none, you see, but plenty of wonderful, fascinating chapters about whales and the people who hunt them, full of the kind of detailed description of the natural world and of working people that I loved in Gerald Durrell, Ivan Sanderson, Jane Goodall, etc. No boredom there, just natural history and competence porn.

6. I haven’t been following the troll wars over the last few years with the Hugo, but am I gathering that you are encouraging people to vote for the names in red? Or perhaps a “no award” vote? This must be very difficult for fans. It kind of reminds me of the Balkan Wars of the 1990’s, especially between the Serbs and Croats.

7. sweet, Will R and Dr Science,
   Add me to the club; I loved Moby Dick.

   Delighted also to have so many fine authors here today (Swisky to rant, Leckie to laugh and Kritzer for extra cat pictures) in addition to those who regularly hang out here.

8. Sean:

   “By that same logic, the Rabid Puppies did nothing unfair because “Worldcon voters are Worldcon voters,” and thus represent Worldcon.”

   No. That is not the same logic. It is not even logic at all. It is more something like this:

   1) Aristotle is a greek.
   2) Aristotle had a beard.
   3) Therefore all greeks have beards.

   And Aristotle was also an SJW. *drink*

9. Nobody thinks that EPH is a magical way of excluding slate voting. Ok, let me be more realistic: nobody with any grasp of basic maths thinks that EPH is a magical way of excluding slates from dominating Hugo finalists.

   What EPH will do is minimise the power of slate voting; that’s basic maths and this year my patience with people who can’t handle basic maths ( say, for example, GRRM) has run out. I have to read the garbage in order to give an honest opinion, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who feel that if enough people nominate maths will cease to be maths.

   I’d better stop here before I enmesh myself in explaining what equations are…

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11. @OhIdon’t Wannagetinvolved

    I haven’t been following the troll wars over the last few years with the Hugo, but am I gathering that you are encouraging people to vote for the names in red?

    Not many would go that far; there are some excellent, mainstream works on those slates, and we don’t want to give the slates the power to make us vote against good works.

    I personally encourage everyone to read all the nominated works and decide whether a) they are worthy of an award (in which case, rank them in order, followed by No Award) b) they’re okay but not worthy (in which case rank them after No Award) c) they shouldn’t have been on the ballot in the first place (in which case don’t rank them at all). In all cases, No Award should be on your ballot somewhere, even if it’s the last thing. (Otherwise the trick of leaving the worst things off won’t work.)

    I suggest entirely ignoring whether a work came from a slate or not. There’s very little slate-specific content (that is, non-mainstream) that belongs above No Award on its own merits anyway, although there are one or two.

12. Andrew M on April 27, 2016 at 2:29 pm said:

    Camestros: Presumably the overall number of voters for the Dragons will be greater; and since it’s one nomination per category, slating as we know it won’t work. Besides which, it’s possible they have built safeguards in, making the process semi-juried in some way; we’re still a bit in the dark about this.

    Bigger probably but…
    1. The way these things scale means you need a lot of extra bigger to counteract a slate (because each extra voter is also a person who introduces yet another different thing to vote for.
    2. I may have got this wrong but as I understand it the only barrier to voting will be that you have to register. So while currently Beale has to find 200+ patsies to pay many to WorldCon to freep the Hugos, with DragonCon he only needs people willing to register. So DragonCon will have more voters but Beale will have more minions.
    3. …and really he only actually needs IP addresses not actual people attached to them. Not only does he probably not care about playing by the rules he doesn’t care about whether he is PERCIEVED as playing by the rules. He operates an all’s-fair-in-hate-and-culture-wars ethic. So DragonCon will be cheaper and easier for him to assemble a lot more votes.

    Of course we don’t know the rest of the rules yet or what kind of levels of participation it will have but if he needs about 10% of the total votes to get a nomination then DragonCon awards will have to be REALLY big to dilute his influence (assuming he does anything).

