2015 Hugo Stats: Initial Analysis
Some preliminary numbers from the stats:
There were 5,950 total voters.
Rabid Puppies looks to be a little less than 10% of that. Comparing Vox’s recommendations in swept categories to the first round results (i.e. those who probably followed the suggestions):
Best Novella (Wright, “One Bright Star”): 556 (took fourth with 1050 eventual votes)
Best Short Story (Rzasa, “Turncoat”): 525 (took fourth with 1064 eventual votes)
Best Related Work (“The Hot Equations”): 595 (took second with 973 votes)
Best Editor, Short Form (Vox Day): 586 votes (took fifth with 900 votes)
Best Editor, Long Form (Toni Weiskopf): 1216 (obviously more people voted for her)
For reference:
Campbell (Eric Raymond): 489 votes (eventually took 4 with 748 votes)
I think those numbers are pretty clear: 556, 526, 595, 586. That’s the Rabid Puppy range, or at least those who closely followed VD’s suggestions. Should we call it 550-525? (Raymond was close to that range, but fewer people make it to the bottom of the ballot to vote the Campbell). I think the number who voted VD for Best Editor is probably closest to the actual number.
Initial Rabid Puppy Estimate: 550-525
That makes around 10% of the total vote, which is in line with what I expected.
I think we can use these same numbers to grab a “Sad Puppy” initial estimate, or at least the most hardcore Sad Puppy supporters (who voted all the Rabid/Sad Puppy picks above No Award). If look at the second set of numbers I gave, that’s 1050, 1064, 973, 900. Even Vox Day picked up 320 more voters from No Award. Is it fair to say those are the Sad Puppies? We’d get 1064-900 for the total Puppy vote. It looks to me like 500-400 Sad Puppies. I want to be looser here, because maybe some Rabid Puppies didn’t follow the VD suggestions, and maybe some other voters drifted in and voted for these texts.
Initial Sad Puppy Estimate: 500-400
We’ll have to refine that number over the next few days.
We can use the same swept categories to estimate the “No Awarders”: the people who voted for No Award over every Puppy pick. Here’s those numbers:
Best Novella: 3459 No Awarders
Best Short Story: 3053 No Awarders
Best Related Work: 3259 No Awarders
Best Editor, Short Form: 2672 No Awarders
Best Editor, Long Form: 2496 No Awarders
One more interesting number:
Best Novelette: 1732 No Awarders (remember, Heuvelt was a non-Puppy pick! In the final pass, he beat No Award 2618 to 2078).
That 3459, 3053, and 3259 number are pretty close. That seems the max No Award number: people who couldn’t stand any Puppy Pick. When there were more valid choices, such as in the Editor awards, No Award was still picking up 2600-2500 votes. In a case where a category was almost swept, the number was close to 2000. So I’m calling the No Awarders at 3450-2500. That’s a huge number, over 50% of the total pool.
I’m stunned at the 2500 No Awarders in the Editor categories; there were some mainstream, decent editors on that list. If 2500 people were voting No Award on that, that’s out of principle. So here’s how I’m estimating:
Initial Estimate of No Awarders Who Voted No Award out of Principle: 2500.
Initial Estimate of No Awarders Who At Least Considered Voting for a Puppy Pick But Eventually Didn’t: 1000.
Those numbers will clearly need some work. So that leaves us:
Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525
Core Sad Puppies: 500-400
Absolute No Awarders: 2500
Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick: 1000
That sums up to 4600 voters. We had 5950, so I think the remaining 1400 or so were the true “Neutrals” or the “voted some Puppies but not all.”
UPDATE, 8/25/15: By looking closely at the Best Novel category, I’ve updated my estimate, breaking the Neutrals into two categories:
Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525
Core Sad Puppies: 500-400
Sad Puppy leaning Neutrals: 800-400 (capable of voting a Puppy pick #1)
True Neutrals: 1000-600 (may have voted one or two Puppies; didn’t vote in all categories; No Awarded all picks, Puppy and Non-Alike)
Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick above No Award: 1000
Absolute No Awarders: 2500
END UPDATE, 8/25/15
Some percentages (estimates, not precise):
No Awarders: 3500 / 5950 = 59%
Neutrals: 1400 / 5950 = 22%
Rabid Puppies = 10%
Sad Puppies = 9%
What the Best Novel category would have looked like with No Puppy votes:
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
Lock In, John Scalzi
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett
Other initial Best Novel analysis: Goblin Emperor lost the Best Novel to Three-Body Problem by 200 votes. Since there seem to have been at least 500 Rabid Puppy voters who followed VD’s suggestion to vote Liu first, this means Liu won because of the Rabid Puppies. Take that as you will.
