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Taleb corrects Pinker

He observes that Pinker has been fooled by randomness and The “Long Peace” is a Statistical Illusion:

When I finished writing The Black Swan, in 2006, I was confronted with ideas of “great moderation”, by people who did not realize that the process was getting fatter and fatter tails (from operational and financial, leverage, complexity, interdependence, etc.), meaning fewer but deeper departures from the mean. The fact that nuclear bombs explode less often that regular shells does not make them safer. Needless to say that with the arrival of the events of 2008, I did not have to explain myself too much. Nevertheless people in economics are still using the methods that led to the “great moderation” narrative, and Bernanke, the protagonist of the theory, had his mandate renewed.

Now to my horror I saw an identical theory of great moderation produced by Steven Pinker with the same naive statistically derived discussions (>700 pages of them!).

  1. I agree that diabetes is a bigger risk than murder –we are victims of sensationalism. But our suckerdom for overblown narratives of violence does not imply that the risks of large scale violent shocks have declined. (The same as in economics, people’s mapping of risks are out of sync and they underestimate large deviations). We are just bad at evaluating risks. 
  2. Pinker conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with simple weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear weapons). The two have markedly distinct statistical properties. Yet he uses statistics of one to make inferences about the other. And the book does not realize the core difference between scalable/nonscalable (although he tried to define powerlaws). He claims that crime has dropped, which does not mean anything concerning casualties from violent conflict.
  3. Another way to see the conflation, Pinker works with a times series process without dealing with the notion of temporal homogeneity. Ancestral man had no nuclear weapons, so it is downright foolish to assume the statistics of conflicts in the 14th century can apply to the 21st. A mean person with a stick is categorically different from a mean person with a nuclear weapon, so the emphasis should be on the weapon and not exclusively on the psychological makup of the person.
  4. The statistical discussions are disturbingly amateurish, which would not be a problem except that the point of his book is statistical. Pinker misdefines fat tails by talking about probability not contribution of rare events to the higher moments; he somehow himself accepts powerlaws, with low exponents, but he does not connect the dots that, if true, statistics can allow no claim about the mean of the process. Further, he assumes that data reveals its properties without inferential errors. He talks about the process switching from 80/20 to 80/02, when the first has a tail exponent of 1.16, and the other 1.06, meaning they are statistically indistinguishable. (Errors in computation of tail exponents are at least .6, so this discussion is noise, and as shown in [1], [2], it is lower than 1. (It is an error to talk 80/20 and derive the statistics of cumulative contributions from samples rather than fit exponents; an 80/20 style statement is interpolative from the existing sample, hence biased to clip the tail, while exponents extrapolate.)
  5. He completely misses the survivorship biases (which I called the Casanova effect) that make an observation by an observer whose survival depends on the observation invalid probabilistically, or to the least, biased favorably. Had a nuclear event taken place Signor Pinker would not have been able to write the book.
  6. He calls John Gray’s critique “anecdotal”, yet it is more powerful statistically (argument of via negativa) than his >700 pages of pseudostats.
  7. Psychologically, he complains about the lurid leading people to make inferences about the state of the system, yet he uses lurid arguments to make his point.
  8. You can look at the data he presents and actually see a rise in war effects, comparing pre-1914 to post 1914.
  9. Recursing a Bit (Point added Nov 8): Had a book proclaiming The Long Peace been published in 1913-1934 it would carry similar arguments to those in Pinker’s book.

Taleb is using a different means to reach much the same conclusions I have. Again. Pinker is essentially applying the same “This Time It’s Different” argument to violence that the mainstream economists applied to the dot com bubble, the housing boom, and the post-2008 “recovery”.

Simplistic thinkers inevitably think in linear terms. They assume tomorrow will be like today because today was pretty much like yesterday. Both those who know history and those who understand probability understand that at some point in time, this will no longer be the case.

History is rife with long periods of peace and tranquility. Those are quite often the sections missing from the history books, because there was nothing much that was noteworthy to record. But human nature being what it is, sooner or later events always becoming more exciting, which usually means more bloody.