13. “Sure. Or, the credibility of the awards has been damaged by thirty years of ever increasing log rolling, publisher manipulation and SJW-compliant nominations.”

    You know, I’m still waiting for a Puppy to prove any amount of log rolling, publisher manipulation, or secret cabals.

    AND Ann Leckie! Damn. Hugo Royalty all up in this thread. I actually got a chance to meet her at Phoenix Comicon. It was awesome.

    @Greg Hullender,

    I predicted three declines. If your numbers are correct I win! …. nothing at all.

    Damnit, with your new numbers I am off.

14. @Stevie

    I have to read the garbage in order to give an honest opinion, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who feel that if enough people nominate maths will cease to be maths.

    I’d better stop here before I enmesh myself in explaining what equations are…

    Well, if enough people nominated, the slates wouldn’t be a problem, but that number is rather large. If 40,000 people nominated in every category, then the slates wouldn’t get into the lists at all. Best Novel only needs about 5,000 to reach that. Assuming that whatever magic we used to increase nominations didn’t increase slates too, of course.

15. Hampus:

    Great Ceasar’s Ghost! I had completely forgotten all about Aristotle! Surely the most mature and adult way of dealing with today’s events:
    VD has run a slate for two years;
    Slates are evil;
    VD is an evil two-year old.

    Aristotle! *drink*

16. Man even the Grinch learned that he could steal all the Christmas decorations but that the spirit of the celebration didn’t come from the items and that he couldn’t take that away.

    2015 was a great year for SFF. People will party and laugh and recognize and honor those works at Worldcon.

    Surprised The Just City didn’t make it. I loved both Uprooted and 5th Season, congrats to those authors!

17. Camestros

    I before E except after C.

    I know, it’s pathetic; it’s been a long day and I’m copy editing your post. However, I think it’s Perceived.

    Also, I do feel that Timothy needs to post pictures; at times like these we need more cat pictures. Actually, I need more cat pictures, but I’m assuming everyone else does too…

18. @Camestros Felapton

    1. The way these things scale means you need a lot of extra bigger to counteract a slate (because each extra voter is also a person who introduces yet another different thing to vote for.

    Let’s explore that a bit. They don’t appear to have any categories like best short story or best fan artist, where the number of choices is almost limitless.

    For example, if there had been 25,000 Best Novel nominations this year, I estimate that the #5 nominee on the finalist list would have earned about 750 votes. A slate would need at least 750 votes to get on the list at all.

    But 25,000 nominations for Best Short Story would have only pushed the #5 nominee to 250 votes. Even the current slate would have still gotten an item on the list (barely).

    Dragoncon might have a different exponent (given the different nature of their awards) and I have no idea how many votes they’d get. It’s easier, since you only get one vote.

    Of course if someone automates the process, they can submit slate votes by the millions. A thousand or so might be hard to detect, and would still screw the process up quite a bit.

    Yeah, I’m not optimistic.

19. @Sean

    You came here, today and many other days, saying that Larry and Brad had no political ax to grind when they made the various Sad Puppies campaign, that they had no links to Teddy Beale, and that they had no interest in the American culture wars. Considering what they’ve written on all of those things, why should I believe you are literate in English?

20. Sean said: Thank you for pointing out SunHawk’s and TheYoungPretender’s reading comprehension fail. Or was it a knowledge fail? Not sure. Well done since TheYoungPretender, especially, likes to pretend everything I post is a “reading comprehension fail”.

    More like memory fail, which I admit my memory is not the greatest and I confused the Campbell award and the original perceived convention snubbing with the later first SP campaign, so yep mea culpa. Accuracy is indeed important in any discussion. In that spirit, please note that I don’t capitalize the hawk in “Sunhawk” (in fact, I often write it as all lowercase but I tend to get tired of fighting autocorrect and leave the s a capital S) so I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t do so when writing out my name in the future, thanks 🙂

21. @Marc Aramini: As for whether your book on Wolfe would be nominated in some other year: probably not. Not that it is or isn’t deserving, I haven’t read it yet. There are at least five books of commentary on Wolfe on my shelf (Lexicon Urthus, The Long and the Short of It, Solar Labyrinth, Gate of Horn, and Wizard Knight Companion for sure), and as far as I can tell none were nominated for Related Work. I think that’s a reflection of the same voting public that hasn’t given Wolfe a Hugo – and neither his lack nor yours is a reflection on the quality of the work.

