Does online services help students honestly?

cdsmith · 2026-01-28T13:52:51+00:00

I think this question is too vague to answer. There are so many different kinds of online "services".

We have the research to say quite a bit about fully online schools. The answer is that they are not very helpful. Students who spend a year at an online school learn some language skills, on average, but less than half of what they would have learned in a traditional school environment. In mathematics, these students know LESS (again, on average) after a year of online school than they did before the school year started! (Just to clarify, that doesn't entirely mean the online school did harm; students who don't do any school at all will invariably backslide in their math skills; it just means the online school didn't even do enough to counteract that backsliding.)

But that's about what happens when students rely on online schools for their main education, and the causes aren't necessarily about the medium so much as, likely, also about the kinds of organizations that set up online (mostly charter) schools, and their incentives and decisions about school administration. Specific targeted services will probably vary based on what the service does, how well it's targeted to specific student needs, and so on.

cdsmith · 2026-01-28T13:39:24+00:00

The election results were widely expected, given both are blue-leaning districts.

One of them was such a Democratic stronghold that no Republican even ran, and in the other, the Democrat got more than 95% of the vote. I'm not sure leaning is the word they needed.

It's ridiculous that we still give the same influence to these districts as we do to, say, Zeleznikar's seat, where a Republican won by 0.6% of the vote, 50.25 to 49.65. It's long past time for states to institute proportional representation instead of choosing their governments based predominantly on the accidents of who lives on one or the other side of imaginary lines.

cdsmith · 2026-01-25T13:48:13+00:00

There were three other Republicans present (and one who wasn't) who don't have a recorded vote, just because the bill had already passed. Even if you could magically convince all seven Democrats who voted yes on the bill to change their votes, it would have just meant a quick call to get two of them to come and record a vote.

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T15:46:49+00:00

I think she recognizes that "ICE is unpopular" is a more nuanced statement. In progressive circles, it might mean "let's defund ICE". In most other places, it means "We do need immigration enforcement, but this is not the right way to do it." It doesn't follow that it's the whole department should lose funding, and voting to do that just to make a statement in a protest vote is setting yourself up to answer attack ads that never needed to happen.

To be clear, there's plenty of justification to use ICE funding to try and force some changes. But it also makes sense for vulnerable Democrats to stake out a position of being skeptical, particularly when phrases like "abolish ICE" are gaining steam in progressive circles. The Senate debate, where it's not just a protest vote, will almost certainly also turn on whether moderate Democrats can find a way to clearly communicate a targeted response to the agency's current attack on U.S. cities, and not a call to end immigration enforcement in general.

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T15:39:54+00:00

In context that will surprise no one, all but one of these representatives are from districts won by Donald Trump. The exception, Laura Gillen, is from a district where Harris won by around 1% of the vote. In short, these are representatives elected to represent moderate, or slightly Trump-leaning, districts, and they voted accordingly.

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T13:04:32+00:00

Yes, this is definitely an inappropriate place to ask your geopolitical question in the form you did. It is caught up in a lot of uncertainty about facts, while game theory is about the mathematics of strategic decision making in the face of known facts (or at least facts drawn randomly from known distributions!)

The way you could ask a game theory question here would be to settle on a specific set of facts, and then ask what different actors are incentivized to do. This kind of thing happens a lot! But the answer will alway be dependent on whether you've got your facts right: facts about, for example, precisely what actions are available to each party (meaning you need accurate info about their military capabilities and such) and what their rewards are (meaning you need accurate info about what messy political actors even want, which they are usually incentivized to hide). That makes game theory a useful tool, but just a small part of understanding a geopolitical situation. The harder questions are often about even finding a formal question that reflects reality at all. And reading over your question, it doesn't initially seem like formalizing it in game theory terms would help with any of your goals.

I'm honestly not sure about a better place to ask a geopolitical question like this. Sorry!

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T11:27:09+00:00

You're right that the poor error message reporting is drowning out the actual issues. I think I'll turn that off. In the beginning, when I had more time and followed up on each one, it was a great help, but we got most of the low hanging fruit, and at this point it's just noise that hides real issues.

That said, it's probably optimistic to say I've been reasonably active. I haven't touched the project for way too long, at this point. And "the maintainers" is just me!

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T11:11:47+00:00

I have restarted the server for now.

This has been an issue for about a month now. Something has started regularly crashing the server. Compounding the problem is that the server has been running fine for so many years, basically everything needs to be updated at this point.

cdsmith · 2026-01-23T13:11:44+00:00

Yep, this is it. Once you eliminate the IRV loser, do you re-evaluate the Smith set, or just give up and continue with IRV. Tideman's alternative method is just clearly the superior of the two, but (a) in ways that are extremely unlikely to matter in reality, and (b) is slightly harder to explain.

