By Kevin Standlee: In light of the revelation that modeling of E Pluribus Hugo does not result in quite the “magic bullet” that some may have hoped for, we may need to consider other changes to the Hugo Award voting system to deal with bad actors deliberately setting themselves against the wishes of the majority of the voting members of the World Science Fiction Society. Over the past few weeks, I have written up descriptions of three different proposals that attempt to deal with bad actors in different ways, and to make it more likely that the results of the Hugo Awards represent the wishes of the majority of the participating members, without the members having to resort to the 16-ton anvil that is No Award.
All of the proposals below are compatible with either of the proposals up for ratification this year (EPH and 4/6). They are not necessarily compatible with each other. None of them require a Very Strong Administrator picking and choosing individual members’ ballots or disqualifying individual finalists on what I call “ideological” grounds. All of them aim to give the majority of the members a strong voice in picking the Hugo Awards.
In this overview, try not to get too deeply bogged down in specific details. For example, all three proposal refer to the “Top 15.” This is a reference to the “long list” currently defined in the WSFS constitution thusly:
3.11.4: The complete numerical vote totals, including all preliminary tallies for first, second, . . . places, shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ninety (90) days after the Worldcon. During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the fifteen highest vote-getters and any other candidate receiving a number of votes equal to at least five percent (5%) of the nomination ballots cast in that category, but not including any candidate receiving fewer than five votes.
Therefore, the “top 15” can be defined in different ways, and there’s a reasonable argument to be made for many of them. Don’t get too tangled up in specifics. These proposals have general principles, and if you’re agreeable to the general idea of any of them, then we can discuss the specific values for some of the blank spots in them.
In the list below, the links lead to my LiveJournal where each proposal is listed in more detail.
3-Stage Voting (3SV) adds a new round of voting to the Hugo Award process, called “semi-finals,” between the existing nominating ballot and the existing final ballot. In 3SV, the top 15 nominees (including any ties, and see the warning about specifics above) are listed in a way that doesn’t show how many nominations they received. The members (supporting and attending) of the current Worldcon (not the previous and following Worldcons) are presented with this list, with a question on each of the fifteen semi-finalists in each category: “Is this work worthy of being on the Final Hugo Award Ballot?” with the choices being YES, NO, and ABSTAIN.
If a sufficient quorum (which is why counting explicit abstentions is important) votes, and if a sufficient number vote NO, that semi-finalist is disqualified from further consideration. As currently proposed, the necessary NO vote is “more NO than YES votes,” but the exact amount needed to disqualify is negotiable. Remember, even if every vote is NO, if a quorum (minimum number of voters) doesn’t participate, the work cannot be disqualified. (This makes it difficult for a small group to campaign against a work.)
At the end of the semi-final round, any works disqualified by the members, withdrawn by the nominees, or disqualified by the Committee on technical grounds is out of the running. From among the remaining semi-finalists, the five that got the most votes in the nominating phase become the finalists, and the final ballot continues as it currently does. Note that in this case it doesn’t matter how many YES votes a semi-finalist got, only that it didn’t get a negative majority.
3SV effectively moves the votes on NO AWARD to the semi-finals, although it would remain a candidate on the final ballot. It allows the members of the current Worldcon (the ones who will be voting on the final ballot) to decide in advance which works they think deserve to be on the final ballot. It does this at a price, however, and that price is to carve 6-8 weeks out of an already relatively crowded schedule. The proposal moves the deadline by which you have to be a member in order to nominate up by a month, and in practice would require the nominating deadline to be earlier in the year.