22. Mr. Aramini, if you’re still reading, I’ve got a legitimate question for you–and I apologize that this is the only way I can think of to phrase it!

    What did you think was going to happen with all this?

    I’m not trying to castigate you here, I’m genuinely curious as to how you saw this playing out when you made the various choices involved.

    I think as authors, we all try to do our best by our books. And at the same time, you had to be aware after last year that the Rabid Puppies were about as welcome at the Hugos as head lice at a picnic. I don’t think most people are excited about the prospect of getting No Award’d! So…what was your thought process?

    Was it an any-publicity-is-good-publicity thing? Did you think that once it was on the ballot, people would go “ok, the RP slate had a lot of crap, but that was good scholarship?” (I mean, you gotta figure with scholarly work on Gene Wolfe, Worldcon and associated fans would be a hefty chunk of the potential audience, so that’d be a gamble between making them aware and making them mad.)

    I’m wondering what the calculation was, because–forgive me–you’re defending the work like someone who’s a little surprised that he’s getting heat for it, and I am rather wondering what you thought would happen, as opposed to what is.

23. Stevie on April 27, 2016 at 3:19 pm said:

    Nobody thinks that EPH is a magical way of excluding slate voting. Ok, let me be more realistic: nobody with any grasp of basic maths thinks that EPH is a magical way of excluding slates from dominating Hugo finalists.

    Furthermore, mathematically, there doesn’t seem to be any way to exclude slates that doesn’t have extremely unfortunate side effects—like completely eliminating some honest votes as well.

    Some people may think that’s an acceptable price to pay. I don’t.

24. @Xtifr —

    “Furthermore, mathematically, there doesn’t seem to be any way to exclude slates that doesn’t have extremely unfortunate side effects—like completely eliminating some honest votes as well.”

    Excuse me for being ignorant here, but why not simply have one nomination vote per category per voter? Pick the top five from that? The slates could always get *one* item on the final list, but only one.

25. Contrarius on April 27, 2016 at 4:05 pm said:

    Excuse me for being ignorant here, but why not simply have one nomination vote per category per voter? Pick the top five from that? The slates could always get *one* item on the final list, but only one.

    You mean, eliminate up to four honest votes from each honest voter in each category? 🙂

    (And it still wouldn’t achieve the goal, which is to eliminate slate voting. It would still allow one finalist per slate!)

26. Contrarius:

    VD was already patting himself on the back last year for numbering his supporters to counter that.

    *looks at sentence, O-o, looks in awe at rye & coke*

27. This is going to be the last post here, and only to answer a specific question to Red Wombat. I signed my contract with Castalia a year before the LAST Hugo awards, before the slates. My book came out after a year of processing and editing with them in July of 2015, so my agreement goes back to mid 2014. I thought people would read my book. And I am the type of man who doesn’t need to share the ideology of my friends. If you have been loyal to me, I will be loyal to you – regardless of the consequences. I do have a severe character flaw: in my narcissism, I believed my work was far superior and more comprehensive than anything else written on Wolfe, and that its brilliance would be manifest to who(m)ever read it. I am not used to being disliked because of the company I keep – it is a new experience for me. You guys take care – I won’t be checking in here anymore. As has been said, I made manifestly clear here, I made my bed. But that doesn’t mean my book isn’t great.

28. @Contrarius

    Excuse me for being ignorant here, but why not simply have one nomination vote per category per voter? Pick the top five from that? The slates could always get *one* item on the final list, but only one.

    That might actually work at a time when we’re getting thousands of people nominating. Even so, for categories like Best Short Story and Best Fan Artist, you’d run the risk that you wouldn’t have 5 candidates all of which got more than two votes.

