My birthday was this week, so as my gift to you, here's a song about a bucket of beans.
Poorly Organized Thoughts on: The Hugo Awards I almost wrote about this in last week's newsletter, but I held off because the situation was still developing and I hoped there would be a resolution soon. That does not appear to be the case. As I was writing about how the Emmys are silly because of their categorization shenanigans, at roughly the same time the 2023 Hugo Award voting results were released.
But first, context! The Hugos are an award for science fiction anf fantasy media given out annually at the World Science Fiction Convention, AKA WorldCon. But WorldCon isn't a singular event, instead different, smaller conventions bid to be the worldcon in a given year. Usually the locations are selected a few years in advance through a process that is complicated and not super important to what is going on right now. Except in that the Worldcon for 2023 was in Chengdu, China. Some people weren't happy about this choice, but I was mostly fine with it. I think a worldcon should actually happen in different places across the world and China seemed like a fine place for one year's convention.
Because each worldcon is technically a whole new event, run by new people, there is also a set of rules governing how the Hugo Award process is handled. For this story you need to know 3 things.
1. Any member of the worldcon (even non-attending members) can nominate works for the award and vote for the winner. 2. The nomination and final voting process is designed to be easy for people to vote & nominate, but there's some semi complex math that happens in the back end to determine the winner. 3. Because of item 2, there is a requirement for the Hugo administrators to share the results of the semi-complicated math process to the public.
Item 1 was taken advantage of for a few years by a small people coordinating their votes to overwhelm the previous calculation system in order to push certain ideological nominees to the final ballot. This was distasteful to some, but within the rules. It did lead to further refining the math in item 2 so that it would take a much larger act of coordination to force an entire slate of nominees to the final ballot. There were lots of arguments about this, but they're not too important right now. The final version of the math made it so that a small group of people coordinating could maybe get one or two items to the final ballot, but it would take a much larger coordination to take it over completely. This was considered a fair balance, because if a large enough group wanted to nominate all the same works then why shouldn't that be allowed? If the majority nominates something it should probably be a finalist. The rules were tweaked to avoid minority rule.
I've never attended a worldcon, but for the past 10 or so years I've bought a non-attending membership so I could nominate and vote. I say that to make it clear I've been doing this for a while. I don't always like who wins, because that's how awards work, but I do generally trust the system, and how it works, to pick a winner that most of the voting populace will be happy with. And that's the point of voting after all, isn't it?
So the 2023 worldcon took place in Chengdu China, and the Chengdu Hugo administration team was a combination of english speaking and Chinese speaking individuals. And it would be generous of me to say they were unprepared for the task. This is particularly surprising since the chair of the admin team has actually done the job multiple times in the past at other worldcons. But for Chengdu, things were messy. The mistakes started fairly early, with unclear nomination timelines, processes that were confusing and even the initial ballot of finalists having a mistake on it. Most of these were either corrected once they were pointed out, or chalked up (by me) as weirdness due to needing to make the whole process bilingual slowing things down overall. But I still was able to nominate, and vote on the final awards. The actual worldcon came and went and the hugo awards were given out. It was a messy process, but a successful one overall.
Except. Traditionally the hugo stats are released soon after the awards are given out, so people can see how the winners were determined, who was on the long list of nominees, and because (surprise surprise) there are a lot of stats nerds in this particular fandom community. But the hugo admin team announced that the final stats wouldn't be available immediately. In fact they wouldn't be ready for a while. A while turned out to be three months later. The actual numbers came out a week or so ago (at the time of writing) and they looked weird. Weird is the best way I can describe them. There are people out there doing actual statistical analysis on the numbers and process, and I'll link to some of those at the end, but the best way I can describe it is that it looked weird. According to the documents, there were more votes counted than submitted, the vote spread doesn't align with historical voting patterns, and possibly most important, there were straight up errors and omissions. One nominee was listed twice in the rolls, and other nominees were deemed "not eligible" with either no reason or contradictory reasons given.
What makes the whole thing look the weirdest to me is that it doesn't look like a conspiracy, or someone putting their thumbs on the scale. It's not organized enough for that. There are errors that seem to be at cross purposes with each other, where if one was to say "Ah, the shadowy figures are trying to make a certain result happen" I could point to a different error that shows an entirely different and opposite goal. I'm being intentionally a little vague here, because I don't want to mis-repeat someone else's opinion and also because I see a lot of anti-China sentiment being thrown around in the comments, which I do not wish to replicate. (I'm not trying to defend the Chinese government either, *cough*Uyghurs*cough* I just don't like how quickly people jump to what feels like rather sinophobic explanations)
The one Hugo Administrator who has publicly commented on this situation has stridently and repeatedly refused to give any answers and has done so in a way that makes him look like a huge asshole. The explanation I've seen that resounds the most with me, is that this is actually not a conspiracy where someone is pulling strings to achieve some master outcome, but rather a farcical series of mistakes that keep compounding as each fudging "correction" to hide one mistake actually introduces three more. A quote from one of my favorite movies comes to mind: "There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It, it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan." A real conspiracy could have done a much better job of doctoring the statistics so that nobody would have noticed.
What I know is this: The 2023 awards are over, and I don't see any way to fix them. I have lost a lot of trust in this system however, and I don't know what that means for my participation unless they make some significant changes. As everyone's favorite TV parents say, I'm nos so much mad as I am disappointed.
Stuff I'm Reading Usually when I talk about stuff I'm reading, it's books, but here's some online stuff I've read recently. Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco - I mostly read this while looking for a source about how the enemies of fascism have to be depicted as simultaneously incredibly strong and pathetically weak. This is where the original thought comes from The Crab Bucket Fallacy - This is a very long (174 pages!) forum thread that I gdid not read in it's entirety. I was looking for general advice for running skill challenges (or something equivalent) in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, but I got sucked into this thread for longer than I should have. The core premise is dealing with the mathematical differences between martial and arcane classes in D&D, but of course which is something I really don't care about but a certain category of D&D players really do. It was a good reminder for why I don't read Character Optimization forums any more. Debunking AGI inevitability claims - This is a blog post by the authors of a preprint paper (linked in the post) looking at the mathematics behind proposed artificial general intelligence (the "human-like/level" AI you might have heard people worrying about.) The paper presents an ideal version of a computer that mat the criteria and then explains why mathematically it's computationally intractable. What this basically means is that an AGI computer would take more resources and time than the likely heat death of the universe.
This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Ping Pong Girl