Another drawback of 3SV is that it triples the number of nominees that the Worldcon Committee (the Hugo Award Administrators) need to vet and contact. However, as a trade-off, it gives the administrator roughly three times as much time to do this contact work, and makes the vetting and contacting process public. That is because the Administrator would not need to contact semi-finalists in advance of announcing the “longlist” of semi-finalists. While the semi-final ballot runs, the Administrator would be contacting semi-finalists to give them an opportunity to withdraw from consideration in the final ballot. Administrators could put out a public appeal if they are unable to contact a given semi-finalist. In addition, the Administrator can do eligibility confirmation in public, with the help of the many other people who will undoubtedly be checking over the list and asking questions. Should a semi-finalist be disqualified on technical grounds, the semi-finalist would not be replaced on the semi-final ballot. Ineligible works show up on the existing Top 15 lists now, and the semi-final round would be too short to allow for replacing longlist slots.
An incidental feature of 3SV is that the finalists would not know they’d made the final ballot until the shortlist was announced. They’d know they were semi-finalists, and during the semi-finals they would have had time to decline if they so choose, but it would be impossible for them to leak being a finalist because they would not know it themselves.
Additional drawbacks to 3SV include the fact that it is explicitly negative. It is a place where you vote against things. Some people are philosophically opposed to “down-voting” works. Furthermore, should the known bad actors stop trying to game the system, there is little need for this semi-final round, and you might find people not even bothering to participate in it, which might result in complaints that we’d added complexity and expense for no obvious reason.
3SV is a “vote against stuff” system. An alternative to it was the second proposal.
Proposal 2: Double Nominations with Approval Voting
Double Nominations with Approval Voting (DN/AV, sometimes just DN) is similar to 3-Stage Voting, in that there would be a semi-final round with the Top 15 (see warning at the beginning of the article) nominees listed in an order that would not reveal how many nominations they received. Only members (attending and supporting) of the current Worldcon would vote at this stage. But instead of voting against semi-finalists as you do in 3SV, you would vote for those semi-finalists who you think deserve to be on the final ballot. You could vote for one or all of the semi-finalists. The version as currently proposed included a single write-in slot as well, primarily as a safety valve. In this case, the number of votes a semi-finalist gets here is critical, because only the top five would continue to the finals.
In 3SV, the number of YES votes doesn’t matter as long as there are fewer NO votes (or insufficient ballots cast to qualify the election at all). The relative number of YES votes doesn’t matter as long as the semi-finalist isn’t disqualified, because it’s the original nominating ballot count that sends works on to the final round if they survive the weeding-out process of 3SV’s downvotes. However, in DN/AV, the five works with the most votes in the semi-final round go on to the final ballot, and the number of nominating ballots cast to get the works onto the longlist is irrelevant. Some have called for nominating counts to be used as a tie-breaker, as they envision a 15-way tie for the final ballot. I personally think this unlikely, and there have been as many as eight finalists on a Hugo ballot due to ties for the final position, so I think we could live without a tie-breaker.
All of the extra administrative issues of 3SV are shared by DN/AV, so I won’t go over them again here.
DN/AV eliminates the “negative” aspect of 3SV, in that you vote for semi-finalists, not against them.
Some have suggested that there’s an implication that “you need to have read all of the semi-finalists in order to vote on this ballot,” although I don’t think that is true in either case. DN/AV is a second nominating round. Just as the current nominating ballot makes no pretense that you should have read everything published last year, DN/AV doesn’t expect voters to have read all fifteen semi-finalists, but instead to pick those that the voters think worth considering on the final ballot, knowing that only the top five will appear there.
The biggest advantage to either 3SV or DN/AV is that they put the decision of “what to have on the final ballot” in the hand of the members who will be voting on that final ballot, and that the majority will of those voters will prevail. Neither system is particularly susceptible to gaming by small minorities. The biggest drawback to either of the first two proposals is that they add an additional round of voting, with administrative overhead and complexity.
Some people have asserted, with various degrees of strength, that the Committee (Hugo Award Administrators) should simply ignore “slate voters” or disqualify “obvious slate-generated finalists.” In my opinion, such proposals are hugely problematical, in that they give Administrators authority they have never had in the entire history of the Hugo Awards. However, there is one historical precedent to which we can look when a group of bad actors appears to have forced a work onto the ballot, and the Worldcon Committee tried to ameliorate the action without actually disqualifying anyone. We’ll consider this in the final proposal.