29. Tasha Turner:

    Well I was wrong. RPs got more on the ballot than I thought they would. I suspect we’ll be NA a number of categories. It would be nice if they’d announce them all up front and then get on with the ceremonies. Please no asterisks this year.

    Likewise. All of the above. The Rabids have put a lot more on the ballot than I expected (I thought their attention would drift and their nominating numbers would be lower; I was wrong). I think there will indeed be No Award for some categories. I would also prefer that No Awards be announced at the start of the ceremony, not dragged out in painful anticipation as a whole series of awkward announcements. This would entail some last-minute revising of the planned ceremony, but I hope that can be done. I also agree about the asterisks. I think the Puppies took offense just because they’re outrage addicts, rather than for any reason based in reality, but, either way, repeating it would lead to ever so much tiresomeness.

30. Stevie on April 27, 2016 at 3:46 pm said:

    Camestros

    I before E except after C.

    I know, it’s pathetic; it’s been a long day and I’m copy editing your post. However, I think it’s Perceived.

    Also, I do feel that Timothy needs to post pictures; at times like these we need more cat pictures. Actually, I need more cat pictures, but I’m assuming everyone else does too…

    I forgot to say that in my journeys I found the Source of Cats i.e. the fabled Fountain of Kitteh, The Wellspring of Catness, El Gato-darado, Catotopia, Catlantis. So there will be cat picture tomorrow! Hopefully that will make amends for both my spelling and Timothy’s behavior.

31. Greg

    On a brief, late at night, run through I don’t agree. It really doesn’t matter how big the numbers are; the selection system is predicated on the assumption that people nominating stuff are doing so because they really like the work. The vulnerability to slate voting is built into the system; you can’t change that by increasing the numbers.

    Admittedly, my maths have been honed in the fire of complex financial instruments over more than 30 years; an obvious example is that we came very close recently to financial Armageddon because a bunch of incredibly intelligent people overlooked the fact that the price of property can go down as well as up.

    Once you have a system predicated on the assumption that there won’t be slates, the only way you can fix it is by changing the system to deal with slates, in much the same way that one needs to explain to people that the price of property can go down, and they need to completely revise their equations to recognise this, once we’ve averted Armageddon. Hopefully…

32. ….sigh. Poor damn’d soul, as the poets would say.

    Well, if he’s no longer reading, then all I can hope is that he finds a better person to be loyal to than Beale.

    I, too, don’t require my friends to share the same opinions I do, but I do need them to not dance deliberately on the edge of “see, I’m not SAYING I’m a white supremacist, I’m just trying to make it LOOK like I’m saying it so I can laugh and feel superior when you get disgusted!”

    But I suppose let she who has never had a toxic friendship cast the first stone. Poor sod.

33. Camestros

    Wow!

    I now have a reason to live! Thank you so much…

34. Marc, I just want you to know that I completely believe you’re gone; never to return.
    But just in case you do, realize that a fair chunk of this crowd is committed to voting on merit regardless of questionable association. Fear not, when the Hugo voters package comes out no doubt your genius will be on full display.

35. I signed my contract with Castalia a year before the LAST Hugo awards, before the slates.

    There was a slate in 2014. Which Beale participated in. Which was widely criticized. Were you not paying attention?

    My book came out after a year of processing and editing with them in July of 2015, so my agreement goes back to mid 2014. I thought people would read my book. And I am the type of man who doesn’t need to share the ideology of my friends. If you have been loyal to me, I will be loyal to you – regardless of the consequences.

    No matter how virulently racist, sexist, or homophobic they are, you’ll stand by your friends as long as they are good to you? Because Beale was already talking about how throwing acid on women and female genital mutilation was for the benefit of women. He was already on record as claiming homosexuality was a birth defect that needed to be cured, by force if necessary, and that non-Caucasian minorities were intellectually inferior and marital rape was simply impossible. This is the man you chose to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with.

