Aug. 28th, 2016

kjn: (Default)
Right now I see a bit of pushback against the newly ratified E Pluribus Hugo rules (see eg Jed Hartman and Rachael Acks). In part this is because the test runs on prior Hugo nominations didn't yield as good results as some may have hoped for, another might be that many fans do not feel they can exactly understand how EPH works. FPTP may be unfair, but it's simple to understand.

At its core, E Pluribus Hugo isn't about selecting the works with the most "support". It's more about selecting the set of works that generates the most voter happiness, where happiness is defined as "getting a work onto the final ballot". I think this framing has gone missing from the discussion.

But in order to help with understanding, no, grokking how EPH works, here is my manually run example. To show how this is done, here is my (hardly random) example set of ballots, with 15 ballots, each with four nominations, and the goal is to reduce the 26 nominees to four finalists. Four of the ballots are also showing very similar taste (due to being on a slate or for some other reason).

I recommend keeping a set of the WSFS agenda from Midamericon 2 at hand, since I'm going to refer to the rules there.

Initial set of ballots )

Per the old FPTP rules for Hugo nomination, A, B, C, and J would be the nominees. Lets see what happens when we start using EPH.

Running EPH )

The final ballot from running EPH would thus be:

A, J, K, L, and M

All the nominators but poor 11 and 12 (or 13%) will have at least one of their nominated works on the ballot, and the slate (numbering 4 out of 15, or about 27%) have one work on the final ballot.

We can compare this with the FPTP system, which would have yielded the following ballot:

A, B, C, J

Here ballots 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 (40%!) would have had no impact at all on the final ballot.

Notes )

Me

kjn

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