In 1989, the Hugo Award Administrator noticed an odd situation, where a set of nominating ballots arrived in close order with a single nomination cast in a single category. This was enough to place a finalist on the ballot that seemed unusual to anyone who had been watching the kinds of things that had made the shortlist in recent years. The ballots all having included membership payments in the form of consecutively numbered money orders further raised suspicions. According to the coverage of the situation in File 770 at the time, the 1989 Worldcon committee said in a statement at the time that they didn’t do any investigation, but that one person wrote to the committee to inquire why he had a membership when he hadn’t paid for it. (After they made a public statement, some fans contacted the committee claiming to have cast these votes with innocent intent.) In any event, there has always been a strong ethos in the Hugo Awards to allow the membership to speak, not a small committee. On the other hand, this case seemed to be doing someone out of a Hugo Award finalist slot unfairly. The Committee took the unprecedented step of adding the sixth-place nominee to the shortlist. Not too long thereafter, one of the six finalists (the one that seemed to be odd compared to the others) withdrew. There is no evidence or suggestion that the finalist who withdrew had anything to do with the string of bullet-voted ballots. At most, this was a case of enthusiasts with more money than common sense or ethics.
The final proposal that I’ve written up would explicitly authorize the Worldcon Committee (in practice, the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee set up by the Worldcon Committee) to take the action that the 1989 Worldcon did whenever they think that there was a pattern of unethical voting in the nominating round. The Committee would be authorized to add up to two additional finalists from among the Top 15. They would not reveal which finalists they added until after the Hugo Awards ceremony, when it would be included in the post-ceremony detailed results.
I have no expectation that the current people who have typically been part of the Hugo Administration Subcommittee would be the ones who would make the actual Plus 2 decisions. I expect that any sensible Worldcon Committee would recruit additional Administrators for their literary judgement, just as the World Fantasy Award does. Any Administrator, no matter whether they were recruited for computer skills, literary skills, or public relations skills, would be ineligible for that year’s Award just as the current Administrators are.
Should the Administrators determine that there was no need to do so, they could choose to not add additional finalists. Thus, if known Bad Actors desist from their wrecking ways, the Administrators could simply continue running things as we have done in the past, leaving it up to the five highest pluralities of nominations. This would simplify administration and require relatively little change.
This proposal allows the Committee to pull from the Top 15, rather than simply the next two finishers in the nominations, to minimize multiple-slating attacks on the system that would try to dominate the top seven rather than the top five positions. While 20% of the electorate has been able to dominate the first five positions relatively easily, it seems unlikely that such a small group could dominate the top fifteen unless their voting power grew to a majority of the entire electorate. Inasmuch as solutions that represent a majority of the electorate (even if you personally dislike the result) are not contrary to democratic process, there is nothing in this proposal that tries to “defend against it.” As I’ve said above and will continue to say, if you can command a majority of the voters, you get your way, even if I don’t like it. It is minorities dominating the process that troubles me.
Note that there’s nothing magic about adding two additional works. It could be one or more. The exact value is debatable. However, consider that we do hope that most people read all or most of the finalists, and therefore making the shortlist too long works against any good you might get from adding (say) five extra works to the ballot.
Broadly speaking, Plus Two is compatible with either (but not both) 3SV and DN/AV. That is, this proposal can be considered separately from either 3SV or DN/AV, whereas the first two proposals above are antithetical to each other, and only one of them could be reasonably considered at a time.
The biggest advantage of Plus Two is that it’s relatively simple, does not add a lot of administrative overhead, and allows the existing two-stage process to stay in place, with only a relatively minor change of adding works to the final ballot. It also adds the “human judgement element” that it appears that many people seem to think is necessary to combat bad-faith efforts to sabotage the Awards.