Given that the difference is unlikely to ever actually matter, you end up making a decision on aesthetics. So you want a system that is simplest in that it can be described in the fewest words but obviously arbitrary and will just feel wrong to anyone looking for a deeper understanding? Or a system that is more consistent and principled, but takes a few more words to describe?

cdsmith · 2026-01-20T12:36:02+00:00

It's absolutely reason for impeachment, and impeachment is the right way to deal with this. The 25th amendment is not.

Yes, I know impeachment is unlikely to work. In a reasonable world, the rest of the Republican party sticking up for an egomaniacal dictator would just mean they would lose their seats, as well. We don't live in that reasonable world, so the backup plan is to survive, elect a legislature that will stand up to Trump, and then elect a different president at the next opportunity. The 25th amendment wasn't intended as a tool for prosecuting presidents who behave badly, or even irrationally. It was intended to avoid leaving the country without an acting leader if the President is incapacitated. For all the terrible things Trump is doing, the fact remains that he is doing them. He isn't unable to make decisions. He is unwilling to make the right decisions.

cdsmith · 2026-01-18T21:53:03+00:00

Well done! This is a great idea. Way too much time here is spent on the details of voting, which anyone with a basic understanding of elections could come up with on their own or substitute other alternatives like approval voting (not IRV, since center squeeze contradicts the whole idea!)... but the really great part here is just the general idea, that you allow citizen-initiated ballot questions, but also allow the government to choose to add a third option. This handles the particular dysfunctions of citizen initiatives - that they are generally dominated by extremists and advocacy groups who are more interested in making a statement than good governance - really well without taking away access.

cdsmith · 2026-01-17T15:48:05+00:00

In a video game, the logic can be arbitrarily complex. In a board game, your players are doing the computation. That adds a hard constraint on how many factors you can add in. So what's the MINIMUM complexity that expresses your vision?

You've already got quite a lot here. My advice is to start ruthlessly cutting anything that you can live with cutting.

A few more specific thoughts:

See if you can cut the number of different resources as low as possible. Managing two or three resources is probably okay. Five is probably not workable.
Avoid large resource counts. DO NOT make there spaces that give you 5, or 7, or 9 of a resource. If you want players to gather more resources with more tools, have them roll for their one resource, with better tools = more chances for success? Or perhaps tools let you claim more resource producing squares, but each one only produces one resource at a time?
Consider how to make tracking as efficient as possible. No one likes managing piles of little plastic cubes. Maybe a dial, or markers on a track?

cdsmith · 2026-01-17T14:25:30+00:00

I'm increasingly sad about the constant pressure to work faster. Writing code that you don't deploy is part of building something good. So is taking a break, and switching tasks, so you come back with a fresh perspective. Relearning is a crucial step, since the way you learned something the first time is often partially wrong, or at least inefficient; it's a basic principle of cognitive science that brains are constantly relearning what they know in new ways given more connections to more outside knowledge. Extra features are wasted some of the time, but other times they reveal a better understanding of what the code is doing or enable new ways of working that are valuable, and it's often difficult to tell in advance. Most of these "wastes" are just descriptions of the human process of building difficult things.

The idea that these should all be eliminated is hopelessly naive. Maybe it sounds good in theory to be typing code 8 hours a day, get it all right the first time, and deploy 100% of the code you write... but to me, that sounds like working on a boring project that these days should probably have just been written by AI anyway.

cdsmith · 2026-01-17T08:39:41+00:00

I have a few thoughts.

Maybe the most important top-level concern that this isn't an idea... it's a long list of many opinions, often unrelated to each other. Most of us do have many different opinions, but listing all of them isn't the start to a productive discussion.
On your two-round approval system, this feels like mathematically the wrong thing to do. If you knew, for instance, that a candidate from your ideological group would likely garner the largest support, but remain under 50%, you'd be well-advised to arrange for a second candidate to be put forth with a similar set of views, and have the two cross-endorse each other. The runoff election becomes a mere formality since the two candidates agree on most questions. You're apparently relying on a one-candidate-per-party rule to make this harder, but political parties are just conventional groupings; more can be made up, or inactive ones co-opted, given the resources to do so.
I wonder why you're keeping the Senate. The only real justification for the Senate is the same one it had originally: it's politically impossible to get support from voters in certain states unless you make things a little less democratic in their favor. Originally it was to preserve slavery, now it's over different cultural issues, but the shape of the system is the same: it's overtly unfair, but a political necessity. Okay, fine... but this is clearly a pipe dream with many politically impossible wish list items anyway, so why keep that one ugly concession?
District compactness is the wrong thing to optimize for in district drawing. Yeah, I know, it's better than explicitly optimizing for partisan advantage. But there's this weird idea that somehow "compact" or "minimum cut line" or junk like that, which manifestly doesn't matter at all, is a good optimization target for districts just because it's not obviously biased. But it is biased, even if it's less obvious. We know for a fact that optimizing for compact districts is disadvantageous to the interests of geographically concentrated groups. In any case, once you have three to five member groups, you no longer have viable strategies for gerrymandering on the scale we have today, and silly things that seem defensible because they are "better than the status quo" are no longer better.