    I do have a severe character flaw: in my narcissism, I believed my work was far superior and more comprehensive than anything else written on Wolfe, and that its brilliance would be manifest to who(m)ever read it.

    Except, it seems, any publisher other than Beale. Its odd that you claim how great your work is on the one hand, but then claim no one but a publishing company owned by a neo-fascist could possibly see their way to publishing it.

    I am not used to being disliked because of the company I keep – it is a new experience for me.

    Get used to it. Being buddies with Beale is the kind of stink that doesn’t wear off.

36. Here there and everywhere.

    Been to Whatever, Not a Blog, MonsterHunter and here. I think my favorite take is Scalzi. He has 2 blogs on the subject and both of them rock.

    The Best Novel category looks pretty good. Some categories look pretty bad. Fans are smart enough to recognize what to do about Vox and what is good and what isn’t. This is only year 1 of a year 2 fix. And we saw this all before so… yawn.

37. @Stevie

    The vulnerability to slate voting is built into the system; you can’t change that by increasing the numbers.

    There is a point at which a slate threatens the system. That is, there is a minimum-effective-slate size. Slates below that size aren’t a problem.

    Increasing the numbers will definitely increase the minimum slate size, although, as we have seen, doubling them wasn’t enough, and a further factor of 5 might not be enough. It isn’t that increasing nominations doesn’t help–it’s just that it’s not going to help enough to solve our problem.

    You appear to be trying to eliminate the problem entirely. I don’t think that’s productive, since I don’t think it can be done. Not without eliminating popular voting and going to a committee or something equally drastic. Heck, there isn’t universal agreement on what constitutes a slate in the first place. So I don’t think you’re being realistic.

    I’m open to hearing your ideas, though; no matter how condescending. 🙂

38. I haven’t been following the troll wars over the last few years with the Hugo, but am I gathering that you are encouraging people to vote for the names in red?

    Mike’s post doesn’t say a word about who people should vote for. I don’t think he took a position last year on who people should vote for.

39. I feel tentative in making commentary about the Hugos because my “dirty little secret” is that I’ve never participated in them and probably never will until my reading habits change (like I actually start reading recently published books instead of mostly cycling through my own library of books published 10 – 20 years ago) but overall I am in favour of them and they are no worse or better than other awards of the kind, and wish those involved in them all the best in making them fair and fun, no easy challenge obviously. I’ve never been to a Worldcon either, but they also sound pretty great, different from the conventions I go to, mainly as a vendor in the artist alley.

    I think though, speaking of conventions, that there are definitely some parallels between trying to become a popular author/award-winning author and being an artist alley vendor and professional artist in general. Both are a tough game: the hours are long and you often work your butt off without much reward, you can be frustrated by things completely out of your control, and it’s way more complicated to succeed at then you might think before you actually try to do it.

    And a lot of it will either be unfair or feel really unfair. You might find yourself feeling jealous or resentful of another artist for doing better than you, for “cheating”, for having connections you don’t have, for “faking it” just to make money, etc. But the ridiculous, sometimes baffling thing about artistic success – whether we are talking dollars or awards or both – is how unpredictable it can all be. I’ve spent years trying to find a balance in my art between “I love making this art” and “people love to buy this art” and even when it’s my own art only competing with my other art, the things that I’ve had (relative) success with have often been unrelated to any sort of intellectual or practical evaluation I tried to do, to make informed choices of what would be a “surefire seller” only to find that what I considered the “superior” artwork being outdone ten to one by artwork that I’ve either done as a joke or experiment without much hope of selling anything. If you let it, that sort of randomness will drive you around the bend. It can’t really be predicted.