The biggest disadvantage is that it gives Administrators an authority that they’ve never actually had before, and that they have used only once before, without any explicit sanction. Administrators may be reluctant to serve on the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee if they know that they may be responsible in some way for adding works to the Hugo Award ballot.
Conclusions
There are no “magic bullets” when it comes to tinkering with the Hugo Award rules. None of the proposals here is a perfect fix. Indeed, per Arrow’s Theorem, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. However, we can try to move things around and minimize unfairness, usually at the expense of additional complexity. The political question then is how much complexity we can tolerate to improve perceived fairness.
The Instant Runoff Voting system that we use on the final ballot is a case of trading complexity (IRV boggles the minds of people who reject anything other than First Past the Post voting) for fairness (IRV usually returns the least-disliked candidate in an election, rather than the one with the largest plurality; in a field of more than two candidates like the Hugo Awards, it usually returns a consensus winner, not just a strong front-runner). Should we decide that the changes we’ve started with E Pluribus Hugo and 4/6 that are up for ratification this year are insufficient to tilt the field back toward perceived fairness, it behooves the members of WSFS meeting in Kansas City this summer to consider additional changes now, not later.
WSFS rules are intentionally complicated to change, in order to prevent concerns of a day or even of a single year to overwhelm the process. However, that doesn’t mean that we cannot start queuing up additional changes now while we continue to monitor how things proceed, in order to protect our own longer term interests.
I expect at least one of the proposals outlined here to be on the agenda of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting. We might even have all three of them.
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Brian Z: I have to hand it to you. Everyone here should know you’re a troll. Hell, everyone should’ve known that for well over a year. Yet you still successfully manage to engage nearly every single one of ’em and quite effectively derail all progress. I don’t think you’re appreciated nearly enough for all the effort you’re putting into this.
Have you ever given any consideration to stepping up your game to the next level? I can see quite a distinguished career for you in any number of very lucrative fields.
Back to the topic at hand: The more I think about it, the less I like 3SV+1 as a proposal.
3SV (which we’ll need) can be ignored in any normal year (provided the quorum is picked well), and this is a feature.
3SV+1 can not be ignored in a normal year. Given the larger than expected long tail of nominators who don’t get any pick on the ballot, there’ll be a large number of people who look at the longlist, don’t see any of their picks on there, and exercise their +1 ability to pick at least something they find reasonable. Depending on how overlapping the tastes in the long tail are, this might have quite some effect on the ballot.
Now, this is probably a good thing! But it does make a fundamental change to the character of the Hugos, and should very much be discussed separately from a griefer-response, preferably as a separate proposal in a year when the griefers are not the issue.
(Put differently: 3SV+1 is too shiny; very clever, but very much its own thing, rather than a response to.)
EPH+, however, would imho very much be worth proposing, since it’s a modification on the current EPH proposal which doesn’t change anything fundamental, but just tweaks its effectiveness. (Particularly important since it has real possibility of it being considered a “not greater change”, thus taking effect straight away.)
Aan: Brian Z: I have to hand it to you. Everyone here should know you’re a troll. Hell, everyone should’ve known that for well over a year. Yet you still successfully manage to engage nearly every single one of ’em and quite effectively derail all progress.
Meh, I engage because I won’t allow his bullshit to go uncontradicted — which is, I suspect, the same reason why a significant number of other people still engage as well.
And then people pretty much walk around him and get on with whatever they’re discussing.
He reminds me of VD, actually, with his delusions of importance and cleverness, and a total lack of awareness of how he makes himself look like a total tool and a fool.
I’ll put Aan and JJ down as “No” for stating that derogatory statements about WSFS members should be ineligible for Hugo Awards.
I can sort of see why they don’t like that, if I squint.
But I was asking Hampus.
