How A Slate Distorts The Hugo Nomination Process.

[catsittingstill]

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Sad Puppies, my previous post gives a brief overview.

There are those among the Sad Puppies who will vociferously tell you that of course they read everything on the Sad Puppy 3 Slate before nominating it, and of course they also read other things, and they nominated their honest opinions and not the slate at all.

Let us suppose for a moment that this was not only true, but true for every Sad Puppy Hugo nominator. It doesn't make much difference. Why?

Because the Sad Puppy slate distorted what Sad Puppy fans read in the first place.

Let us suppose that the average Sad Puppy reads fifty books a year--not an unreasonable amount. And let us suppose that of those fifty books, ten of them were published in 2014. This actually strikes me as rather generous; I am a voracious reader and I was making a deliberate effort to read books published in 2014 because I knew going in that I intended to nominate, and I think I only managed nine.

Let us suppose the same is true of the non-Puppy Hugo voters--they also, on the average, read ten books published in 2014.

For the Sad Puppies, five of those books were on the SP3 slate, and the other five were sprinkled roughly randomly over all conservative science fiction published in 2014. If only ten works of conservative SF had been published in 2014, this would make no difference, but it was much more than that.

For the non-Puppies, all *ten* of those books are sprinkled roughly randomly over all the (let's say non-conservative, for the sake of argument) science fiction published in 2014. If only ten works of non-conservative SF had been published in 2014... yeah, we've been over that.

If we assume, for the moment, that conservative books on and off the SP slate are roughly equal in quality and that once a book is conservative, Puppy tastes are randomly distributed, 50% of the Puppy nomination "votes" go to five slate books, and the other 50% of Puppy nomination "votes" are spread over all non-slate conservative books published in 2014.

This gives slate conservative works an enormous advantage over non-slate conservative works. Each of them gets nominations equal to 10% of the total number of Puppies right off the bat, even if all the Puppies do is *read* the works in question and nominate what they honestly think is the best, without fear or favor, neither consciously and unconsciously influenced by slate approval. A non-slate book gets maybe 1% of Puppy votes under the same circumstances.

In actual point of fact, the votes will tend more to the slate than that, especially to the originators of the slate, since the Sad Puppies originally got involved because they like those authors, and give more than random weight to those authors recommendations.

In the meantime, non-Puppy fans are spreading their nominations out thinly over hundreds of works, without having a slate of five works to read that focuses a large fraction of their reading attention on a small fraction of the total SFF published in 2014. All their books get maybe 1% of non-Puppy votes.

Now in practice we have other patterns overlaid on this. Reviews and word-of-mouth buzz mean that some portion of the books we read are not randomly distributed over SFF, and relative quality means some portion of our votes are not distributed randomly over the books we have read.

But even so, it makes no difference if the Puppies are only using the slate as a reading guide; it still distorts the nomination process by changing what they read. And it also would make no difference if the Puppies put some liberal works on it for cover--it would *still* distort the nomination process. About the only way for it not to distort the nomination process would be for Sad Puppies to put only works on it that would win on their own. At which point, of course, the Sad Puppy slate would be useless, because it would make no difference.

But making difference is precisely what they want to do.

Comments

[randwolf]

This assumes, though, that people don't read more when they're given a slate and that the puppy list does not overlap the books these people would otherwise have read. That said, I have to admit that neither of these are entirely likely and the slate probably did influence voting inordinately.

I think, though, that rather than randomness, a small group is voting their party ticket in a primary. The appearance of the Williamson thing on the final ballot is a tell; if anyone was reading critically, that wouldn't be there.

[catsittingstill]

How much more do they have to read to increase the number of 2014 books read to the point where the slate makes no difference? Is it practical to read that much?

I am indeed assuming that the slate doesn't overlap what they would already have read that much. Which in the case of at least the Correia book is probably incorrect, given the way the Sad Puppies are gathered in the first place.

I have, however, ignored the results of trying to bring new people into the Hugos if they are conservative, and not if they are liberal. Some things are just rather hard to quantify.

[randwolf]

You're right; "reading more" was more a mathematical quibble than a strong objection. Maybe if you're very young you read that much; that's what I did when I was a teen with no social life. Overlap seems much more likely, though; there are not very many hard right authors.

I am not so worried by the affect on the final balloting myself. We already have plenty of conservatives in fandom and there are not that many of these people. I am worried about thuggery, however.