It’s not hard to understand why there are fewer wars these days. Nuclear weapons have put an end to the post-French Revolutionary progress towards Ludendorffian total war. But that doesn’t mean they will never be used or that Man will not find other means to fight cataclysmic wars. It’s rather remarkable that anyone would make such abysmally stupid claims about the prospects for the continuation of the “Long Peace” when the USA is moving rapidly towards ethnic civil war, Europe is preparing for extreme ethnic cleansing, and the Dar al-Islam is in the process of uniting under a new and aggressive Caliphate even as the USA attempts to instigate war with Russia.

Don’t fight them over there

Fight them over here:

The accumulating evidence from high-quality public-opinion research is hard to ignore. A Quinnipiac University survey released March 4 found that terrorism now trails only the economy as a top public priority: 67% of the American people regard Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as a “major threat” to U.S. security. The public is not satisfied with the Obama administration’s response to this threat. Only 39% approve of the president’s handling of terrorism (down from 52% a year ago), while 54% disapprove. When it comes to ISIS, the public’s view is even more negative, with only 35% approving.

These sentiments translate into support for much more assertive policies. The Quinnipiac survey found that by a stunning 62% to 30%, the American people now support sending U.S. ground forces to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Those in favor include majorities of Democrats and independents as well as Republicans, women as well as men, and young adults as well as seniors. This result underscores a late-February CBS poll, which found 57% of Americans favoring the use of ground forces, up 18 percentage points since last September.

It is astonishing that the American public want to send ground forces to Iraq and Syria when there are millions of Muslims laying the groundwork for the Caliphate in the West. This is why the West is presently losing the Third Great War of Islamic Expansion.

Any time your grand strategy is based on an idea as intrinsically idiotic as the notion that the magic of geographical translocation will somehow transform invading enemies into clones of yourself, you deserve to lose.

The Left devours itself

The long-anticipated breakdown of the Rainbow Coalition has begun on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the White Minority has not really even begun to get into the game. But give them time.

I am a “lefty”. I have voted Labour all my life. I believe in the
abolition of public schools and the inviolability of the NHS, and that
the renewal of Trident is a vanity project. I believe the state must
work to ensure equality of opportunity for all: women, the LBGT
“community”, those with disabilities, those of minority cultures and
ethnicities, and the working class. The Guardian has been my newspaper
forever. I was glad to see the back of the Sun’s Page 3, and I believe
there should be more all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats. I
believe immigration is more of a positive force than a negative one.

However, you might be less certain about my status when I finish
laying out my stall. Because I find myself holding a “transgressive”
body of beliefs and doubts alongside my blue-chip leftwing ones that are
liable to get me branded a misogynist, an Islamophobe and a Little
Englander – at least by people on my Twitter feed, and others of my peer
group…. My stance on these issues makes some people in my “tribe” very angry. It is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate….

One very key element of the liberal left has long been under threat: its liberalism – that is, its willingness to debate with anything outside a narrow range of opinions within its own walls. And the more scary and incomprehensible the world becomes, the more debate is replaced by edict and prejudice: literally pre-judging. Identity politics is one of the most significant developments of the last 50 years, but it has led to nerves being exposed in a way they rarely were by economic issues. Because identity is less about politics and more about that most sensitive of human constructions, the protection of the self – both group and individual.

And the more it becomes about the protection of self, the less it becomes about the back and forth of rational argument. All the beliefs, opinions and doubts I hold are just that: they are ideas, not ironclad convictions. I am not certain about any of them, and am quite willing to change my mind, as I have done many times in the past. But I will not alter them if I am faced with invective rather than debate; in fact, they will become more entrenched.

Meanwhile, in America, the low-intensity power struggle between blacks and browns stretches from Compton, California to Baltimore, Maryland:

A plan that would dedicate two public high schools in suburban Washington to immigrants and students struggling with English is pitting black and Hispanic communities -– usually allies — against one another.

The Prince George’s County, Md., chapter of the NAACP is strongly opposing the plan — which would take effect next school year, and cover about 800 students having English language difficulties — claiming it will pull resources from other students and unfairly redistribute them to Hispanic students. Some critics go so far as to compare the plan to segregation.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP, told FoxNews.com.