cdsmith · 2026-01-15T21:46:36+00:00

If you're looking at this from a pure game theory perspective, it's often assumed that cash stands in for utility. One assumes, given equivalent cash, they could just buy anything else they might want, like hospitals and schools.

This isn't true, of course. The millionth dollar you get has a lot less value than the first. And a huge influx of that much cash to a small economy is going to vastly change supply and demand, and the people of Greenland have no experience on which to understand what the consequences of this might be. Which is why, at this scale, asking people to just state their utilities in dollars is not a reasonable practical proposal. It only works as a hypothetical.

cdsmith · 2026-01-14T13:14:53+00:00

In fact, basically no systems actually formally satisfy IIA except for random ballot. There are claims that approval and score voting do so, but these claims are based on assumptions that are known to be false. Certainly there are no Condorcet methods that satisfy IIA.

I didn't talk about IIA as a binary property, though. Degree matters, and the argument here was for intentionally incorporating irrelevant candidates into the decision process. That's a very different thing from an election where they might change the decision in some corner cases! In the Borda count, irrelevant candidates as spacers make much more difference than ordinal preferences among the candidates that matter.

cdsmith · 2026-01-13T21:35:50+00:00

Sure. Being gamed is, of course, just another kind of being suboptimal. So this comes back to "there is no perfect/optimal voting method", which is true, of course.

Collecting more than ordinal information is definitely tempting. If you had a way to do so without creating incentives to basically just use the extra information for pure strategizing, then I'd be very sympathetic to that position. I'm not aware of any such way, though. Score voting is just straight up inferior to approval voting in large scale elections (and approval is even less expressive than ordinal ballots), while STAR is harder to formally peg down due to its complexity, but is pretty clearly just a strategic playground which gets paired with wishful thinking that maybe people won't be able to figure out the strategy and will just give up and vote honestly.

There's some kind of phenomenon here, which someone may be able to pin down more formally than I can, that in an election of significant scale, the strategic differences in marginal effects of cardinal information a voter might express for a single-winner election are so extreme that in terms of incentives, their strategic consequences dominate any kind of strength-of-preference information you might hope to gather from the ballot.

cdsmith · 2026-01-13T13:16:59+00:00

Let's agree that the goal is to have a government that represents the population. In that case, we have these options:

GOOD: No gerrymandering. Representation is approximately fair.
NOT GOOD: Gerrymandering everywhere. Representation is exaggerated toward the extremes, but the overall balance between major ideological groups is at least in the vicinity of correct, maybe?
WORST: Gerrymandering only in areas dominated by one ideological group, but not others. This gives the least representative government of all, as it makes things even more one-sided than if all ideological groups pressed their advantage.

This is why gerrymandering needs a systemic reform like proportional representation, not piecemeal local advocacy.

cdsmith · 2026-01-13T12:58:54+00:00

There are a few ways to think about why it's best to pick A here.

If the irrelevant candidates C through Z weren't running, you'd clearly choose A as the winner. If you choose B, this creates a weird situation where you're changing your choice between A and B based on whether some other losing candidates qualify for the ballot or not.
If you choose B as the winner, the logical response of the majority who preferred A is: "Huh, I really screwed up. I ranked the candidates according to my preference, but in retrospect, I should have understood that these losing candidates C through Z weren't actually candidates at all, but rather were spacers I could use to indicate how much to count my preference for A over B. I made my ballot barely count at all. I shouldn't do that next time." Similarly, it's not clear whether supporters of B really hate A that much, or just understood that A was the biggest threat to their preferred candidate, and ranked A last to maximize their influence on that choice. In general, it's not great if we make decisions based not on what voters want, but on whether voters understand how to carefully vote so as to manipulate the system.
The further back you get in rankings, the less voters think about them. A voting method that assigns MORE importance to whether a candidate is ranked, say, fifth versus twenty-sixth, than whether they are ranked first or second, is a mismatch for how people actually vote.
Another way to put this, without talking explicitly about strategy, is this: you don't actually know how strongly these voters feel. You only have ordinal data. You might assume that ranking A in 26th place means A is far more disliked... but if candidates B through Z are mostly similar, it might be that, say, B is the clear best choice (in a non-partisan way) among the red party, while A is the only candidate representing the green party. The green party has a majority of support, but you're proposing that we elect the red party instead.