No. It is to at an early stage remove items that everyone knows will be No Awarded because they have been gamed to the ballot. This to make sure that there are strong finalists to choose between.
Hampus,
If 3SV were in use today, which of the following would you remove at an early stage because everyone knows they will be No Awarded because they have been gamed to the ballot:
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)
The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com)
Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum)
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel Entertainment)
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon)
“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb 2015)
“Flashpoint: Titan” by CHEAH Kai Wai (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (Uncanny Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015)
“Obits” by Stephen King (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner)
“What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)
@Brian Z:
Tell that to your Griefer friends. They’re the ones who started leaving the dog crap on our yards for us to step in. We just want to throw it back onto their yards.
Brian Z:
I would vote to remove:
If you were an award, my love
Space Raptor Butt Invasion
Safe Space As A Rape Room
SJWs always lie
The Story of Moira Greyland
Vox Day
Kukuruyo
…and several others.
OK. So, none of the novellas or novelettes?
Can’t say. Haven’t looked at them. And I am not going to go into detail here on what I would No Award.
OK. “I don’t know” is an interesting answer. There is nothing unusual or hard to understand about these stories. You’ve already had not only the allotted two weeks to think about them, but actually months now, since they were on Vox’s list.
In a two week 3SV period, there will be uncertainty and mixed feelings. Loud voices on the internet screaming to do this or do that. Some fans down voting almost everything, others begging them to stop. Blame and accusations.
You don’t think “griefers” would exploit that?
Well, to be honest you are behaving like an asshole and have for over a year. And that is why there is no chance in hell I will let you piss on the choices I make when voting or nominating.
You are a griefer yourself and you only ask these questions to find something to exploit by misunderstanding on purpose.
You can call me an asshole if you want, I don’t mind. I’d rather say that we have serious differences of opinion and I am not sympathetic to some of your stated views.
I’m talking about potential social attacks on 3SV.
3SV/3SV+1
Initially I wanted DN because it had the potential to make the ballot better any year. Then I thought 3SV+1 was a good compromise. But I’m slowly realizing that what we need asap is just to remove the bad. (I do like Hampus’ idea of wording the yes/no question positively.) Trying to reshuffle the top 15 in the quick turn-around this would need may just be a case of too little, too late. When (or sadly, if) the time comes when the longlist is overall stuff people really think is worthy, we can look at making it reshuffle the nominees (or even dropping the 2nd stage) then.
I really like the idea of seeing the top 15 before the final ballot (instead of after the award ceremony) even if they won’t be reshuffled. I also think the aspect of making the process of determining eligibility and contacting potential finalists an open group effort is a big plus too.
EPH/EPH+
I continue to believe that one of the great things about EPH is that it is actually slate-blind. It reduces the effects of organic and slate driven clumping. I want less domination of smaller groups regardless of why they’re converging on the same works.
I would like to look at this too. I think that anyone who would be neutral on EPH (and would feel comfortable missing the BM during its ratification) would feel the same about EPH+. The big change would already be happening or not. This is really just a fine-tuning. A clarification based on the results of the 2015 data testing.
And if it really cannot be amended to this year’s EPH proposal, I would like to see EPH+ proposed this year. I think it would be easier to present to an audience who has EPH fresh in their mind.
From a coder’s perspective, the change from EPH to EPH+ was trivial. Would seem the kind of minor tweaking of the numbers that could be done this year without needing to start a new proposal.
Modified the slate simulator to have a configurable number of finalists. Even with multiple slates, EPH+ is best at getting the most organic choices into the top 15.
Brian Z on May 21, 2016 at 6:52 am said:
Six to eight weeks, as I proposed it. Some people think it can be done instantaneously overnight. I disagree with this. That’s why I think we need to move the first-round membership deadline back a month and have a shorter nominating period, ending in early February.
errhead on May 21, 2016 at 7:43 am said:
I’m a computer programmer myself, and I think that you’re mistaking the complexity of the change with its scope. The rules about amending the WSFS Constitution do not say that “minor changes” can be done on the fly. They say that the ratification cannot exceed the scope of the original proposal. Even a one-word change could exceed an amendment’s scope.
