Voting systems and the Hugo awards

The ciiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiircle of life! It turns! The stars wheel around (as do we), and another year has passed: welcome back to the announcement of Hugo nominees! As in past years (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009) I am going to try to read all the fiction (novels, novellae, novelettes, shorts stories) and think about them. (You'll notice that my extensive retroblogging project continues with these lists.) No promises how far I'll get through posting my thoughts this year, but links will follow.

One note before we begin. A fortuitous confluence of events means that I recently heard a seminar by Rida Laraki, on the subject of voting systems. It was a fantastic seminar, and I am certainly going to read some of his research. The takeaway points were these:

1. All voting systems are "wrong" for some scenario of voters and gaming the system. (We just have to decide which flaws we prefer to other flaws. Thanks for the pessimism, Arrow's theorem and similar.)
2. Most of the time spent making a decision should be spent selecting the voting mechanism and explaining it to voters, not campaigning.

How does this relate to the Hugo awards? Well, there's a giant kerfuffle happening right now over a campaign ("Sad Puppies") which produced a voting bloc and dominated the nominations in several categories. It is political, and social, and polarizing in some corners of the blagoweb. My main reaction is that I am sad that this strategy has been so effective, because it quashed the dispersed-voice-nomination-effect which brought me so many wonderful reading lists in past years. I'll still try to read the list below, but I'm appending another list of books I suspect might have made it onto the ballot in the absence of bitter canine whelps.

I feel that (1) trumps (2), since any adjustment to the voting system now will be reactionary, and if we change the voting system every time it produces a result we don't like, that doesn't seem too far (in theoretical terms) from simply weighting certain votes as "better" than others. It's meta-gerrymandering.

Best novel:

• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
• The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
• Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos
• Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Best novella:

• Big Boys Don’t Cry by Tom Kratman
• “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr.
• One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright
• “Pale Realms of Shade” by John C. Wright
• “The Plural of Helen of Troy by John C. Wright

Best novelette:

• “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart
• “Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner
• The Day the World Turned Upside Down by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• “The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn
• “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra

Best short story:

• “Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet
• “On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli
• “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” by John C. Wright
• “Totaled” by Kary English
• “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa

Suggestions I've gleaned from elsewhere:

• Echopraxia by Peter Watts
• The Peripheral by William Gibson
• Lock In by Jon Scalzi
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• My Real Children by Jo Walton
• Annihilation / Authority / Acceptance (trilogy) by Jeff Vandermeer
• The City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennet
• Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey
• Defenders by Will McIntosh
• The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
• The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
• Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
• Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
• Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon
• Coming Home by Jack McDevitt

... and now I am out of time to look for more possible-nominees, so I will certainly not have the time to read this entire list. The fun is in the attempt, of course.

This post's theme word is febrile, "of, relating to, or characterizing a fever; feverish." She entered a state of febrile reading.

Bleak outlook for academic postdocs

This article in Nature offers a bleak outlook for science postdocs.

The problem is the aggregation of individual human actions. If the system as a whole could change (as per the US National Academies' recommendation, or the article's call for synchronized, systemic global change), then the problem would be easily fixed. Of course! Simplify away all the complexities, and a theoretical approach can surely offer many solutions [she says, tongue-in-cheek].

In the absence of unanimous, organized global overhaul of the scientific research system, what to do? I take the retrospective of Dr. Thuault-Restituito seriously. I have come to a similar conclusion, luckily much earlier in "the pipeline." I am lucky to have the luxury of choice --- if the system is not treating me nicely, I can take my training and education and leave. I can contribute, and find stable, productive, interesting employment elsewhere. I am mentally and personally flexible. I can switch universities, or countries. I can leave academia. If everyone had such freedom (and stubborn self-respect), then again we would find ourselves in a simplified system where decade-long underpaid, precariously-renewed postdocs are eliminated, for lack of a population willing to subjugate themselves to such treatment.

Aside from solving my own (local) problem by simply refusing to participate, I feel some social obligation to contribute to improving the complicated system as a whole. I'm just not sure how to do that from my current position (or indeed from any position whatsoever, even as director of an entire government's science funding agency).

As with all things in science, we continue to fumble towards* understanding and improvement.

This post's theme word is lebensraum, "space required for living, growth, and development." Some postdocs are academic bonsai, continually pruned and hemmed-in, prevented from obtaining the lebensraum needed to progress professionally.

*my least-favorite preposition to see in any scientific context, esp. when accompanied by "understanding"!