I’m going to get some sleep. I’m tired, so I’m sure I slipped at least once on one of these numbers. Too much data! Happy analyzing!
92 responses to “2015 Hugo Stats: Initial Analysis”
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Chaos Horizon 
586 votes for a guy who wants to repeal women’s right to vote. The 19th Amendment must be trembling!
Thanks. This is more detailed — and more optimistic than my analysis, which showed more puppies. I figure anybody who would vote for Vox Day at all (aside from the 28 who ranked him under No Award) was likely a Rabid Puppy. This suggests 600 to 700 rabids. There were 1800 fans who gave first place votes in Novella to puppy candidates, suggesting this is the total number of puppies. After all this publicity, I don’t see any anti-puppies ranking any of these works first.
This gives a much scarier number that the puppies could be 30% of all voting members, and thus nominators in 2016, which would fully dominate nominations.
I think you’re leaving out the neutrals. The internet is a big place, and a story like “Flow” from Analog is still mainstream enough to pick up some neutral votes. Believe it or not, but not everyone is on the internet, even Hugo voters. I also think some Sad Puppies would vote for Vox, if for nothing more than to register a protest vote.
That’s fairly disturbing.
All the short fiction categories, and the Related Work, range around the 1000-1200 nominations in total. Editing categories are smaller yet.
Anybody voting for the Hugos this year is very likely to be able to nominated next year.
If the active Rabid Puppies alone are 500+, we could be looking at 30% or more nominating ballots being from the Rabid Puppies. I haven’t followed your Sad Puppy initial estimate, but if that’s really another 400-500, then that’s 900-1000 voters who are registered and mobilized to nominate next year.
If they vote by slate, that’s very likely to be overwhelming. Nominations are the chokepoint; not the voting.
I mean, I’m just tossing out numbers here, but:
Let’s round Best Novelette down to 1000 nominating ballots. There you estimated 150-360 as the size of the Puppies block (and that jives with the nomination numbers we’re seeing for various Puppy works).
If Puppies have gone from 350 to 1000, and WorldCon nominations quadruple next year for every category (giving us 4000 nominations for Best Novelette), the the Puppies are still going to be 25% of the nominating ballots. That’s… not good. It’s not good at all.
Does EPH handle this? My gut tells me Puppies would get at least two nomination slots per category, and maybe more – maybe much more. I might be exaggerating here, because EPH was proposed with similar nomination ratios, so I assume these ratios are taken into account. But it really comes down to how diffuse the non-Puppy nominations are – and that 25% number is if nomination ballots quadruple. I can’t pretend to predict what the new nominations would look like, but with a surge like that, I think more that more diffuse nominations is a pretty safe bet.
So. I’m glad the results show how united WorldCon and SF fandom is against Puppies trying to crash the gates. But I’m worried that an award based on public, highly-diffuse voting just isn’t going to be resilient against this kind of concentrated campaign.
I expect nomination totals to double or triple for next year—but a block of 525 will be very competitive (and still able to sweep) in most down-ballot categories (i.e. everything but Best Novel).
My estimate for the number of Rabid Puppies voting is quite similar to yours, on average, 565. The Sad Puppies are a little tougher to estimate, but I came up with about 450, for a total of 1015 Puppies. This makes sense, given that we picked up some non-Puppy votes in categories like Long Form Editor, where the non-No Award vote was 2,178 versus 1,842 in Novella and 1,642 in Best Related Work.
However, you should take into account that the antics of the SJWs this year have converted about half the Sad Puppies into Rabids, and inspired many hitherto non-involved people to get involved with Rabid Puppies next year. Our discipline will be considerably tighter, with regards to both strategy and tactics.
I expect many of those who have been posturing about the evil of slates this year to form them next year in preparation for EPH and 4/6; both of which require slates for effective results. We have already seen the rules changes we anticipated, and now it is only a matter of time before we see the establishment of rival factions centered around publishing houses as well.