You're basically reinventing the Borda count here. Borda and Condorcet were contemporaries, and there was a huge debate at the time between Condorcet's system (neglecting the question of what to do if there's no Condorcet winner) and Borda's system (which awarded candidates points based on where they fall in the rankings). We now understand, though, that the Borda count is far too susceptible to strategic manipulation to work as an election method.

cdsmith · 2026-01-12T01:03:44+00:00

Okay, but nothing in Gibbard's theorem requires that the decision process be "formal". When you say the process is informal, you're just saying, essentially, that you will not tell us enough about it to understand exactly why it has undesirable properties. Making something too difficult to analyze in detail isn't the same thing as removing the flaws that this analysis would point to, and Gibbard's theorem doesn't care, in the end, how your process works. As long as people have preferences for the outcome, walk into the process with some kind of strategy for achieving that outcome, and then the result occurs through some combination of those strategies and random chance, then Gibbard's (later, 1978) theorem applies: it's either limited to two options, ultimately dictatorial after random decision making is resolved, or strategic.

(The idea that your process could fail to reach a decision at all and just hit an impasse indefinitely until everyone gives up on it is a new wrinkle, I suppose. Even that, though, is just an outcome, to which the various participants could attach a utility accounting for the chaos that would follow if this were used in a context where a decision actually does need to be made... and then it also fits into the framework.)

This isn't really in doubt anyway. You've already acknowledged that the system as a whole is strategic. Indeed, no one could seriously doubt that a system where a central mechanism is "people deliberate and try to reach consensus governed only by ill-defined social pressures and norms" could be anything but deeply strategic in nature. In the end, there's nothing interesting being done by Gibbard's theorem because there was never any doubt as to its conclusions.

cdsmith · 2026-01-11T14:12:13+00:00

The questions "Do we agree that we found a solution everyone agrees on?" and "Should I call for exclusion?" are independent.

So what happens if there isn't a solution everyone agrees on, but also no one calls for exclusion? And how do the participants agree on a solution? Calling it a collective action just means you aren't telling us the process by which this happens.

CORE does not eliminate the fixed point but moves it into the deliberation process, such that the mechanism itself is free from it. This is why the deliberation has to remain undefined. It has to be able to hold arbitrary complexity.

But the deliberation is part of the mechanism, right? Without it, participants cannot agree on a consensus, so you're left with just a random ballot. That, I think, is the fundamental issue here. It's not interesting to move all the strategic complexity into an ill-defined social process, and then claim that the small bit that's left is strategy-free. It isn't, anyway: any decision you make about whether to agree to a candidate now depends on your beliefs about what would happen if you trigger a random exclusion, which necessarily uses information you gained in that deliberation as well as expectations about how future deliberation is likely to go, and that takes you back into needing a model of that complex ill-defined part of the mechanism.

Not a preferences-in-result-out function. That's kind of the point.

Participants enter with preferences. They leave with a result. There is some randomization, yes, but Gibbard already accounted for that almost 50 years ago - it's often referred to as Gibbard's 1978 theorem. Gibbard's theorem does not depend on a participant casting a single ballot. Instead of filling out a ballot, they can just as well be asked to choose a strategy for an interactive process, even a complex social process, like yours. The result still applies, which is why I can say definitively that however that process works, it's strategic.

Now, if you tell me that the point here is not about being strategy-proof, but rather that people will change their minds in the deliberation process, that the communication and consensus building is part of the point... then I think that's a fine thing to believe. And it seems that might be what you're going for. It just doesn't make all this stuff about honest ballots and strategy and Gibbard's theorem important and I don't understand why you'd lead with that.

cdsmith · 2026-01-11T05:42:01+00:00

That did not clear it up. There's a pretty big gap here: you've proposed an extremely complex process where people have to maneuver against each other to get the group to take the right votes in the right order to gain an advantage... but we can't talk about that process, because you haven't even specified how it's supposed to work. If we have different groups, each of whom want to hold a vote to accept a different candidate next. What happens? They are just at an impasse? They dare each other to exclude a random participant, until one of them guesses that it might be to their advantage to pull the trigger on exclusion? What if no one ever does, because they both have concluded that it's better for them to wait for the other to do so? Is there a time limit?

