Second Guess

 

Rules and instructions.

 

Second Guess is a game, a bit of fun for political anoraks. The aim is to use the wisdom of crowds to guess which MPs will support which other MPs for leadership or deputy leadership of the Labour Party.

 

The principle is that we all have a little bit of information. Whether it is rumour, hearsay, gossip, intuition or we have read it in the paper, we all know that potential leaders of the Labour Party have “camps” of supporters – and this is a way of collating all the information we have in one place.

 

Instructions

  1. Register. Please tell us some information about yourself so we can run interesting and fun statistics on the basis of your second guesses. Don’t forget to press submit when you are done.
  2. Under “My Choices” select in order the top five Labour MPs, in order of preference, whom you would like to see as the next leader of the Labour Party. We use this information, together with your profile information, to extrapolate the electoral college. Don’t forget to press “Update Selection” when you are done.
  3. Now enter your Second Guesses. You have to guess which MPs will nominate which other MPs for Leader of the Labour Party. Browse the tabbed system for the name of the nominating MP and double-click on their name. Then browse for the nominee and single-click on  their name. Then use the dropdown to select a confidence value – 1 for a guess to 5 if you know something as a fact. Then click “Update” to enter your second guess.
  4. To see how the MPs nominations and the Electoral College is panning out, go to “Home” and you will see the statistics. Only MPs with nominations from at least 12.5% of their colleagues go through to the Electoral College stage of a leadership or deputy leadership election.

 

Rules

  1. OK there’s a prize so there have to be rules. I, Alexander Hilton, will give £500 to the person who correctly guesses the most number of MP nominations for leader of the Labour Party in the election subsequent to the retirement of Tony Blair.
  2. I will weight guesses so that they are more likely to win you the prize, the earlier they are made.
  3. There is no entry fee for this competition (though donations are welcome).
  4. Nominations shall be judged valid if they are tabled to the party in support of a candidate. Nominations of candidates who do not achieve the support of 12.5% of the PLP will also be judged valid if they are verifiable and not in conflict with a nomination of a valid candidate
  5. I reserve the right to close this competition at any time. I reserve the right to change and or amend the rules at any time to take into account the integrity of the data or the procedures determined by the Labour Party NEC or for any other reason.
  6. In determining the winner of this competition, Alexander Hilton is the judge and the judge’s decision is final.
  7. In the event of a tie, the prize will be split between the winners.
  8. The Winners agree to take part in reasonable publicity organised  by Alexander Hilton or Labourhome.org.

 

 

How does the data achieve any sense of reliability?

 

OK – so how do we know that the bad information isn’t outweighing the good? Well firstly, we ask people what their preferences are for Leader or Deputy Leader – a selection we use to calculate the rest of the Electoral College. Secondly, we have a prize – so there are two reasons to put in what you think is true rather than what you wish were true. The first being that we have given you an outlet to express your own wishes and the second being a financial motive to be correct.

 

The last element of “goodness” in the data comes as the data achieves critical mass. If you imagine True and False being on a grey-scale where 0 = False and 1 = True, the rumour might have a value of 0.1 and gossip 0.2. Something read in a paper might have a value of 0.5 to 0.8 depending on the paper. Getting the information from the horse’s mouth as it were, would be worth 0.9 or 1.

 

However, there is no corresponding scale of falseness in negatives. The most false you can get is 0 in value – so eventually, there is enough “Truth” in the system to make the data interesting and for it to have some reliability.

 

Any enquiries should be directed to:

Alexander Hilton

alexhilton@gmail.com

07985 384 859