The fact that nominally anti-slate voters voted for Guardians of the Galaxy proves that they are not anti-slate in principle, they are merely anti-wrongslate. There is no need to debate this, you’ll see their thinking evolve as soon as they work through the practical implications of the rules changes.
And I note, with some amusement, that Toni Weisskopf received nearly 10x more votes in not winning the Best Tor Editor award than Patrick Nielsen Hayden did when he first won the award created by and for him.
Those are basically identical with mine, but I went for more of a range than a single number. I didn’t give the Rabid Puppies the 40 vote difference between the Novella category (Wright in first place with 1065) and the Editor Category (VD with 1025). Those 40 votes could have been Sad Puppies voting for Wright, Rabid Puppies who didn’t vote in the Editor category, or Neutrals who liked Wright. Thus the range. If I add the range to the Rabid Puppies, I have to add a range to SP.
Don’t read SF/Fantasy but the three body problem sounded fascinating while its competitors sounded horrible, meaning the puppies pushed the clearly best work into the win column. How is this a bad thing?
@Asher
if the 3BP is so clearly the best work, if Vox had read it before he posted his slate and included it on his slate, do you think it would have still won? or do you think it would have been a casualty of the no-award slate?
That’s going to be the million dollar question for 2016. What happens if the SP or RP choose a work like Seveneves in 2016, something that was likely to be nominated anyways? We just missed this happening in 2015 with The Martian, which would have been a SP pick if it was eligible, and would have also been very competitive. How far would people have voted against it simply because it was a slate work?
@chaoshorizon (nesting limits in case this gets posted the wrong place)
I think what happened this year in Best Editor where people say that Toni Weisskopf would have been a short-list candidate, if only she hadn’t been nominated by the puppy slates. She got a lot of votes, but the no-award slate swept that category (and as I understand it, with similar numbers to the other categories.
Anyone claiming Toni Weisskopf could have had a chance “if it weren’t for those dastardly puppies” is ignoring the fact that she’d never been nominated before Sad Puppies. (Nor had Jim Baen while he was alive.)
That’s not a question. It would have been no-awarded like everything else. Because VOX DAY!!!!!!11!!!
I think the point is starting to get across, David.
I’m inclined to suggest that Toni Weisskopf and Butcher’s Skin Game had that happen to them this year. The fact that both lost out to No Award suggests to me that there are about 2-2.5k voters who hate the Puppies more than they like good SF. Or alternatively, care more about assuring that the awarded works are Politically Correct than about assuring that the awarded works are good quality SF.
Jim Baen was nominated every year from 76 to 81, and in 2007.
I think Toni Weisskopf will be an interesting point in the statistics to delve into, one of the best points to try to tease the “votes on merit” from the “No Award to anything Puppy.”
This is just my general sense and intuition, but, IMHO:
* The Editors categories usually get a lot less attention, mostly because many readers aren’t familiar with the editors or don’t feel they have much to say about “who did the best editing work.”
* Clearly this year we have an abnormal pattern, with a far larger percentage of voters voting in all categories. So voters who wouldn’t venture an opinion in other years, did this year.
* My sense from the general community gestalt is that Weisskopf is a worthy Hugo nominee, making her one of the few Puppy picks that *isn’t* widely regarded as not being Hugo quality regardless of how she got on the ballot. Of course, individual voters may differ on that opinion.
So Weisskopf may be the closest we have to somebody that large swaths of the voting body may have pegged as “Puppy pick, but Hugo quality,” which is the only place we’d expect to be able to distinguish the “No Award everything Puppy” group from the “Judge Puppy nominees by their merits” group.
(“Totalled” in Best Short Story is the other one I think garnered some widespread appreciation, though fairly mixed as far as I saw.)
Your sizing up of the RP block looks good, and the puppy-kickers’ block is clear, but I think that there is far less of a line between the SP voters and the neutrals than you think. I expect that most SP voters votes fro some, but not all categories.
I know that my vote would have looked ‘neutral’ according to your criteria for example
Hopefully I can begin drawing that distinction as I get more into the data. I think there’s probably two SP groups: some who voted for all the SP works above No Award, some who didn’t. In my current schemata, you’re a “puppy-leaning neutral”; I’m struggling to draw the line in any other way. In previous posts, I talked about “effective SP strength”: there may be as many as 1000 Sad Puppies each voting 50% of the slate. That looks the same as 500 SPs voting 100% of the slate.
