Today the Sasquan Business Meeting will consider 4/6, E Pluribus Hugo plus other unfinished business and whatever shennanigans people have left in their deck at this point.
Livebloggers welcome.
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Am I wrong in thinking that 4/6 is nearly as easily gamed as the current system? All it would have required was the Sad and Rabid camps offering two different slates and we’d be in the same basic boat.
(I recognize that 4/6+EPH is still slate resistant, to be clear.)
Daveon: With the current system they can skip cleaning data on low vote items as they’re obviously below the possible cut. For EPH to work they have to clean all the data.
They have to look at all the data anyway, to determine whether it’s below the cut. EPH is not going to require any extra normalization.
Based on the data from last night I’m inclined to believe that the numbers need to be very tough. At the moment I’d suggest 4/8.
It’s not slate resistant but it’s more resistant.
(nitpicking and flyspecking about how x/y ratios are going to be debated)
Been reading the liveblogging on way to work. Thanks everyone for posting. I am happy & relieved that EPH passed.
(I didn’t expect to feel so strongly about this, but turns out, I do.)
Phil Sandifer said:
Not a number cruncher myself, but the people who’ve been talking on this a while say that you’re absolutely right, 4/6 by itself is not a solution. That’s why the push for EPH was so hard, because it was the most slate-resistant fix. EPH+4/6 would be even better, though, which is why I’m still watching this thread like a hawk. 🙂
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Fandom: Nobody DoSes us like us.
Motion to table the 4/6 proposal indefinitely, which would kill it, fails.
With the current system they can skip cleaning data on low vote items as they’re obviously below the possible cut.
For EPH to work they have to clean all the data.
They have to clean it all to get the numbers in the first place. This is known to everyone who has dealt with written nominations.
JJ. It’s more that they can do a visual check on low numbers now rather than make sure all the episodes have the correct name in a machine readable way.
I’m sitting in the biz meeting two seats away from another File770 reader! (john Seavey, is that you?)
Motion to table 4/6: motion fails by wide margin.
Unless they are a varient name of one of the higher nominations. Those 5 nomInations for “episode 3 of the Dentist” might make a big differance to “Yellow Gums”.
By itself, 4/6 wouldn’t be nearly sufficient. With EPH likely to be in play as well, it’s a useful supplement.
Limiting nomination counts per ballot (the 4 part of 4/6) + EPH is probably harmful, not helpful. Increasing the number of finalists + anything including EPH (the 6 part of 4/6) is helpful in the abstract, although it must be weighed against all the other issues with increasing the number of finalists.
@Phil Sandifer
You can roughly think of 4/6 as making slating 50% more difficult. As in you need 50% more members voting the slate to make it equally effective. Or if slates only choose 4 instead of trying to get all 6, it reduces the number of final nominees slates control by 33%.
@Greg: I wish. 🙂
4/6 is more of a slate-discourager than anything else – it’s not as effective as EPH, but it was faster to put together and easy to explain.
With EPH, there’s no reason to have an upper limit for how many works each person can nominate.
(The Business Meeting is turning into a protracted spreadsheet demo.)
ObEthanHawke: ‘I was told there’d be no math.’
Just gotta say that it was awesome to be in the room and vote on EPH. Thinking of everyone online unable to be here. If you ever have a chance to go to the WSFS business meeting at a Worldcon I definitely recommend it.
@Dave: As one of the earlier posters mentioned, there are several text tools commonly used for fuzzy text search that can be used to do reliable initial data normalization for most categories, especially ones with a title and author. The category that Mr. Lorentz used as an example, the dramatic presentation short form, is probably the one that is the hardest to normalize.
JJ at 11:58 am : the motion was to table, but not indefinitely. It failed, anyway.
Chosen numbers are 4/6, after all of that
4 and 6 passed as … 4 and 6.
Motion to extend debate, fails.
1/5 fails
3/10 fails
2/5 fails
3/7 fails
5/10 fails
4/8 fails
3/6 fails
3/5 fails
5/8 fails
6/9 fails
4/6 passes
6/7 therefore fails
half hour of faffing about to replace 4 and 6 with 4 and 6
The 4 and 6 proposal’s fill in the blank was painful.
I think we should really thank Sarah Hoyt for making EPH pass. If she, and other puppies, hadn’t quite publicly stated that their intention was to swamp the ballots for next year and allready started to accuse the administration for rigging, there would have been fewer votes for support.
I think we should also thank Brian Z. Because of his passive aggression and antagonistic ways, together with faux arguments, he pissed so many people off that I guess he himself created at least 20 EPH supporters.
Wait, they did both blanks at once?
That’s not how I thought it was going to go.
I’m not a fan of 4/6, but ho-hum, I expect it’ll pass in moments. Thanks for all the live blogging, folks; I’m refreshing this and Rachael Acks’s blog religiously! (command-r, command-r, command-r)
ETA: Re. filling in the blanks of __/__ (picking the specific numbers) I loved Rachael’s comment: “And… 4 and 6 wins. WOW WE HAVE WASTED SOME TIME.” …LOL.