Here’s what happens: In year 1, we pass a proposal that changes the Constitution from its base state to a new state X. In year 2, we can ratify anything between the base state and X, but nothing beyond X. That rule it there to protect absentees; they know that if they’re comfortable with anything between the base state and X, they can skip the meeting entirely. Anything, even a single word, that exceeds X requires re-ratification.
This is why 4/6 (four nominations per category per member; six finalist postions on the shortlist) could be amended in either of the following ways this year without requiring re-ratification:
5/6 (five nominations, six finalists)
4/5 (four nominations, five finalists)
…because both of these changes would be closer to the current state of the Constitution. The current Constitution is 5/5, so changing either of the two terms closer to 5 is a lesser change. But a change to (say) 4/7 (four nominations per voter, seven finalist positions) or (as some advocate) 5/10 would exceed the scope of the originally-passed proposal and require re-ratification. All of the changes to the 4/6 terms are “minor” in that they only change one or two numbers, but only a few of them are within the scope of the original proposal.
EPH is sufficiently complex that it seems likely that any change to it is likely to be ruled to exceed the scope of the original proposal, and therefore require re-ratification. Therefore, I conclude that trying to fiddle it this year is another case of the perfect destroying the better in the search for perfection.
OK. Don’t be surprised if some of the long list items, which may or may not be finalists, nobody knows, wind up setting people against each other, making it a long six to eight weeks on them there internets.
Creating another barrier to voting in order to accommodate a round devoted to disqualifying votes. I know you think you are in the right and all of this seems justified, but please be careful.
Because a round devoted to disqualifying votes is the minimum step needed to safeguard the process.
I think 6-8 weeks would become more toxic. 3-4 would be my preference. But it is about what is possible. Still better than being toxic for four months.
Kevin Standlee on May 21, 2016 at 8:16 am said:
Ok, I hear you. I could see someone who was ify on EPH (but was resigned to letting others decide on it) might see EPH+ as a step too far.
What do you think about it being proposed as a new amendment? If EPH is ratified, won’t people be ready to get EPH+ in the pipeline? It is a refinement recommended by the study conducted as a result of passing EPH last year. Wouldn’t this year be a good time to do it with EPH (and the report) fresh in their minds?
I gave some thought to how the slate organizers might sabotage the vote for the longlist, assuming we used either EPH or EPH+ to choose the list. My conclusion is that that’s not very easy for them to do because (this time) EPH saves the day.
Assume a list of 15 and 300 slate nominators. The slate organizers create their own list of 15 and split it up, so each nominator gets 5 to vote on. Right off the bat this increases the work for the organizers by quite a bit, but that’s not the best part. EPH almost guarantees from 5 to 10 organic nominees.
With EPH, each slate nominee gets 100 votes and 20 points to start with. Under EPH+, it’s 100 votes and just 11 points. In every category, only a few things will have more points at the start.
The EPH winnowing starts removing things from the bottom of the list, and this goes for a while before any slate nominees get touched. At that point, most of the organic items above the slate bloc will have lower numbers of votes but higher point scores.
Now the items in the bloc begin to chew each other up. Survivors get 25 points under EPH (14 under EPH+) and presumably move above at least a few organic results, but a good 50% of the bloc evaporates before there’s another slate vs. organic matchup.
Suppose that only 5 organic results managed to get above the bloc before this. In that case, the winnowing will stop when there are 5 organic and 10 slate results. I don’t believe there is a single category that won’t meet this threshold, so there should always be at least 5 organic candidates in the longlist–assuming the slate organizers used a simple divide-by-three strategy.