I agree with you about the difficulty in the 1000 voting 50% vs 500 voting 100%, but I would say that you need to keep this distinctino clear in your posts.
I think we saw this when your analysis showed ~200 effective SP voters in the nominations which lead people to believe that there were a very small number of SP voters, and more dismissive of them than if they thought that there may have been twice as many, but not voting in lock-step.
From your analysis, it does look like the RP vote is pretty monolithic, but also that the SP vote is far less so. I look forward to more info on this as you dig deeper (I hope it confirms what I’m thinking, but the best way to change my mind is to provide information)
Interesting. One suggestion: look at past Hugo statistics, check how many people vote No Award, and subtract that number from your No Awarders count and add to your “neutrals”. (That’s the background noise, not the signal– how many neutral (ie., non puppy slate year) no award votes get voted.
Probably a small correction, but still
Here’s that data for 2013:
2013 Total No Award %
Novel 1649 44 2.67%
Novella 1463 36 2.46%
Novelette 1364 68 4.99%
Story 1381 102 7.39%
So we’re jumping from something in the range of 36-102 to 2500.
I would suggest that some of those would be the sort of people who have the same interests as the Puppies and are voting No Award because nothing they like made the lists, so those people may have converted to non-No Award votes in 2015. (I’m generally cautious about ascribing a single meaning to a specific number.)
The math above suggests puppies are about 20% of voters. I believe they are more, as many as 30%. Either way, the numbers suggest something like 30% of those who cared strongly.
Either way, that large a fraction completely controls the nominations, if it sticks together. The only way there are Hugos in 2016 is if the puppies collapse, or they are unable to recruit new puppies at the rate the anti-puppy faction recruits for its side, or if somebody does a similarly sized counter slate.
3 Body Problem only made the ballot because two puppy nominees — one of whom was a puppy organizer not wanting to look selfish — withdrew their works.
If 10-15% was enough to sweep the nominations under the existing rules, 20-30% would be far more than is needed to sweep the nominations under the 6/4 rules (either blatently by open coordinating who would vote for who, or just by listing 6 nominees and change the order they are displayed each time they’re viewed, which is a reasonable thing to do anyway if they are all equal recommendations)
I’ll bet that many voters would give EPH problems as well, unless their opponents who claim to be anti-slate organize a slate
I signed up for an associate membership after the nominations were over; an author I follow indicated that besides the opportunity to have a voice in the award, the download packet itself would be worth the money.
Following the Sad Puppy recommendations, I read the nominees and made up my own mind. Some of my voted were Puppy recommendations, others were not.
However, given the anti-Puppy slate’s success at suppressing the awards, I’ve come to understand that the SPs were right, and the self-proclaimed “true fans” are more interested in denying the award to people they disagree with than in any positive expression.
Lesson learned. Next year there’s a good chance I’ll vote lockstep with the SO recommendations, since that’s what the truefen want.
The results of the 2015 Hugo Awards don’t prove that the puppies were right. The puppies concocted a situation where no matter what happened, they could claim that they had been proved right. If Hugo voters rejected all puppy-slated selections (which they did) , that proves (according to the puppies) that their preferences are being unfairly ignored and that there really is a biased SJW clique in control of the Hugos. On the other hand, if voters consider the puppy-slated nominations and award them Hugos, that proves (according to the puppies) that their preferences are Hugo-worthy and have been unfairly ignored in the past. It also proves (according to them) that their dubious methods were a perfectly valid and, indeed, necessary way to counteract what they perceive to be a biased SJW clique that controls the Hugo Awards.
Those are the only 2 options, and neither allows for the possibilities that there might not be a clique in control of the Hugos or that the No Award vote was the only way that a diffuse group of voters could signal their disapproval towards the dubious method of ballot-stuffing.
If the puppies have a valid argument, then they shouldn’t be afraid of entering into a situation where they could either be proved right or wrong. Indeed, they should EMBRACE situations where they could be proved wrong, because if they really are right, they will have nothing to fear.
what method should the puppies have used?
If you say they should only have nominated a few works, let me point you at SP2 where that is exactly what happened and they were still attacked and vilified, with lots of people condemning Larry’s book without reading it.
I’ll also point out the accusation that the SP slate left ‘just enough room for RP to add their stuff’, never mind that 1-5 empty slots meet that criteria.
By the way, the anti-puppy tactic of buying votes for other people is a lot closer to ‘ballot stuffing’ than anything the SP did.
