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Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes
An anonymous reader writes: You may remember way back in April there was a bit of a kerfuffle over the nominees for the Hugo Awards being "too conservative" based on a voting campaign organized by a group of science fiction fans who wanted to promote hard science fiction over more recent nominees. This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award. The question was left: would the final voters of the Hugo awards accept these nominees, or just take their ball home and refuse to give out anyway awards at all? The votes are in and we know the answer now: they'd rather just not give out any awards. (Wired has a slightly different slant on the process as well as the outcome of this year's awards.)
It's like Slashdot doesn't even try any more.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The headline there is stupid. The result IS the fan's votes. In six categories "No Award" won the vote.
This sums it up pretty well: http://io9.com/how-the-hugo-aw...
"This actually sounds like a compelling argument at first â" but the saboteurs themselves have already disproved it. Their own success shows that their conspiracy theory is absolutely false. If there had been a left-wing conspiracy to stuff the ballot, it would have largely counteracted the efforts of Beale and his friends. The Beale strategem only succeeds if all the other nominations are scattered and disorganized. And that kind of disorganization is exactly what we saw in most nominations. It appears that everybody except Bealeâ(TM)s crew simply nominated whatever stories they happened to enjoy in 2014. Had there been a secret left-wing bloc nominating its own stories in lockstep, then Bealeâ(TM)s strategy would have failed."
This is the most ignorant story summary I can ever remember reading on Slashdot.
I don't believe that it is worth engaging with it, but readers should understand that there has always been a "No award" option. Furthermore, anyone can join up and vote in the Hugos. There is no "cabal" of "SJWs" who are taking over anything. Anybody can sign up to vote in the Hugos. If the majority voted "No award" in some categories, that reflects a democratic view of those people who bothered to register to vote.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I have to wonder why Slashdot ran that submission from an anonymous coward (sorry, reader). The Wired article Timothy mentioned in passing looks like it has a stronger grasp on reality but that submission is what people will actually read. Do we need to start moderating the editors or as the GG/Puppies contingent gotten so strong here that it's a lost cause?
Re. the "popular books should always win" concept, I think Martin said it best:
“The reward for popularity is popularity! It’s truckloads of money! Do you need the trophy, too?”
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
> This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award.
Umm, according the blithest troll behind the group that's exactly what it is:
"For his part, Beale—who runs his own small publishing company, Castalia House, which got five of its writers and editors (including Beale himself) on this year’s Hugo ballot—has been outspoken about his goals. “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.” Some nerds just want to watch the world burn."
[..]
“I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” he said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’”
-- source: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
They are the typical scummy trolls, just like any other juvenile middle school troll. It's rather sad to see *adults* behaving that fashion. WTF is wrong with some people, really. And that's who you have writing your summary, great job there Slashdot. Breitbart, *really*?! Pretty low.
Okay, some basic factual errors. First off, the Hugos are a fan award, not a writer award - that's the Nebulas. They're both important, they aren't the same.
Second, the people who refused to grant awards were *the very people who paid $40 [or much more if they attended] to vote*. This wasn't some arbitrary decision, or a decision by some committee, there has always been an option of voting that it was better to not award an award in that category than to award it to the option on the ballot because they were so universally sub-par. This wasn't done by some committee, this was the voice of the voters.
Seriously - the summary was godawful and misleading, but the information is widely available.
Please explain how a fallacy could be true.
It's literally defined as being a false belief or a failure in reasoning.
It's the "fallacy fallacy."
If you conclude that because a line of reasoning contains a fallacy, the statement reasoned about is false, you just fell into the fallacy fallacy..
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
People paid 40 dollars a pop to vote for no award, I think that not giving an award is the right thing to do in that case.
Nope. This was a free vote of everyone who wanted to register to vote. You don't have to go to WorldCon to vote. Anybody who wants to register gets a vote. So there is no question of "SJWs" getting butthurt. There were a series of votes on the various works that were nominated. In the categories where serious nominations were made, Hugos were awarded. In the categories that only had non-serious nominations, no awards were made. If the puppies had wanted to win the votes, they should have recruited more people to vote for their nominations. They didn't (or couldn't), so their nominations did not win.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Yeah, the headline is false- in fact, it is backwards.
The fans voted for no award.
No award wasn't instead of the fans' votes: it was the fans' vote.
(not in all categories, though.)
-- this is an artifact of the fact that it only takes a plurality to get on the ballot, but it takes a majority to win (with single transferable vote). So a small groups can get works on the ballot, if the rest of the nominators are split, but if the majority doesn't like those works, a small group can't make those works win.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
GamerGate has nothing to do with this, apart for the same ideologues pushing their wacky postmodern agenda, If you think this is just some right wing push back, your so off it's a joke. I have voted liberal all my life, I am bisexual and I am sick of people using my sexuality as shield for their shitty behaviour. After SPJ airplay your hate mob narrative is nothing but ideological bias, keep drinking that Kool aid.
Science fiction authors always had political differences, which fans were in many cases aware of. In the days of the Big Three, we had, let's see...a New Deal Democrat, a military/libertarian Republican, a gay Eurosocialist. The worlds they built reflected their sociopolitical values, and guess what - nobody worried about it! It just caused them to offer different styles of future, which fans debated as alternative scenarios, which is the whole idea. The field as a whole had no net political coloration.
