On Apr 20, 1:13 pm, Amy Guskin  wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>Apologies right up front for the length of this tome.

No need to apologise whatsoever. I've written longer, and you've
clearly had an issue that needed time to explain properly. It was
worth clarifying all the context.

>The contest ended on Saturday night, March 31st, and thanks to the utterly
>amazing people I know (both online and the geographically proximate variety),
>I managed to finish SIXTH in a field of nearly one thousand entries.  This,
>despite the very last minute entries who mobilized their troops to get
>them a high ranking with their low scores.

Congratulations on this achievement. It's commendable.

> Then, Thursday, April 5th came.  And on Thursday afternoon, I received a
> startling number of e-mail notifications of comments to my blog.  Now, I
> hardly ever update my blog, and in fact, the latest entry at that point was
> dated from November 2006, and was about...the Finesse contest.  It included a
> link to vote me a "10," and a reminder to vote my
competitors a "1."  So I
> opened the first of the e-mails...and felt like I was struck across the face.
>  It was a VERY ugly, VERY nasty note about how I'm a cheater, I have an ugly
> soul, and someone ought to tell Finesse how I cheated.  The next one said I
> was a bitch.  The next said they'd seen better hair on a horse.  The next,
> "cheaters never prosper."  Etc.  I kept reading them -- they
were all made
> anonymously via blogger.com's comment feature -- and I very quickly realized
> that I'd better turn off the open comment feature, and delete those comments.
>
> I finally got to the last comment (I was still receiving them via e-mail,
> even if they weren't appearing on my blog), and it was from someone who
> kindly -- anonymously -- told me where all of the ire was coming from.  It
> was coming from a thread on a message board dedicated to sweepstakes players.
>
> Several women from this community had entered the Finesse contest.  One
> particular woman started this ugly nonsense.  She'd apparently been going
> through withdrawal after the contest ended, did a search on some terms
> (presumably on Google Groups), and found our various threads on the subject.  
> She proclaimed that she was "livid" that I had
"cheated" by having people
> vote "1"s for my competition in such an organized fashion (a
list!  a list!),
> and she wanted advice on what to say to Finesse when she wrote to
> complain about me.

"Dear Finesse, I'm a gambling addict who feels insecure about my
physical appearance, and I'm having a hard time coping with the fact
that I didn't make the finalists of your contest. I only have a small,
narrow clique of supporters, and some of them aren't very intelligent
and so we didn't utilise the best strategies during this contest.
Would you please consider only counting votes from people who voted me
a "10", and not counting any contestant who got more 10s than me
because they obviously are cheaters who have unfair advantages over
me? Also, could you please automatically disqualify any other
contestant who's suggested that I be scored with a "1", because such a
person obviously doesn't know true beauty when they see it and they
should have more respect. Before considering your answer, please be
advised that my acquaintances and I are very catty, bitter people who
utilise personal attacks and intimidation tactics whenever we don't
get what we want, and if you don't give in to my terms as outlined
above, we WILL hound you and you'll never hear the end of it. P.S. I'd
also like you to disqualify the contestant who referred to me as
'Bitch Head' and I can assure you that I'm a very beautiful woman and
that my face bears no resemblance whatsoever to any animal of the
canine variety."

> Oh, and they also didn't like that we'd bestowed descriptive nicknames on
> some of the entries -- but how else were we supposed to refer to people for
> whom we didn't have names?

These nicknames were for the benefit of your supporters, rather than
for the ears of your competitors. They weren't made spitefully or with
the intention of the people concerned reading them. If one of your
competitors has gone to extraordinary means to search down your posts
then she's responsible for anything she reads that wasn't intended for
her ears. (Hmmmmm, I can't help but wonder which particular nickname
we might have used to refer to this woman -- lol).

> Since I'd never received a reply to my e-mail, and doubt was gnawing at me, I
> called up Finesse and asked to speak to someone about an e-mail I'd sent
> regarding the contest.  I've had a couple of phone conversations with them
> this week, mainly because the customer care person to whom they referred me
> didn't know anything about it, and had to do some research -- but she's told
> me that she is reasonably sure that the judges never saw ANY of the e-mails.  
> Not the ones from the accusers, nor mine.

Hopefully they do indeed have a filtering system whereby other people
decide what material needs to be passed on to the judges and what
doesn't, with a view to not biasing the judges.