If there are a dozen or more organic results that manage to leap over the bloc, then there will be a second round of winnowing when the new, half-sized bloc consumes itself. However, that seems fairly unlikely to do much, since it is unlikely that the slate nominees would have fewer candidates in the top 15 than they would in the top 5. (EDIT: except that they’ve divided their strength by 3, so 5 might be optimistic for them.) Conservatively, figure them getting no fewer than 5 and no more than 10. With that strategy, anyway.
EPH really comes into its glory here. Without it, I estimate that only five categories would manage 5 out of 15 organic nominees. Best Short Story and Best Fan Artist would end up with just one each.
@Kevin Standlee
Does that allow any time for members to react to the long list and sign up for the Convention? Or is eligibility to vote in the disqualification round frozen at the point the long list is announced?
What are people thinking for cutoff of eligibility for 2nd round? I was thinking end of 1st round or just before longlist announcement.
@Greg
Thanks for the analysis. That certainly sounds like good news.
@Laura
I’d like Jameson or someone else deeply steeped in the algorithm to double-check my logic. Somehow people are most prone to making mistakes when they really want to believe the result they get, and I’m no exception.
Actually, in that case, @BrianZ, can you have a look? 🙂
@Greg: I believe you’ve made some mistakes. But I think that the basic story you tell is not too far wrong.
I’m currently working on polishing up my graphs of this very issue… I’ve run into a bit of a snag and I’ll be busy today so I probably won’t have these ready before tomorrow.
I wouldn’t trust Greg’s numbers. I’ll have solid numbers tomorrow.
@Greg
Yes, that’s why I say it sounds really good, but I’m leery of getting my hopes too high. Plus, I’m rubbish at trying to figure out how things might be gamed.
@Jameson Quinn
Fair enough. I’ll be interested to hear where the mistake is. The high-order bit is how much confidence we have that at least five organic candidates can get into the long list despite the presence of a slate.
Kevin Standlee: While you and I may think this is the case, it’s impossible to know this short of each member explicitly announcing their motivations. Trying to disqualify individual voters based on a subjective opinion of the voters’ motivations eventually leads to No Vote Is Safe.
I’m certainly not proposing disqualification. I realise that no possible procedure could actually eliminate slate votes, without unfairly harming others. I am just objecting to the idea that it is a positive merit of EPH that it does not exclude slate votes. I see it rather as an unfortunate but unavoidable downside.
@Andrew M
I think I’d be inclined to say that a benefit of EPH is that it doesn’t try to identify what a slate vote is. From a machine-learning perspective, slate classification (or any sort of fraud detection) is a very hard problem to tackle with the very limited data and monstrously long turnaround times we have.
@Brian Z
They’re in charge of the Logrus Awards, and you’re in real trouble if they detect a pattern.
@Greg Hullender:
No such thing as “Logrus!”
#snootyfirstseriespurist
@greg Careful, or they’ll try to start nominating the way the Fremen walk.
Thinking of attacks on the longlist that Griefers and slaters may attempt.
1. Controlling/sweeping the longlist. Greg’s scenario above and probably too-much-like-hard work.
2. Disrupting the longlist process i.e. making it difficult and annoying to administer or to participate in. This covers the two points below as well.
3. Getting people to vote against things that are actually legit things.
4. Getting crap under the radar i.e. finding ways that people don’t vote against things that are actually crap, offensive or just silly*
*[personally I’m not averse to silly]
Isn’t Logrus something you put Taliessin through?
Taliesin’s a bard. You put him through a mandolin, of course.
Log-R-Us is obviously a sawmill.
Gah! And in the Opening Credits! Walking in lockstep!
Will R: Careful, or they’ll try to start nominating the way the Fremen walk.
Soon Lee: Gah! And in the Opening Credits! Walking in lockstep!
–And they’ll never learn.
I was thinking a bit more. As I’ve said earlier, I see only two solutions:
1) Administrators gets the power to remove slating ballots.
2) Membership as a whole gets power to remove slated works.