Just a friendly reminder: Chaos Horizon is a stats site. I’ve let people debate a little more vigorously because I know emotions are high, but I don’t want this to devolve into Puppy/anti-Puppy bickering. Keep the comments on the stats or I won’t let them continue.
fair enough. I would be interested in an update to your estimate on the nomination sizes for RP and SP now that you have more complete data to work with.
They should have had a longer list of suggested works.
Just publish all the ideas that people came up with in the comments of that one blog post, like how BASFA, NESFA, and others do.
Maybe that’s what they were doing. Gaming the system so that no matter what happens, the end result would be the same. But that doesn’t explain why so many voted “No Award” for categories that merely included recommendations from the Puppies. Say what you will about the Puppies, but how does a scorched earth tactic help at all?
I could have written everything but your last paragraph.
The lesson I’ve learned is that the Hugo Award itself is worthless, but the packet was worth my forty bucks this year, and might be worth it next year.
But screw lockstep on either side.
There’s another data point backing up the “Absolute No Awarders: 2500 / Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick: 1000” split. Look at the race for 5th place in the Best Novel category.
According to the official Hugo stats, there were 3117 ballots expressing a preference between fifth and sixth place, and 2536 which didn’t. In other words, 2500 ballots left both Skin Game and Dark Between The Stars off of the novel category (presumably voting the other three in some order plus No Award). That’s exactly the behavior we would see from voters avoiding slate works on principle; voters willing to consider them would presumably have read them and expressed a preference between the two.
Thanks! I’ll be doing the full analysis of the Best Novel category tomorrow, but that seems to back up my initial assessment.
looking through at the no-preference numbers is interesting. The categories that were clearly big media (best graphic story, best dramatic presentation) had relatively small no-preference numbers in the middle of things, climbing slightly at 5th place, which makes sense for people leaving things off their ballot.
But for the ones where no award was prominant, it looks like there were ~2500 people who did no award and nothing else on their ballot, with another few hundred who did no award with one other thing (I’m not clear if this other thing was ahead of or behind no-award)
Seems like Correia’s concerns were borne out: the mass of anti-Puppy votes were based not on merit of work or candidate, but on basis of who nominated whom.
This comment by @calbeck is such bullsh*t! The Puppies forced things on the ballot by using unprecedented tactics, and from the perspective of many, DID NOT base their selections on merit or quality of the work or candidate. And then when the larger mass of SF fandom have the opportunity to respond to that action, they rejected it entirely.
In what Universe are these (slate and anti-slate) equivalent actions? This is a completely specious argument, and it has been borne out by the vast majority of SF fans who voted on the Hugos deciding to NO AWARD all-Puppy categories or vote for the sole non-Puppy candidate in other categories.
The Puppies were wrong in using a slate to try to game the HUgos, and the vast majority of Sasquan voters acted accordingly.
Did the vote to have the anonymized nomination ballots release pass?
If it did, can we have moratorium on further claims or disclaims until we can see the ballots and look for trends and how much actual slate nominating occurred vs. people tending to vote for a little from slate A, a little from personal taste B?
I believe they did, but they haven’t said how or when they’re going to release that info. A stat dump of 6000 ballots in 15+ categories is also not going to be easy to sort through.
I don’t have the power to impose a “moratorium.” These issues are either going to be discussed openly and neutrally at Chaos Horizon, or more shakily elsewhere. At least here, we have plenty of eyes on the stats, and any mistakes/exaggerations/problems will quickly be rooted out by the wide range of anti-Puppy and Puppy voices who stop by.
Puppy slates were indeed No Awarded based on the highly dubious methods used to nominate them, not on their content or quality. The best way for the puppies to prove this is to create a slate of so-called ‘SJW’ favourites and sarcastically vote for them at the 2016 Hugo Awards. All SJW authors would be ethically obliged to withdraw their nominations, as they were only attained with illegitimate puppy support, thereby forcing all the SJW favourites off the ballot. And if Hugo voters really are against slating (regardless of which group is doing the slating) then they would also be ethnically obliged to vote No Award above any sarcastically-slated picks that didn’t decline their nominations, thereby ensuring that not a single SJW could win a 2016 Hugo Award.
On the other hand, if the nominees and voters ignored the sarcastic puppy support and proceeded as normal, they would prove themselves to be hypocrites who punish others for being on slates, but then accept slate support when it benefits them. Either way, the puppies win.