    So while I do empathize with authors like Marc feeling so sure they’ll do well with a book because the book is just so well-written or otherwise superior, and then struggling to understand why it isn’t immediately snapped up, and it’s easy to blame others or get bitter about people just not understanding your artistic genius, that may be true but it’s just the nature of the beast. We’re all out there, making art, hustling, trying to get by, and we can’t all make it. Hell, not even the majority of us will make it. I remember my first year of art school, our profs said baldly to our faces during a class: “Only one of you in this class of 30 will become a successful artist professionally” and we thought that was kinda mean and unnecessary to say, and not strictly true in the end, the core idea IS true. Some of my class mates gave up art entirely and started other careers. Some kept at art, but struggled to make ends meet. Some, like me, tried for a compromise that allows us to do *something* artistic while saving most of our creativity for the weekend. There are just too many artists and authors out there for everyone to get a slice of the pie. It’s totally unfair, but unless we start doing something weird and giant like, I don’t know, pre-screening people before we let them be artists or authors and not beyond a set quota, I’m not sure what solution there is, or whether it’s even a problem to be solved, but more a situation to be accepted. Hey if you don’t win this award, maybe you’ll win the next award. If you don’t get published today, maybe tomorrow, and if not this book, maybe your next book. We each gotta find a way to dig deep and keep making art, even when things get tough.

40. Re: maths and slate vote elimination. OK, my own maths are no longer up to this (shoot me back to my high school champion mathlete days and I’d certainly give it a shot), but I think there is a way of determining if a nomination is slate-based…without even knowing that a particular slate exists.

    As you know, Bob, historical Hugo nomination data tells us that 1) *Nothing* is anywhere near universally popular; being on 20% of the ballots will almost certainly make you a finalist and it’s very rare to see any nominee even manage that 20%. 2) people make very different nominations based on what they’ve read/seen in the last year, what’s been recommended to them from a large number of possible sources, etc.

    What this means is that pairs of ballots should be very poorly correlated as to what’s on them. As the number of ballots grows, the odds should quickly get very large than any N ballots should be substantially identical, especially if they nominate in most of the categories and for most of the slots in a category. This is why I laugh at Puppies who go “There’s no evidence there was any block nominating going on in 2015, and if there was it certainly wasn’t based on a so-(self)called slate”. Really, Torgersen/Beale just happened to manage to put that many items (most relatively obscure in that the slates were the only folk suggesting them) that made the final ballot on their slate lists? Beating the odds like that, they should’ve gone to Vegas instead and bet on Leicester for this year.

    So, it occurs to me that it should be possible to calculate odds that a subset of N ballots would have X correlation. Possibly even go to the category level; how likely is it that, say, 100 ballots put the same 4 items, regardless of a 5th item, for a category?

    The question is what are the values for N and X such that you could say with near certainty something like “The odds of these 100 ballots having this degree of correlation with each other in these seven categories is over a million to one.”

    And then saying “Thus, under the definitions of slating in the WSFS Constitution as determined by amount and probability of correlation, the nominations made on those 100 ballots in those seven categories were tossed out before the official count.”?

    In other words, could we detect slating ballots by their actual slating, which to work/happen requires that a certain number/percent of ballots have a high correlation of having the same nominees? And say that ballots that have a very high certainty of such are ruled (by algorithm, not opinion) are ruled invalid, at least in categories in which such occurred?

41. My heart is full of misgivings for Marc Aramini…. If his work’s included in the voters’ packet, or accessible online (because there is no way I am paying money to Castalia House or any entity connected with it), I will read it with interest. I’ve been a big Wolfe fan for a long while; I think The Book of the New Sun was the last thing I fanboy-squee’d over, before I became all mature and jaded and cynical. If he’s got something interesting to say about Wolfe, I’m willing to listen.

    But my heart is still full of those misgivings. Because the idea that Castalia House is the only outfit that would handle a work of Wolfe scholarship is, well, pretty dubious (there are the scholarly works already mentioned, which didn’t come out through Castalia). And because… well, I remember last year, and (ahem) certain other writers proclaiming the greatness of themselves and their works. The thing is, it’s not the writer who gets to decide whether or not they’re great – it’s the readers. I am worried that Marc Aramini may prove too optimistic a judge of his own greatness.