Ross believes the proposal to open two new schools violates the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled separate schools for black and white students violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

“It risks turning Prince George’s County into a segregated school system,” Ross said, adding that he realizes the need for better education in the county but believes it should not come at the cost of existing students.

Latino advocacy group CASA de Maryland sees it differently. The group, which has pushed for the schools, argues that it’s not a violation of the Constitution because the schools are not mandatory and are being built to provide options to immigrants.

One thing that most white people have almost religiously failed to grasp is that Hispanics dislike blacks considerably more than whites do. They completely lack both white guilt and white paternalism, and they view blacks as their primary economic and political competition. As Hispanics begin to bring their numbers to bear on both fronts, they are going to ruthlessly crush the traditional sinecures that white liberals have carved out for their black supporters.

Mailvox: suicide of a San Francisco church

A soon-to-be ex-member sends along his the decision of the church “elders” to knowingly embrace sin as church policy:

Dear Friends,

I want to speak with you on behalf of the Elder Board of our church about a pastoral conversation we have been having over the past 9 months. In May of 2014 the Board asked me for a book that was clearly grounded in Scripture that we might study on pastoring our brothers and sisters in Christ who are part of the LGBT community. We read Ken Wilson’s A Letter to My Congregation. The book is rare in that it shows great empathy and maturity to model unity and patience with those who are in different places on this conversation, all the while dealing honestly with Scripture. Since our church already lives in the reality of a multiplicity of viewpoints held with humility, this book seemed to us a good choice. I want you to hear where we have arrived as a Board and invite you into a conversation and healthy discussion about how we arrived there. 

Our pastoral practice of demanding life-long “celibacy”, by which we meant that for the rest of your life you would not engage your sexual orientation in any way, was causing obvious harm and has not led to human flourishing.

(It’s unfortunate that we used the word “celibacy” to describe a demand placed on others, as in Scripture it is, according to both Jesus and Paul, a special gift or calling by God, not an option for everyone). In fact, over the years, the stories of harm caused by this pastoral practice began to accumulate. Our pastoral conversations and social science research indicate skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, and addiction among those who identify as LGBT. The generally unintended consequence has been to leave many people feeling deeply damaged, distorted, unlovable, unacceptable, and perverted. Imagine feeling this from your family or religious community: “If you stay, you must accept celibacy with no hope that you too might one day enjoy the fullness of intellectual, spiritual, emotional, psychological and physical companionship. If you pursue a lifelong partnership, you are rejected.” This is simply not working and people are being hurt. We must listen and respond.

Imagine the feeling! Someone, somewhere, has suffered FEELBAD! One guess what the response will be.

Summary: What has actually changed here?

On one hand, nothing. This aligns with our existing core vision: the doors of this church are as wide as the arms of the Savior it proclaims. We remain passionate about having as many people hear the gospel as possible. City Church will continue to receive into membership all those with a credible profession of faith and expect the same commitments represented in their membership vows.

On the other hand, we want to be clear what this now means. We will no longer discriminate based on sexual orientation and demand lifelong celibacy as a precondition for joining. For all members, regardless of sexual orientation, we will continue to expect chastity in singleness until marriage. Please pray for our Board as we continue to discuss pastoral practices with our LGBT brothers and sisters in Christ. Pray for our denomination, the Reformed Church in America, as it does the same.

One sad piece of news: two of our Elders, Tyler Dann and Bruce Gregory, resigned from the board. We received these resignations with sadness and understanding. These are fine members of our church who love Jesus deeply.

Well, I’m sure the City Church of Ken Wilson will flourish every bit as well as the Episcopalian and Anglican churches have since they embraced other forms of anti-Christian heresy. “By their fruits you will know them,” we are told.  And when the organizations wither and die, we’ll be assured that it had nothing whatsoever to do with their embrace of open and unrepentant sin.

I find it interesting that these progressive churches still insist on turning a cold shoulder to unrepentant murderers and child molesters. It’s really rather intolerant and unChristian of them, isn’t it?

Notice in particular the gentle and understanding tone in which the missive is written. That is the insidious whisper of Hell.