If the puppies don’t do this, but instead go on using dubious means to push their own candidates, all they continue to prove is that Hugo voters are ethically opposed to ballot-stuffing in general and want a fair vote, which is far from a flaw.
which is why I have strongly suggested that those who might be nominated for an award in future state, categorically and publicly, that they do not endorse campaigns or voting slates for the Hugos, do not want their names/works included on slates, do not authorize anyone to do so for them and will request removal from such lists if and when it becomes known to them that someone has put them on a list against their publicly stated request.
I have much respect for Bellett, Kloos, Black Gate and others who withdrew this year (whether they withdrew too late or not).
Not campaigning has been the default social setting since 1953. History of the awards demonstrates that those who have tried it previously were summarily rejected for breaking this social contract.*
It’s ok to campaign for participation in the awards and it is ironic that if the sad puppies had concentrated their efforts along those lines alone, they may very well have had a positive effect on the awards; Toni Weiskopf is the perfect example; everyone in the field knows that she has done good and hard work for years, work that is worthy of consideration for a Hugo. (Consideration – but not a guarantee of a win.) She has been on the ballot previously (2013, 2nd place: 2014, 2nd place: 2015, 2nd place), with two previous years of no puppy slates leading to the same result as this year with slates, its pretty obvious that she enjoys a fair degree of respect and support from the fans.
If Toni had disavowed her inclusion on the slate(s), it sure looks to me like she would have won. (Though I suspect that doing so would have been particularly hard for her as many authors in her stable appear to lean towards the puppy side of the argument. On the other hand, if she had taken the lead in doing so, it might have gotten at least some of the puppy organizers to think twice about what they were trying to do, or at least the methodology they chose. Which of course begs the question about Toni’s support/non-support of the puppy campaign.)
I think the numbers make it very clear that the majority reaction this year was “we do not engage in slates, bloc-voting or campaigning for the awards”.
We may have a year (or two) of continued award BS to weather before things have been resolved, but it certainly looks as if the only remaining tactic for the puppies is to screw with things as long as they are able to get away with it. Doing so will be transparent, annoying and ultimately pointless.
And I have no doubt that fandom, as a body, will respond appropriately in future, just as it did so resoundingly this year.
(*Make all the arguments you want to that “others have done it in the past”. The response will be that every single time it is even hinted that someone – anyone – is doing so, and you will find that the majority of fannish voices have spoken out against it.)
Steve: That’s not entirely true regarding Weisskopf. Correia had included her in both previous iterations of Sad Puppies. So while I do believe she has a good deal of respect, I think historically the members of Worldcon which vote on the Hugos do not read a whole lot of Baen and thus have not included Weisskopf. Her inclusion is entirely because of Correia’s advocacy. At this point more people may be saying “shit, right, Toni Weisskopf is doing an awesome job at Baen” – but she wasn’t getting nominated / recognized until Correia talked her her up and put her name out there with his own.
Your math is flawed. The maximum # of hard core Puppies, Rabid and Sad combined, was less than 500. Wisdom from My Internet was on both slates, and they only got 491 people to put it on their ballot at all. Obviously, there was a penumbra of voters that would vote for some of the Puppy nominations if they were less horrible than that. Likewise, the maximum number of people who would vote no award above *anything* on a slate is shown by the BDP (long) vote: 478 had No Award as their first, second or third choice, and some of those may have done so on the merits.
That’s an interesting observation but you’re misreading the stats. The Hugos only does five places; you’d need to do six to actually see how many people absolutely voted for “Wisdom From My Internet” above “No Award.” If you look at the data from the last pass they did, it shows this:
Letters from Gardner 1133
Wisdom from My Internet 491
Preference 1624
No Preference 3277
Total Votes 4901
An unknown number of the people who voted for “Letters from my Gardner” could also have voted for “Wisdom from my Internet.” I expect that a fair number of the 1133 did exactly that, which would put us more in line with my Puppy estimate.
I don’t think that follows. If someone is counted for Letters for 5th place, the only way they can have Wisdom still on their ballot is in 6th place. And to do that they have to have No Award on their ballot higher than either.
