[Doonge]

Your position is of someone's who knows the guy, and analyzes all what he says because of past experience.
Your experience is valuable, of course, but such is not my angle.

If I met awful people in a convention, alongside wonderful ones, I think I'd be able to focus on the awesome ones and write a glee review.
But I'm ready to admit you're right about that, I think it's secondary.

I understand that what's important to you is the bad treatment Sad Puppies inflicts on this award. You call the treatment unsusbstantiated, and you call the award the most prestigious.
Here's my angle: saying that popularity awards are cliques' games doesn't need substantiation for me, it's a default assumption. Furthermore, trashing a prestigious award is not a bad thing in itself, because it will either kill the award (showing that despite being "the most prestigious", the award was weak) or strengthen it in the long run. If there is some value to the Hugo, it will be kept.

It is a possibility that this guy is just a conspirationist, as you put it. But it seems to me that, facts asides, all he wanted was that the Hugo award to be self-recognized as a regular "biased" (not a bad connotation here) award and not an all-inclusive unbiased one; and then proceeded to demonstrate it with an autistic accountant efficiency level.
It is desirable to nicely paint the Hugo award brand, but it shouldn't be a lie. If the Hugo award is valuable, then value must be there to back it up.
Another way to put it is that fighting bias is a scientific-level task. It is not easy. Does the Hugo award voting process contain inherent bias? I don't know, but by default my assumption is yes. I know how hard it is to remove bias, and I also know it's not even always desirable anyway.
To me, saying that there is probably bias in the Hugo award is totally non-controversial, and problems arise only when people want to assert it is unbiased (whether it is true or not, I do not know if the Hugos are actually good or bad, I don't care personally).

Per assumption, it seems to me that at worse, this Correia is an honest autistic guy that is trashing a weak award just to make a point. Not exactly praiseworthy, but not conspirationist either.


I've now read the whole thread, and I appreciate your contribution. Especially the straw explanation ^^

Regarding your analogy to hacking, white and black hats; consider that this Corroeia maybe couldn't take the white route. In my opinion, the worst route is doing nothing (well, it could be black hat too, it is in fact situational : it depends if your own black hat actions are the most damaging thing to do or not, because doing nothing lets another one the opportunity to do black hat things). Doing nothing is similar to letting worse people than you the opportunity to do black hat stuff themselves, in the future.

Corroeia claims to have gone the white hat route first, then opted for the black hat route after being met with incredulity of some sort.
Depending on the long term real damage done on the Hugo, going black hat might have been a good option. Because if Corroeia is right, the Hugo would have rotten into irrelevance and died without his feat. Acting forces them to react.