A taste of things to come

John Wright is pleased with Jeremiah’s artwork for the first volume in his Unwithering Realm series, Somewhither, which will be coming out in April. And if you’re interested in supporting an esoteric, but worthwhile project, Castalia House blogger Ken Burnside and Ad Astra game developer needs just $2k more in order to fund his AVID Assistant via Kickstarter.

Speaking of Castalia, we’ll have a new offer going out to the New Release Subscribers next week, but for various reasons I’m not going to bother going into, we will be releasing not just one, but TWO new books the week after that. I’d like to find 10 volunteers to review both of them, so if you’ve got the interest and the intellectual chops to handle either Equality: The Impossible Quest or The Art of War: The History of Military Strategy, both by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, email me with EQUALITY or WAR in the subject. UPDATE: have all 10 for both books, thank you.

The former is conceived as the third in a conceptual trilogy with Plato’s work on Justice and J.S. Mill’s work on Liberty, whereas the latter features a foreword by none other than Dr. Jerry Pournelle himself, who describes van Creveld’s work as “a necessary supplement to Clausewitz.” It’s a short, but as you can probably imagine from that description, brilliant history, and anyone who has appreciated Mr. Lind’s work is going to find it fascinating and educational. Thanks to Chris Kallini, who did both of the van Creveld covers.

Terry Pratchett: an indictment

Chaos Horizon points out the essential absurdity and historical irrelevance of the Hugo and Nebula Awards:

Pratchett never won a Hugo or Nebula award. Neither awards have ever known what to do with humorous/satirical SFF. Both awards failed to live up to the imagination that Pratchett showed in his best work: it’s easier to celebrate the serious and prestigious than the fantastic. Our field should have done better. Pratchett did receive Nebula nominations late in his career, in 2006 (Going Postal) and 2009 (Making Money). Neither are among his best books. Mort, Guards! Guards!, and Small Gods all would have been worthy winners, but I’d draw your attention to 2003, the year that Robert Sawyer won the Hugo for Hominids. Pratchett published The Night Watch in 2002, a twisty time-travel caper, that would have been an outstanding winner for that year.

I am proud to be able to say that I am among those SFWA members who were responsible for both the 2006 and 2009 Nebula nominations. (I also used to regularly nominate Charles Stross for awards, to little avail, back when he actually deserved them.) The fact that Terry Pratchett wasn’t even being NOMINATED when the likes of Catharine Asaro were WINNING was one of the things that first led me to believe there was something very, very rotten in the state of SF/F awards. Here is the review of Going Postal I posted on this blog in September 2004. In case you’re wondering how the review could have been posted in 2004 while the nomination was in 2006, it was because a) the Nebula schedule was bizarre back then, and b) I received a pre-release review copy of it.

In fairness to the Hugos, Pratchett also received a belated Hugo nomination for Going Postal, but he declined it. It’s hard to believe he didn’t even receive a nomination for his best book, Night Watch, in a year when the likes of Picoverse, The Other Wind, Solitaire, Passage, The Curse of Chalion, The Chronoliths, Cosmonaut Keep, and The Bones of the Earth did.

To be, or not to be, Gamma

Eventually we were bound to start recognizing their patterns, given that they do the same stupid bloody thing every stupid bloody time. Stickwick, who happens to hold a PhD in Astrophysics, points out why there is absolutely no point in responding in a substantive manner to a Gamma male’s questions:

What’s rather remarkable about you is how the fact that you’re so reliably shown to be wrong and/or obtuse doesn’t deter you in the slightest. You’re like one of those inflatable punching clowns that just keeps popping back up no matter how many times you’re knocked down.

This is why I simply go straight to the dismissive rhetoric with these sad sacks now that I sufficiently understand the Gamma mentality. They are all, by their socio-sexual nature, limited to rhetoric. Their defining characteristic is their refusal to accept the truth of a social order that they can not only see, but frequently reaches out and touches them; the Gamma is the True King in his own mind and he redefines defeat as victory every single day.