There is actually one argument for the first alternative. Because the longlist with votes is not revealed until after the Award ceremony, it would also mean a run up to the Hugos without discussion of toxic works.
@Rail
@Bill: Lots of works get a few organic nominations and never make the ballot. That’s what the long tail means.
Are you a mind reader who can tell us which of Wright’s nominations are organic and which are slate?
Or is this another repeat of “But you should read and consider them no matter how they got on the ballot”?
I know what long tail means — my comment had nothing to do with long tails.
If a nominating ballot includes 3 or 4 non-slate entries, and Wright, I’d assume the vote for Wright is an organic, non-slate vote. Why would a slate supporter vote mostly for non-slate works?
And even if the voter is a slate supporter, who for unfathomable reasons votes for 3 non-slate works plus Wright plus another slate work, I can’t see any way to distinguish that ballot from someone’s who voted (from a pure heart) for the same five works. I certainly wouldn’t want the latter ballot to be discounted (and I hope you wouldn’t either) so I think the former should be treated the same way.
You know, the reason we got into this situation in the first place was because of a group of people nominating in lockstep. #bringingthreadstogether
Hampus,
I’m still voting for Option 2) as the more transparent & democratic. It’s also more in keeping with the spirit of the WSFS.
(The Locus Awards that time that changed their voting system so non-subscriber votes were half value arbitrarily? I never want the WSFS to get into that situation, and the way to do that is to retain the openness & transparency. If an Admin decides to remove slating ballots, I’d want to know when the finalists are announced, not wait until after the Hugos are awarded.)
Thinking about that:
(2) puts the onus, responsibility but also trust in the hands of members
(1) puts those things in the hands of a committee/panel/jury
I think either deals with Sad Puppy style slating but then, probably EPH is enough to make that not worthwhile (i.e. it doesn’t make slates vanish but the rewards for sadpuppying are reduced to the point where they don’t bother – the No Award response last year was already a hefty disincentive).
Griefing i.e. rabidpuppying is intended to troll, upset and discombobulate voting members. It is intended to make a fun thing not fun (for the non-griefer) and cause angst and upset. (1) allows for some degree of that spread across lots of people, which makes the reward for griefing higher. (2) allows for some degree of that focused on a few people and in relative private, so the rewards for the griefer are lower.
@Bill: And what does any of this have to do with the conversation as it had evolved before you jumped in advocating for competing slates?
It looks an awful lot like you’re trying to deliberately derail the conversation here. Maybe looking for quotations to twist into proof that we are who Beale says we are?
@Camestros:
I think that once there is some way to deal with the Griefers, there will be a lot less upset among the honest membership.
Most of us have lived through years of being told that we just have to endure bullying until the bullies grow out of it. Having some way to break that pattern will help a lot.
I think (2) does that quicker whereas (1) may draw the pain out a bit longer – but I don’t know that. Depends on how motivated the griefers are and what level of upset is enough to be worth it for them versus the cost of organizing and participating. (2) is obviously something many will regard as a change in the character of the awards.
@Camestros:
While I think the opposite: knowing that I personally can do something about it will be a whole lot more satisfying than waiting for my surrogates to handle it for me.
It would feel a lot like being physically capable of ejecting a misbehaving party guest myself.
@Bill
That’s a very reasonable conclusion, but we still don’t have any automated way to determine what is or is not a slate work. Obviously if there were a committee making the rejection decisions it would be very easy for it to just find every ballot that nominated “Rape Room”, “Space Raptor”, and Vox Day and simply discard the entire ballot. I don’t think that’s in the cards, though.
@Camestros Felapton
Have you got 1 and 2 backwards? I think giving power to admins would arguably work faster whereas having the fans do it drags things out, but giving that power to a committee would change the fan-driven character of the awards. Having the fans do it isn’t much different from the No Award power they’ve already got.
Yes and I lost track of which was which – I hope that inspires confidence 🙂