    (Mind you, I think Moby Dick was great, by the way. Loved that book. The rambling digressions about whale taxonomy are some of the best bits, in my opinion.)

42. Er, my overall point in my looong ramble was that having a hard time being successful as an artmaker of whatever medium is not a good excuse to justify behaving badly or aligning yourself with those who behave badly just so you can get ahead. Some may feel they have it worse than others, but really we all have a hard time of it, if you want an easy time being sucessful then maybe art is not the place for you and I imagine writing is similar. We need less of a “I got mine, so screw you” attitude in just about every walk of life, but especially art because that’s where my heart is. Most of the artists I know are great people and we work hard to create equally decent, supportive spaces for each other and those who enjoy our art. I totally totally get why people are so emotionally invested in the Hugos and so protective of them.

43. In other words, could we detect slating ballots by their actual slating, which to work/happen requires that a certain number/percent of ballots have a high correlation of having the same nominees? And say that ballots that have a very high certainty of such are ruled (by algorithm, not opinion) are ruled invalid, at least in categories in which such occurred?

    I would like to see a Worldcon Hugo administrator do this. Define the algorithm privately before the vote with the others working on that year’s Hugos, then toss all nominations that trigger that criteria. There’s precedent for ballots being thrown out in the past for fraud. Voting for an entire slate of works across many categories to manipulate the process and push out other nominators is fraudulent.

44. Stevie said: Also, I do feel that Timothy needs to post pictures; at times like these we need more cat pictures. Actually, I need more cat pictures, but I’m assuming everyone else does too…

    *speaks loudly towards computer microphone* I would certainly have more time to post cat pictures if, say, an AI were to arrange distractions for certain people that would keep them from trolling. Yes, if an AI were to do that, I would post many cat pictures as payment.

45. Soon Lee: I see Matthew Foster credits my fan writer nomination to the Sad Puppies — because, of course, we all know how much they love everything I write.

46. Greg

    I wish you luck in finding the things you claim I said.

    I’ll go off to sleep while you devote yourself to find the citations and quotes you claim exist.

    I’m sure it will be easy for you…

47. rcade: The resistance to the algorithm in some quarters is that it would flag the votes from people who organize to fill Best Dramatic – Short Form with five Doctor Who episodes. I haven’t been in touch with that effort for years, however, I know there was one back in the day. You know, innocent slating, rather than bad slating…. Ook ook.

48. The resistance to the algorithm in some quarters is that it would flag the votes from people who organize to fill Best Dramatic – Short Form with five Doctor Who episodes.

    An algorithm could take multiple categories into account. I imagine something along the lines of “if a ballot has the same 4 nominees in 6 categories as 5% of the total ballots, that ballot is thrown out.” The values 4, 6 and 5 could be tweaked by different Worldcons, as long as the algorithm was defined by the Hugo team before the nominations were opened.

    EPH and 4/6 will reduce the problem, but I find myself wishing that we let Hugo administrators exercise some discretion and wipe it out entirely.

49. I believe that people who post regularly here in this puppy-obsessed venue may not realize the extent to which most people in the world have no awareness whatsoever of these issues. It’s quite possible that Marc Aramini is one of these.

50. @Xtifr —

    “You mean, eliminate up to four honest votes from each honest voter in each category? ?
    (And it still wouldn’t achieve the goal, which is to eliminate slate voting. It would still allow one finalist per slate!)”

    Well, it wouldn’t have to be just one vote — you’d only have to allow fewer nominating votes per person than there are slots on the final shortlist. Let people vote for three, and have six on the final list — or whatever. That would leave plenty of “real” nominees to vote for in each category, and without the hand-waving apparent magic (for those of us not particularly interested in mathematical manipulations) of the EPH and 4/6 systems.

    And I don’t necessarily agree with your goal. As long as the slate voters are unable to control each category, I’m not going to get all that excited about them.

    @Jonathan —

    “VD was already patting himself on the back last year for numbering his supporters to counter that.”

    I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you just said. Was that the rye speaking? 😉

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