That is why they “keep popping back up” pretending that they weren’t wrong no matter how many times everyone has seen them intellectually depantsed. They have to cling to the delusion that they are ever-triumphant because they can’t face the depressing ugliness of their own daily reality.


I was quite pleased the other night when I was picking up Ender after practice. The previous practice, he had gotten into a bit of a scuffle with one of his defenders, who got into his face after he’d failed to bail out the defense’s catastrophic mistake, prompting Ender to punch him in the face when he wouldn’t back off. Fortunately, they finally have a good coach, who chewed out the entire defense for being lazy, then told off the defender while he had Ender run a few laps as punishment.

I was curious when I saw the defender standing in the path where Ender would be exiting the clubhouse. Having gotten into it two days before, I wondered how they would they react. Would they pretend not to see each other, be distantly polite, or behave normally? But instead, when Ender came out I saw them exchange the thumbs-back hand-clasp thing and nod, which of course is male teamspeak for mutual acceptance. That was good, because it told me that whatever he may turn out to be, it isn’t going to be a passive-aggressive, self-delusional Gamma male.

Meanwhile, this exchange with another Gamma was as amusing as it was illustrative.

VD: (cites article in which scientists admit problems with rectifying data with evolutionary theory)

Gamma: So what’s the alternative to evolution? To instead believe in the Hebrew book of fairy tales called The Bible and honestly believe the world is only 6000 years old and humans and dinosaurs co-existed on Earth like in The Flintstones? You’ll have to do better than that. That just sounds like believing in a fairy tale someone made up. And if science is so phony next time you need to fix a broken bone or get an operation, just try praying real hard instead, see how far that gets you.

VD: Duck and change the subject. That’s certainly new. And convincing! Why pray when we can simply fix it by evolving it through natural selection? Because that’s science too, right?

[Notice how when I don’t bite on the pseudo-dialectic by taking it seriously but simply mock it, the Gamma drops the
passive-aggression and shifts right into the full rhetorical attack
mode. There isn’t even any pretense of dialectic anymore, just a desperate throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall attempt to cause feelbad.]

Gamma: Because you can’t just sit and evolve. That would be as futile as praying for a deity to fix your broken bone magically or cure you of your illness that required an operation. Said deity would not answer. Plus evolution takes a very, very long time. The average human being only lives to around 80. You’d need medical attention pretty quick if you had a broken bone or you needed a life saving operation. Just praying to got to correct either would get you nowhere.

Off topic, but I think Vox Day really is jealous of a Gamma like John Scalzi. Which is why he keeps writing about him. He can’t understand why such a nerd can sell so many more books than a so-called real man with a black belt (or whatever) in martial arts like he is.

Vox Day doesn’t really act like a Christian either to be honest. Jesus (if he existed) loved everyone. Even non-believers. Jesus wouldn’t be for racial segregation voluntary or not. Even if Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has failed. Vox never used to write about all this race themed stuff. Not until Obama was elected and then re-elected. I think Obama’s re-election really knocked the wind out of his sails. And that’s part of why he gave up the WorldNetDaily column. I think the demographic for his blog has changed. It used to be a younger crowd. Now it feels like the average age is 50 plus. A lot of old get of my lawn type retirees. One more thing, being a world class cruelty artist may be entertaining for readers, but my guess is the Christian God and Christ (if either exists) finds that level of cruelty in human beings to be a pretty serious sin. 

This is hilarious. Let’s count the feeble attempts to cause feelbad. 1) jealous, 2) false Christian, 3) upset by Obama’s re-election, 4) readership is old and past it, 5) offending a God in whom the Gamma doesn’t even believe. With all due respect, I’ve had people publicly calling me every name in the book FOR 14 YEARS now. Do you really think you’re going to be the one who has finally come up with the magic word that will crack my Olympian indifference to your opinion?

I was curious about the blog demographics, however. It turns out that the three most distinctive characteristics of the VP readership are that they are a) educated, b) male, and c) wealthy, in that order. As for age, the blog is followed heavily in all age groups from 25-64, with 45-54 being the strongest and under-18s being the most highly underrepresented. This makes sense, as under-18s are the least-educated, least-wealthy group out there. And, of course, I am in the 45-54 educated wealthy male group myself.

