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Bemused, Amused, and Exasperated
Mar. 27th, 2006 03:56 pmThe above title describes my mood regarding the various reactions on the SMOFS e-mail list about L.A.con IV's plan to offer "taster" memberships. As apparently is usual, many people there are seizing upon the potential negative implications, including all of the ways that people might try to jigger the system or commit "vote fraud" on the Worldcon site selection, all of which, while not absolutely impossible, are vanishingly unlikely.
Something I've tried to explain to our clients (and our sales people) in my job is that the existence of outliers on a curve of possibilities does not invalidate the mean. Just because it's possible for some odd thing to happen now and then doesn't mean that it will happen regularly.
But I guess it's human nature. I've been reading Christian Wolmar's book On the Wrong Track: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways, which, among other things, blames some horrific railway accidents on the way in which the British railway system was privatized. I bet that a lot of people in Britain think rail is the most dangerous way to travel, when in fact it is among the safest. People assume the outliers are the mean.
Meanwhile, the scenario where a horde of people take advantage of these $20 Worldcon memberships to flood the Business Meeting and vote themselves a bunch of Hugo Awards is just silly. On top of the fact that there's no way enough people could be rounded up to try it in the first place, there are so many procedural safeguards1 built into the system to prevent "meeting packing" that it's just ludicrous that people would think it's even a possibility in the first place.
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( Procedural safeguards, ho! )
Something I've tried to explain to our clients (and our sales people) in my job is that the existence of outliers on a curve of possibilities does not invalidate the mean. Just because it's possible for some odd thing to happen now and then doesn't mean that it will happen regularly.
But I guess it's human nature. I've been reading Christian Wolmar's book On the Wrong Track: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways, which, among other things, blames some horrific railway accidents on the way in which the British railway system was privatized. I bet that a lot of people in Britain think rail is the most dangerous way to travel, when in fact it is among the safest. People assume the outliers are the mean.
Meanwhile, the scenario where a horde of people take advantage of these $20 Worldcon memberships to flood the Business Meeting and vote themselves a bunch of Hugo Awards is just silly. On top of the fact that there's no way enough people could be rounded up to try it in the first place, there are so many procedural safeguards1 built into the system to prevent "meeting packing" that it's just ludicrous that people would think it's even a possibility in the first place.
__________________________________________
( Procedural safeguards, ho! )