But not 5\7? Wouldn’t it have been better with two primes?
Nat, as explained by the chair, it wouldn’t have made sense to consider numbers separately, because the ratio is arguably the most important number.
Nobody proposed 5/7
I’m surprised 5/7 wasn’t up, particularly with a comment about how reducing the # of slots might annoy voters. I’d rather 5/7 than 4/6 (but I don’t like either one).
I’m indifferent about 4/6, but I’m very glad EPH passed. I hope it can pass next year, too. If the puppies pull the same crap for next year, EPH is a shoo-in. The only way the puppies can defeat EPH is to not slate next year’s Hugos.
Speaking of supposedly complicated stuff to understand, is there a tutorial somewhere of how to read the Hugo report on the IRV results? I can’t quite wrap my head around the way the data is presented.
Steven des Jardins speaking for, says if EPH is not ratified next year, the 4/6 will still be available as a somewhat palliative measure.
Kovalchik against says this ratio still can be easily gamed.
Chris Gerrib speaking for, says if EPH doesn’t pass, this is better than nothing.
Dara Korra’ti speaking against, says that this method would still be vulnerable to 2 or more slates or “parties”, says this system does not discourage slates, it mandates them.
Ben Yalow speaking for, says he opposes EPH but says since people want something, this will provide a solution.
John Sagers speaking against, says that we have other ways of addressing the problem including EPH, and this is an ill-considered attempt to address a problem which it will not actually address.
25 or 6 to 4 considered?
I was in favor of ratios with fewer ballot slots (I was going to propose 3/5, someone else did it first). Larger denominators means more to read between the nominations and the voting.
Speaker against, says voters already have too much to read, more finalists is even worse.
Rich Horton says that more things to read is a feature, not a bug, that it will bring in a more diverse and wider set of entries.
Motion to close debate, passes. Debate on 4/6 is closed.
Now voting on 4/6
In regards to the data: they *should* be cleaning the data, even for the lower-number items. I believe there has been at least one recent case where those low-number, dismissed items should have been added to another, larger group (being an alternate name), and thus denied an item a nomination.
I’m not going to cry if EPH forces them to do better data procedures.
Serpentine count for the 4/6 proposal.
Serpentine count, after a lot of parliamentary wrangling
Now a serpentine again.
86 in favor.
I think in many ways the actions of both Sads and Rabids have driven the EPH vote; they’ve both made it clear that they will be creating slates for next year, which made the Old Guard, including GRR Martin, look as if their rose-tinted spectacles were overriding their considered judgement when they opposed EPH.
Adorable, but nevertheless exceedingly dangerous to the entire concept of Worldcon…
2/3 majority required (as this is a constitutional amendment). 86 for, more than
60 against. Fails.
ETA: Sorry, got that wrong. Bare majority. Pass.
There was a question WAY back about the phrase “eat the mike”. This was being used by the chair to get quiet speakers to hold the directional microphone properly.
When you tell someone to “eat” the mike, they are more likely to put it up straight in front of their mouth, instead of letting it droop. This is important with a directional mike like the one being used.
82 opposed. Motion passes
Yes, particularly as this year was a two-slate attack on the nominations (Rabids and Sads). The difference was the Rabids were slightly more voters and had better discipline. With 4/6 you wouldn’t need two distinct slates either – a pair of overlapping slates would do it. Again its vulnerable to exactly the kind of attack that occurred this year.
Looking at the nomination figures this year I suppose we would get an outcome not dissimilar to the outcome this year. The Top 4 Puppy Noms (combined Rabid and Sad) being Butcher, Correia, Kloos, Anderson, and then two non-puppy noms getting in, Leckie and Addison. Assuming the same people withdrew, then the eventual ballot would be pretty much the same except it would have an extra Sad Puppy pick: Gannon’s Trial by Fire.
The other categories look better as they suggest that at least one non-puppy pick would get on with 4/6 but that assumes the Puppies wouldn’t have reduced the overlap between slates a bit more. Also the category would still be noncompetitive with just one or maybe two non-slate works at best.
EPH is still vulnerable to slates – the only way a voting system can’t be is to make it undemocratic. However, to get multiple works through is trickier. A slate needs more votes and less lock-step voting. Put another way, EPH is less punitive to how the Sad Puppies nominated than it is to the Rabid Puppies. A pure lock-step slate runs the risk of being completely wiped out at a single stage. To ‘game’ the system the Rabids either need lots more nominators [OK they have at max 500 based on the final votes – which is a lot] and very little consensus on the best works from non-Puppies.
I suspect the likely strategy from the Puppies for next year will be a dual riding-coat-tails (i.e. pick stuff likely to do well regardless and declare it theirs – as in their claims of victory for Guardians and 3BP) and/or spoiler nominations (nominating works and people that non-puppies like so that the nominees feel pressured to withdraw or so that in the final vote a good work gets No Award as part of the anti-slate backlash)