The stats don’t tabulate who is ranked fifth on the ballots; they show what the rankings would be like if the first, second, third, and fourth place choices were eliminated, and then the ballots recounted with only Letters from My Gardner, Wisdom from My Internet, and No Preference remaining. That’s how this slightly arcane system works. Trust me, it’s confusing. Here’s a good breakdown from Staffer’s Book Review. The important thing to keep in mind that passes are eliminating choices and redistributing votes, not looking at what place things were voted in.
@will
there are only 5 spots on the ballot, so if the person votes no-award they can only put 4 other things on the ballot
If you don’t put no-award on the ballot, you can put 5 selections.
nothing says that people who has Wisdom or Letters on the ballot voted no award anywhere on their ballot (in fact, the numbers indicate otherwise
the tabulation only shows down to 5th place, even though there are actually 6 items (including no award), whatever isn’t in one of the first 5 places is in 6th, but we don’t get to see how many votes there were for it.
In this case (since no-award won) for the 5th place contest, we had Letters with 1133 votes and Wisdom with 491
If all of the Vox day people voted exactly as he told them to, Wisdom was ranked below Letters and no-award did not appear
so it’s possible (but unlikly) that there were 1133 votes that had Letters in 4th place and Wisdom in 5th
If anything, this indicates that there were almost 500 people who voted for
Wisdom BESIDES the RP slate vote.
it’s hard to argue that you should punish blockbuster movies because the puppies liked them. What are the politics of the movies? Just about everyone has acknowledged that those movies were outside of the politics.
The ~500 you list who no awarded all the movies are probably the hard-core of the hard-core. Or people like Williamson who got so disgusted with the process that he publicly stated that he was no-awarding across the board, even on his own works.
As for Wisdom from My Internet, I think it was never a serious contender to win. It was a protest nomination to point out the hypocracy of people who would deride it for merely being quotes from the Internet, while Scalzi got nominated a couple of years ago (or did he win? I don’t remember) for a book of quotes from the Internet.
It’s equally difficult to argue that you should “punish” NYT best-selling author that the Puppies nominated, or legendary figures in the field that they did as well.
But consistency is difficult, especially when one’s aim is to punish in the first place.
Note that if you subtract the number of nominations for Skin Game (the highest puppy outside of Dramatic Presentation, Long Form) from the number of nominations for Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians still made the ballot.
It was going to win no matter what.
Also, Scalzi’s (winning) book was a collection of essays/blog posts, not “quotes”.
Michael Z. Williamson himself urged an across-the-board No Award, and voted that way himself. I suspect a good number of otherwise staunch Sad Puppies supporters didn’t vote for Wisdom from my Internetfor that reason.
Nobody has been looking much at the results in the dramatic presentation categories. In part it’s because they seemed less tainted by the Puppies than the other categories, since they were simply suggesting votes for productions that have no ties to them and probably would have been nominated anyway. And there was no big vote tallies for No Award. But it is still possible that the Puppy and anti-Puppy votes had some effect on the voting, though not on the winners.
In Long Form, three of the five finalists were on the Sad Puppies ballot. (Captain America and Edge Of Tomorrow are the two that were not.) Guardians of the Galaxy was the winner; it’s hard to imagine a universe where it would not have been a Hugo nominee. There weren’t many votes for No Award in this category, but the anti-Puppy vote may have pushed Captain America into second place and relegated Interstellar (another movie that would have been on the ballot, puppies or no) to third. The Puppy voting in the nomination process probably lifted The Lego Movie onto the ballot over something else (most likely Big Hero 6) but whatever ballot filler got that fifth slot wasn’t going to win anyway.
Over in Short Form, it’s interesting to note the inversion between the nominating and final votes. There were three US productions (Grimm, The Flash, and Game of Thrones) and two BBC (Dr Who and Orphan Black), each represented by one episode. The three US shows topped the nominations but finished behind both BBC shows in the final voting. So the questions are: did the US shows finish more strongly on the nominating ballot because of the Puppies or because of more people having seen them? Did anti-Puppy voting keep them down in the final round or did it just reflect the BBC love that the Hugo voters have had since the Dr Who reboot in 2005 (2006 vote)?