What Beale and his minions (there might be henchmen in next year's budget, but they'll never be able to afford cronies) are mainly concerned about seems to be identity politics, especially when combined with the current softening of the science being presented in an effort to broaden readership. I think they have a point on the retreat from science into what Beale calls "angsty fantasy," but do fans really care deeply about the gender ratios in their stories? Beale is attacking from a fundie Christian perspective that has zero following in the genre.
If SF needs a political mission, I would like to see it address a real present danger, which is the general culture's mounting disrespect for science itself. Tis showed up first as a generalized fear of every application of science, but it has mushroomed into deep-seated evil like this:
http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015...
If these people gain political traction, everything we value here is in deep trouble. If the genre wants to charge into a political battle, this is the one it needs to join.
But if you compare the results of this year's vote, to votes of previous years, you can easily see that this year is the only year where there was an organized attempt to get certain people elected. Categories that they did not care about were ignored, there was no disagreement at all among the conspirators, while their was no unified pattern of votes in previous years. In previous years there was real competition - rather than an agreement for all of one category of voters to focus on a single, predetermined winner.
So the analysis of their attempt to game the system proves that they were in fact WRONG, and previous awards were fair voting, rather than a conspiracy as they paranoidly claimed.
But it's not entirely fair to blame the conspirators. They simply abused a system that was not designed to handle intentional abuse.
Frankly, the main problem is that people simply don't care enough about the Hugo's to cheat - until now. So now we have to upgrade the voting system to account for a-holes trying to game the system.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The Sad Puppies won. Yes, they didn't win a single award -- in fact, some really good works lost to No Award, seemingly just to spite them.
But that was the point.
Their stated goal was to prove that there was a group of people out there voting for political reasons and fixing the Hugos. To fight this, they did the unforgivable sin of nominating some good works (such as one of the Dresden Files novels) for a Hugo.
The CHORF / SJWs fell for it en mass, just as George R R Martin begged them not to (archive version) back in April. They proved the Sad Puppies point -- that the Hugos are fixed by a group of gatekeepers.
The Hugos have been fixed for years, to the point that Steven King outright refused to participate due to how bad it became. The CHORFs proved the Sad Puppies' point more than anything else could. The Hugos have been forever tarnished by this -- not by the Sad Puppies voting in the "wrong way" for the "wrong type of fans", but by the CHORFs decreeing that you have to have the right politics, the right thoughts, the right opinions, to be a "real fan" or a "real hugo winner."
Yes, the Slashdot readership will greatly miss the five posts you have made over the last four years.
You should probably read the Wired reporting on the story rather than perpetuating ignorance. They interviewed Annie Bellet. She was not pressured by anyone. She personally rejected Sad Puppies' using her as a politically pawn. She personally thinks their approach is antithetical to inherent inclusiveness of nerd culture. But yeah, keep regurgitating the WML-fabricated narrative. I'm sure it goes over well on blogs like Breitbart.
Okay, but I think you're missing the component here that espousing that point of view fails to account for: that diversity for its own sake is not necessarily beneficial.
Not that I agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies here, or that I have any problem with what you're saying on the surface, but that's the problem with ideology. There's been a lot of "taking a good idea to absurd levels" going on in geek arenas, and that's where the charges of "racism" and "misogyny" come from.
Minorities and women are sure welcome, but ideologues from the outside marched in and started telling everyone on the outside that they don't seem to be welcome enough, by some vague standard of "enough" that can't be satisfied because there are no existing qualifications to satisfy it. So, of course the media jumped on a juicy story that can get people worked up.
What, really, does "diverse enough" mean, that make fields like science fiction really guilty of not being diverse enough by some standards, and where such guilt is quantified by things other than stereotypes and strawmen?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I don't think you get what I'm saying - it's a lot easier to rig a small vote than a large one, purely because you don't need to get as many people on board. Look here's a noted and very vocal SJW Charles Stross crowing about the "victory", although himself and Scalzi fail to realise they're just making the point for the Sad Puppies. When he speaks of "fans" here he's talking about his own clique who did exactly as instructed, as demonstrated above.
The no awards didn't receive a majority, but rather a narrow plurality.
So if you're going to complain about slanted news it behooves you not to engage in the practice.
Nope.
In every single one of the categories in which NO AWARD won, it won on the first ballot with a majority.
The closest was in editor, long form, where the results were:
No Award 2496
Toni Weisskopf 1216
Sheila Gilbert 754
Anne Sowards 217
Vox Day 166
Jim Minz 58
Total votes 4907
But 50.9% is a majority. (The other categories were not nearly as close.)
I'm rather sorry for Toni, who I rather like, and who might well have won in the absence of the puppy-only ballot. If she had won, I would have said "well deserved."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics."
"Puppies supporters say that slew of "eno award" wins this year can at least partially be attributed to the fact that SJW votes were concentrated on that choice, while Puppies votes were distributed between as many as four deserving authors.
First, all of the "no award" wins won by a majority on the first ballot. Even if all of the puppy voters had agreed on a single candidate-- they still wouldn't comprise a majority. That argument is false.
Second, that argument is by somebody who doesn't understand how the ballot functions. It works for the nominations, but not for the actual votes, which use a "single transferable ballot" (aka, "australian ballot"). When your first choice is eliminated, your vote goes to your second choice. So, if the puppy vote was distributed between four authors-- so what? As each candidate is eliminated, that vote doesn't go away.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com