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Unrepresentative success

glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
edited 2012-12-14 13:59:28 in General
Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

This is a sort of general trope that occurs very often in real life.  Probably more in real life than has been made a point of in fiction.  I would YKTTW something like this except this isn't really a fiction or creative work trope...


So, y'know those situations where there's a success or win condition, and there are multiple ways to fulfill it, and sometimes someone fulfills that success condition in a way that you totally did not intend or weren't expecting?


For example, you create an exam where people have to pick 4 of 9 prompts to respond to.  There are three readings you draw them from, and from each reading you write three prompts.  So you have prompts A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, and C3, drawn from readings A, B, and C.  So you'd expect people to answer one A, one B, and one C, and one more from a category of their choice.  Then someone takes the exam and you find out that they did all the Cs and just tacked B1 onto that.


Or lets say that there's a student activities council in a school where to be elected as council president you need a majority of the votes from the various clubs.  Faculty-sponsored clubs get 3 votes each, and non-sponsored clubs get 2 votes each.  Let's say you have 10 sponsored and 10 non-sponsored clubs, for a total of 30+20=50 votes.  The way it's weighted obviously encourages you to get the support of sponsored organizations.  However, you could--and lets say you do--pull out a victory by getting all 20 votes from the non-sponsored clubs and just two of the ten sponsored clubs (6 votes), netting 26 of 50 votes.  Or slightly more realistically, if you had 18 of 20 non-sponsored votes (9 of ten clubs) and 9 of 30 sponsored votes (3 of 10 clubs) for a total of 27 votes.


I find this phenomenon really interesting.  And exciting.


Discuss.

Comments

  • BlueeyedratBlueeyedrat
    edited 2012-12-14 18:57:52
    "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."

    Heh, our student council never even held an election for my grade this year. There were four students interested in the position, so they would be split into two pairs (two candidates and their VPs). Problem was, three of the students hate each other, so none of them wanted to put up with that arrangement. They agreed to let the fourth have it and pick who she wanted as her VP.

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