For the first time in quite a while, the Short Form ballot was not dominated by BBC productions. Until this year there had been at least two Dr Who episodes on the ballot every year since the reboot, and most years had three. (Last year also saw a nod for An Adventure in Space and Time, which was a special about Dr Who, and for an episode of Orphan Black, so the Beeb had five of the six slots on the final ballot.) This time there was only one Dr Who; perhaps there is a bit of Who fatigue after the big anniversary push in 2013 that resulted in four Who-related shows on the 2014 ballot. The eventual winner was actually sixth on the nominating ballot, but the #5 choice, an episode of Supernatural, was declared ineligible because it first aired in 2013. (The votes for that Supernatural episode may have resulted from it being on the Rabid Puppies slate; the Sad Puppies did not name it.)
There were about 170 people whose Best Novel vote consisted exclusively of No Award and no novel at all. I’m curious as to how you interpret that.
The WorldCon voters are notoriously grumpy. My stats show that, over the past 5 years, around 2% of voters “No Award” the Best Novel category every year. This year, the percent was (170 No Award/5653 Best Novel votes), or around 3%. So that’s in line with past stats. Maybe a few more people registered protest votes, but some readers just hate everything.
i think you’re seriously overestimating the size of the “Everything on a slate below No Award” vote. Guardians of the Galaxy only got 1038 No Awards, and some of the were probably background noise rather than policy.
I see an interesting pattern. For the nominations for the first four categories, the nominations that were just on one slate were fairly similar: 172 votes average for the sads and 165 for the rabids. For those endorsed by both slates, they ranged from 323 votes for the novels to 220 for the short stories, averaging about 281. This is only 83% of the same of the two when voting for different nominees, so there is some overlap in the two pools of nominators: you can’t just add them together to get total influence.
There’s also strong decay by nomination choice: they fall off quickly based on the nominee, from 100% relative strength quickly down, and that decay was quicker for Sad Puppies than Rabid Puppies. I’ll do a thorough analysis of the nominations soon. Here’s the post where I talk about that phenomenon from 2014.
The count of people that voted as VD wanted them to falls off considerable down ballot, to 450 for Jeffro Johnson.And it only provides a maximum, not a minimum. We know that 525 people put Turncoat as their first choice, but we don’t know how many were minions and how many were swing voters. This has important consequences for how badly he can game next year’s nominations.
I agree with that. Estimating slate discipline will be a key aspect in estimating next year’s results.
I replicated your analysis independently and posted it several places. I agree with your assessments.
I do have one question if you could elaborate. You stated there were some that: “No Awarded all picks, Puppy and Non-Alike”. Could you explain this? It was the only part of your assessment that I cannot follow.
The math is the math. Interpretations behind the calculations will differ. I interpret the hard 2,500 “no award” everything as a lockstep clique. You interpret this has a “vote on the principle.” By the math itself – an interpretation of the motivations of the hard core 2,500 cannot be determined. Probably there is a mix of the two motivations in the 2,5k.
BTW – I was a first time voter this year. Did not nominate anyone. I read everything and voted. I had some “no awards” but did not “no award” any entire categories. I also did not vote at all in some categories (such as fancast) because I did not care enough to inform my vote.
What I mean by “No Awarded all picks” is from something like the Best Novel category, where we had both Puppy and Non-Puppy picks available. In that case, as shown by the stats in my Best Novel analysis, 268 people voted “No Award” in the first round, i.e. putting No Award above Leckie, Liu, Addison, Butcher, and Anderson. These “No Awarders” seem different than someone voting against all the Puppy choices, and that 3% number is in line with the first-place Novel No Awarders from the past (I have 2.81% for 2014, 2.67% for 2013, etc.). This seems a different group to me: people who hated all 5 choices, people who were Brandon Sanderson fans and were outraged he didn’t make the final ballot, people who were protesting against the whole politicization of the award, people who just hate everything. Like you rightly point out, we don’t know motivation. I don’t think it’s fair to lump them in with the seeming 2500 who were deliberately voting against the Puppy slate. For a further support of that number, look at Best Dramatic–Long Form, where 285 people voted “No Award” over all 5 Puppy and non-Puppy picks. Are these “Snowpiercer” fans registering their protest? We’ll never know, but, to me at least, I’m trying to keep them as a separate group.
Chaos Horizon:
I appreciate your explanation of the 268 “no awarders.” Your interpretation and use of this category fits the data.
I’ve enjoyed reading your analysis. You have a good, practical grasp of descriptive statistics used to draw inferences and predictions of future behavior.
Again – enjoyed your work.
Thanks! Always good to get nice feedback—most people on the internet just want to yell at you!
I came up with a lower estimate for the hard anti-slate vote: http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-2015-hugos.html