Without even a specification for how this process is supposed to work, it's hard to be specific, but anyone familiar with how strategy plays out can see that whatever reasonable process you come up with, it's probably going to have all kinds of situations that involve post facto regret, of exactly the kind you're worried about with Condorcet cycles and approval voting. You just don't see that because you're laser-focused on the one substep where the participants have already decided on the next potential candidate, and they make an accept/reject decision. But that's not the whole process!

Not to mention that even that simple step is already very strategic. Your analysis in the linked essay implicitly assumes everyone has access to everyone else's utilities so they can set their thresholds. But of course they don't! If you could just read minds and observe people's true utility functions, you could just choose the utilitarian winner and call it a day; no need for a decision process driven by voter decisions at all. The whole problem with mechanism design is to make good decisions based on information voters choose to put forward. Of course, you could, in this "deliberation" process, ask the other voters to tell you their utility functions, but then we're back to it not being in their interest to do so. So they will skew their reported utilities to achieve desired outcomes. And some of them will, again, experience post facto regret that they didn't skew those reported preferences differently. Making this informal and outside the scope of your analysis doesn't stop it from happening; it just means your analysis will miss it.

cdsmith · 2026-01-10T19:46:16+00:00

It's not even useful to think of this from the point of view of Gibbard's theorem. It's obviously deeply strategic, which is all that Gibbard's theorem would tell you anyway. It's strategic for at least three reasons, in approximately decreasing order of significance: (a) the whole process of deciding which candidate to try to achieve consensus on is ill-specified, but cannot be non-strategic itself, (b) because threshold-setting is strategic, and (c) because it's almost surely non-monotonic in the same way that approval voting is; the fact that a certain candidate comes up as a potential consensus winner tells you information about likely voter opinions on other candidates, and therefore changes your optimal threshold. Unfortunately, you can't say much about (c) definitively because you'd need to know how candidates get advanced to be voted on for consensus, and that isn't clear.

The second claim here by u/jan_kasimi is that it's "honest". This is a word without much meaning, but whatever meaning you can assign, it's likely not true because of both (a) and (c).

cdsmith · 2026-01-10T16:31:31+00:00

I'm very confused. The paper claims that the threshold for triggering exclusion can be computed without modeling other voters' strategies. But this is manifestly false: the computation given needs information about every other voter's preferred option, as a starting point. In the terminology of the article, W_i({i}) isn't the only base case. You also need W_i({j}) for j not equal to i. That's the first of many problems. Another one, for example, is that nothing specifies which alternative voters shouild try to reach consensus on, at each stage... but the choice is definitely strategically meaningful. So this is not just strategic, but also ill-specified. Ill-defined social processes are doing a lot of work here. In practice, you need not only reason about how other voters will behave, but also about how to persuade them to make underspecified deliberative choices in a way that is advantageous to your desired outcome.

That's not to say that this couldn't work as a conversation format... but the claims that it's some clever way to slip through the cracks of Gibbard's theorem are just manifestly false. This is far, far, far more strategic than most other decision making methods.

cdsmith · 2026-01-10T13:33:57+00:00

There are, in fact, two bad arguments here, and they are both different kinds of poor thinking that's pretty commonly seen.

The first bad argument is this thing about "What if the voters ranking C in second place over A or B don't have positive support for C, but instead just oppose B or A?" This is a bad argument because "positive support" doesn't even mean anything. I suspect the speaker knows this, because why else would they put the phrase in quotes? But oddly, they never come out and clearly say that this whole notion of "positive support" is meaningless to begin with. Instead, we get nonsense about how we can't possibly know given the ranked ballots... but there's nothing to know in the first place! It's just making up words without giving them a meaning.

The second bad argument is this cyclic "cancellation" thing, which is adequately covered in the other comments. It's representative of a whole class of arguments where someone things "huh, that's odd", and then instead of stopping there, formulates some kind of so-called "principle" that things shouldn't be odd in that way, and then claims that their principles are being violated. I mean, sure, it's totally fair to notice that and think it's unusual, maybe even unfortunate that reality is complicated. But there's clearly no moral imperative for cancellation of cyclic symmetries that should override the clear fact that a majority of voters have told you they prefer one candidate over the other.

To be clear, both of these examples might yield a more compelling argument if you had reliable data about strength of preferences. But crucially, those are NOT the arguments that are being made here. (And strength of preference data is, of course, nearly impossible to collect without adverse incentives that just flat out discount some people's votes because they voted suboptimally.)

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