> One thing I did verify with her: voting ANY number for ANY contestant once a
> day, whether an organized effort or not (and thanks to Hilary for that
> amazing strategy, which I'm certain kept me in the Top Ten right up to the
> end!), was NOT cheating.  Nor was it even slightly morally wrong.  In fact, I
> was exactly the kind of contestant they wanted: someone who would get
> hundreds of their friends engaged, and visiting their website, and thinking
> about Finesse every day for several months.

Nods. That's what you'd expect and it's why they ran the competition
in the first place. If they'd wanted to prevent people voting "1" for
other candidates, then it would've been a simple matter to restrict
everyone to one vote per 24 hours (rather than one vote per candidate
per 24 hours). So, no-one has any legitimate claim to hound you as an
individual, just because you implemented a particularly methodical and
effective form of a strategy that most of the other successful
candidates were also using. If the highest scores were 4s at the end
of the competition, then the mean and median would probably have been
down around maybe 2, and there could easily have been 5-10 votes of
"1" per every vote of "10" on average. So these people
may as well be
criticising you for being a contestant in a running race and wearing
an expensive pair of sneakers sold by the company organising the race,
when most of the other successful runners were wearing them as well.

> As for the pile of nasty comments I received, I feel like I got a teeny
> little taste of what celebrities have to put up with...and I have a lot more
> empathy for them now.  I wasn't bothered by the comments that attacked my
> appearance; I'm comfortable with who I am.  But the idea that these women
> thought it was okay to tell me that I had an "ugly soul," that I was a
> dreadful person, that bad things should happen to me...

These comments are indeed disturbing, and ridiculously over the top
when made in reference to a contest that's not of any serious
importance. The fact that these people have resorted to interpersonal
attacks suggests that they're very shallow people who have a poor
sense of boundaries and priorities. It also suggests a likelihood of
an unhealthy level of emotional investment in gambling, quite possibly
to the point of being addictive. Their comments say far more about
them than they do about you, and they're aimed to try and hit you
where it hurts in order to obfuscate this fact.

This "ugly soul" comment is particularly out of line. I wouldn't tell
anyone that they have an ugly soul -- not even the criminals that I
worked with at a prison last year. It's not the place of one mortal
human being to pass a judgement on the soul of another. Rather, any
criticisms of another person should be restricted to their external
behaviour and the effects it has on others. So, I won't comment on the
souls of any of these people, but rather I'll simply say that their
behaviour is catty, obnoxious, inappropriate and ridiculously out of
proportion to the situation they're responding to.

In my view, giving anyone guidance or mentoring on matters of the soul
is something that's a very intimate matter and needs to be consensual
between the parties concerned (although admittedly this is partly my
own personal beliefs speaking here, and this is related to me being
eclectic and not into organised religion). To me, it seems like a
gross interpersonal boundary violation to volunteer a criticism of
another person's soul in such a manner.

>It was particularly awful because I was also dealing
>with my father being hospitalized and undergoing
>a (minor) cardiac procedure during all of this, and it
>was just so much dross that I really did _not_ need.

I'm very sorry to hear that and I hope that everything goes smoothly
with your father's recovery from his operation. I will be sure to send
healing energy.

There are all sorts of reasons that could explain why you didn't end
up being counted in the top 20. It could be anything from nepotism, to
qualitative interpretations, to the type of standards used -- for
example, statistical techniques that gave less weight to 1s and 10s as
we were discussing earlier. You may, for example, have been 25th out
of nearly a thousand in terms of what it was determined that your
unbiased score was, but 6th in terms of the approximation of your
score that was provided. It's entirely plausible that Finesse may have
used an approximation without correcting for 1s and 10s, etc., until
such time as voting was closed and the statistical analysis was
performed.

So, it's possible that your success in getting 6th originally was an
artifact of the strategies that a lot of contestants employed but that
you employed very effectively. However, that's absolutely no reason
for anyone to give you a hard time or accuse you of cheating or doing
anything untoward, just for being good at what lots of other people
did as well, and perfectly within the rules of the competition. If
Finesse had wanted to prevent such strategies then it would be a
simple matter for them to do so, and what's more, there are plenty of
statistical techniques that can be applied to compensate for the
effects of extraneous variables.

So don't worry about a thing and just leave it that, as you and many
others have said, some of these women have some gambling addiction
issues and a bad habit of resorting to inappropriate and entirely
unwarranted personal attacks when they don't get their way over some
issue which is bigger for them than it should be.

Congratulations again on achieving 6th place in the original results.

Matthew
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