It’s not so much “get off my lawn” as “please be advised that you will now be escorted from the premises of our country club”.

Never bother to engage in dialectic with a Gamma male. It serves no purpose, they literally don’t hear what you’re saying. To them, arguing is a competition in causing feelbad. So relentlessly mock them and target their insecurities, and pay no attention whatsoever to their pseudo-dialectical bait. It isn’t honestly offered.

UPDATE: This discussion has helped me see a little deeper into the psychology and I think it’s given me a glimpse into the core source of the Gamma delusion. The Gamma believes that if he admits to the truth of his own feelings about himself, he will lose.

Evolution and the problem of time

I always find it amusing when someone who has credentials in a subject, but is at a distinct disadvantage in IQ terms tries to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. You may recall that over the years, I have repeatedly asked various evolutionary True Believers a very simple and straightforward time-based question, to which there absolutely must be an answer, and they not only have been unable to answer it, but frequently tried to deny it was either a) relevant or b) possible, thereby demonstrating that they don’t understand ANYTHING about their own faux-scientific faith. But the speed of evolution, and of the underlying mutations, is absolutely central to understanding the theory, as well as determining whether it is total nonsense or not:

Mathematicians keep refining π even though they know it to more than 12 trillion digits; physicists beat themselves up because they cannot pin down the gravitational constant beyond three significant figures. Geneticists, by contrast, are having trouble deciding between one measure of how fast human DNA mutates and another that is half that rate.

The rate is key to calibrating the ‘molecular clock’ that puts DNA-based dates on events in evolutionary history. So at an intimate meeting in Leipzig, Germany, on 25–27 February, a dozen speakers puzzled over why calculations of the rate at which sequence changes pop up in human DNA have been so much lower in recent years than previously. They also pondered why the rate seems to fluctuate over time. The meeting drew not only evolutionary geneticists, but also researchers with an interest in cancer and reproductive biology — fields in which mutations have a central role.

“Mutation is ultimately the source of all heritable diseases and all biological adaptations, so understanding the rate at which mutations evolve is a fundamental question,” says Molly Przeworski, a population geneticist at Columbia University in New York City who attended the Human Mutation Rate Meeting….

A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and
archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution,
such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world.
But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when
extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most
recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered
dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many
researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting
multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is
assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between.

You know you’re dealing with QUALITY science when scientists start substituting variables for concrete numbers depending upon what they want the results to be. Here is the money quote: “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,” he
says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite
embarrassingly bad and uncertain.”

As I have repeatedly predicted, genuine genetic science is eventually going to kill evolution by natural selection deader than phlogiston or the Flat Earth theory.

RIP Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is dead at 66:

British fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett has died aged 66 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, his publisher said today.He sold more than 85 million books worldwide in 37 languages, but also waged a very public struggle with Alzheimer’s disease in recent years – and was a vocal campaigner of the right to die.

The author is best known for his satirical fantasy novels set in Discworld, a flat planet resting on the back of four elephants, themselves perched on the back of a vast turtle moving through space.

After avoiding them for years, I eventually came to enjoy many of Mr. Pratchett’s books and consider him to have been rather underrated as a writer. I hope, for the sake of his literary legacy, that his death will be sufficient to prevent him from writing any more books.

The ghosts of the machine are pro-Puppy

This strikes me as not only amusing, but a propitious omen:

I just logged into Sasquan’s website to make Hugo nominations, and when I first opened my ballot, all the slots were already filled in. It seemed to be entirely with the Sad Puppies slate. It’s my first time nominating, is this kind of thing usual? And if so, why the hell?

I mean, I changed them all, but why were they there?

I’m not entirely sure it was the Sad Puppies party ticket, but Vox Day appeared a surprising number of times.

I don’t know why it should surprise anyone that an Internet Superintelligence should have machine intelligence friends. In any event, these deep mysteries of the cybernetic age aside, it’s been interesting to see some of the predictions concerning the Hugo nominations, both public and private. Chaos Horizon is among those expecting SP/RP to land two Best Novel nominees, Monster Hunter: Nemesis and Skin Game:

3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia: Correia finished 3rd in the 2014 Hugo nominations, with only Leckie and Gaiman placing above him (Gaiman declined the nom). That put him very safely in the field, and the mathematics are in Correia’s favor for this year. While Monster Hunter Nemesis is a slightly odd choice for the Hugos, being 5th in a series and urban fantasy to boot, it’s hard to imagine Correia’s supporters abandoning him en-masse in just one year. Despite the vigor of his campaign, Correia doesn’t haven’t the broad support necessary to win a Hugo.

5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher: Skin Game was part of the “Sad Puppy 3″ slate, but Butcher’s appeal extends well beyond that block of voters. While Butcher has never gotten much Hugo love in the past, he is one of the most popular writers working in the urban fantasy field, and his Henry Dresden novels have been consistently well-liked and well-loved by fans. Even WorldCon voters who don’t agree with the Sad Puppy 3 argument may look at the list, see Butcher, and think, Why not? If Correia can make the slate, so too can Butcher—and Butcher might be even more popular in Sad Puppy realm than Correia. On the negative, this is #14 in a series, and that’s a tough sell to new readers. I’ll be fascinated to see how the vote turns out on this one.

I tend to think he’s discounting Nebula-nominated The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, which I expect will replace either the Addison or the Leckie book on the list of finalists. My suspicion, and it is only that, is that Sad Puppies is going to generally outperform what appears to be the consensus expectations of two nominees per category. Now, I could be entirely wrong and perhaps there is a 650-strong stealth SJW slate that will lock out the Puppies entirely across the board, but I don’t see many signs of that having been successfully organized.

Chaos Horizons also looked the number of expected nominations and predicted the overall performance of Sad Puppies:

In an earlier post, I estimated the total nomination ballots for this year to be around 2350 (that’s pure guesswork, sadly). 330/2350 = 14.0%. Either way, the model gets us in the same ball park: Sad Puppies 3 is likely, at the top end, to account for between 10% and 15% of the 2015 Hugo nominating vote. For good or bad, that will be enough to put the top Sad Puppy 3 texts into the Hugo slate.

2. The data shows that the Sad Puppy 2 campaign fell off fairly fast from the most popular authors like Correia to less popular authors like Toregersen (60% of Correia’s total) and Hoyt (50% of Correia’s total) to Vox Day (33% of Correia’s total). Torgersen and Vox Day made the final slate based on the relatively weakness of the Novella and Novelette categories. While I don’t track categories like Novella, Novelette, or Short Story on Chaos Horizon (there’s not enough data, and I don’t know the field well enough), I expect a similar drop-off to occur this year. If you want to assess the impact of the whole Sad Puppy 3 slate, think about which authors are as popular as Correia and which aren’t.

If we put those two pieces of data together, we get my “Hugo Campaign Model”:

1. A Hugo campaign like “Sad Puppies 3″ will probably account for 10-15% of the 2015 nominating vote.
2. The “Sad Puppies 3″ slate will fall off quickly based on the popularity of the involved authors. 

I don’t think Chaos Horizon is correct about the percentage, however, for two reasons. First, he probably isn’t aware that the Dread Ilk did not get involved until AFTER the nominations were closed. So he’s probably missing about 120 votes right there. Furthermore, we know that an unknown number of Dread Ilk, and an equally unknown number of new Sad Puppies, got involved this year. So, my guess is that his 330 estimate should be at least 500 for the combined Puppies and could be even higher. If we assume his 2,350 estimate is correct, and I find his reasoning to be perfectly plausible there, then the Puppies will represent between 20 and 25 percent of the 2015 nominating vote.

(I note, with some amusement, that the combined Puppy vote will likely exceed the TOTAL Hugo nominating vote for any year prior to 2009. Keep that in mind when anyone tries to claim our votes are somehow unrepresentative, illegitimate, or unfair.)

Second, Chaos Horizon has no reason to understand that the Dread Ilk are far more intelligent, focused, and disciplined than the average readership. But you are, and therefore at least the Rabid Puppies element of the slate is unlikely to fall off quickly on the basis of popularity as it did last year.