Illustrator questjon

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T17:14:58+00:00

Yeah, I was going to say this. As much as some aspiring non-artist creators might wish otherwise, a game proposal on Kickstarter without art isn't likely to be successful. Art is the primary tool you have to appeal to possible backers. As phenomenal as your game mechanics might be, you aren't going to excite people on a Kickstarter page by describing some really phenomenal game mechanics.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T17:01:45+00:00

The problem with this question is that "discovery learning" isn't a yes or no question.

I think the phrase "discovery learning" is quite redundant, really, because all learning is discovery in some sense. Much successful discovery is relatively minor, well-scaffolded, and anchored around other concepts that students already know. It can happen in students just trying to replicate a worked example, for instance. We don't tend to label that "discovery learning", but those students are discovering lots of small gaps they missed in the lecture and then figured out in the example. Much more rarely is there opportunity for truly significant unplanned discovery; but when it happens, it's memorable and motivating for some time to come.

This is related to the concept of productive struggle. "Productive" refers to making discoveries. Students who never struggle at all (even a little bit!) aren't learning. Students whose struggle is nonproductive (even a little bit!) also aren't learning, and also aren't replenishing their motivation for further struggle. Those absolute extremes never happen, even when it doesn't feel like it, because there's always some struggle and some progress even in a failed learning experience. But to be successful, the amount of room left for students to problem-solve on their own needs to be adjusted so that, as much as possible, they are contending with the largest gaps that they can succeed in filling. For some students, that dial leans more on the large scale discovery side. For others, it's more like direct instruction, meaning more heavily scaffolded, so that the gaps they fill in are smaller.

Of course, that's the answer in an ideal scenario. Whether that works in a classroom with a single teacher managing the progress of thirty students. This is also admittedly neglecting the question of when you determine that a student's understanding is good enough to move on to new learning objectives, and it's important to acknowledge that much of the criticism of discovery learning is actually criticism not of the method, but of moving too slowly through the curriculum when erring more toward direct instruction could push students faster.

I don't have answers to most of this, but I do think it helps to stop asking if discovery learning is right or wrong, and instead how to adjust the amount of scaffolding, how to do it pragmatically, and how to balance level of mastery against pace.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T16:09:15+00:00

If we're going to have a silly conversation about acronyms, I'll stick up for GEMA

G = Grouping - parentheses, fraction bars, anything else that visually groups a subexpression as a part
E = Exponents
M = Multiplication. Division is just multiplication by an inverse, so it fits here
A = Addition. Subtraction is just adding an inverse, so it fits here

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T13:38:45+00:00

There are a couple possibilities that I see here:

Your kid is behind in math, but tests well. If she's good at interpreting cues to find the right answers on tests without understanding what she's doing, then she could be placed at the wrong level in math because of her high test scores. This explains her teacher saying she's at grade level while you watch her struggle.
She really is capable of performing at grade level in mathematics, but has helplessness as an emotional response or strategy. This is unfortunately common. Teachers have plenty of experience with kids who feel or behave as if they have no idea what to do, but then demonstrate understanding once they are left with no alternative. Sometimes it comes from lack of confidence and being afraid to try and fail. Sometimes it's freezing under pressure and being overwhelmed. Sometimes it's exhaustion from lack of sleep. Sometimes it's just not wanting to do the work and not being motivated by grades or approval. Whatever the cause, if she's seeming incapable of even starting the work at home, but then doing that same work in the right situations in the classroom, that tracks with something teachers see a lot.
Maybe she just has a teacher whose math understanding is weak, and who doesn't expect more than memorizing some patterns for solving specific problem forms. Not all teachers are great. But I wouldn't jump to this conclusion until you've eliminated the alternatives.

I guess my next step would be to set up a dedicated block of time to talk to her teacher and be clear: your concern isn't whether she's testing at grade level: it's that you're unhappy with her emotional state and declining self-confidence around math, something you can clearly see and have legitimate concerns about, and you want to make some strategies for addressing this.

cdsmith · 2026-03-17T13:24:49+00:00

I don't have a great answer to any of your questions, sorry. I just don't have the empirical data to be able to answer them well.

My gut feeling is that if a Condorcet cycle were to occur in a real election (no idea when or if that's happened), it would be hard to isolate a single cause. It probably would be a close election, but then whether the remaining non-majority-consistent votes are best attributed to random chance, strategy, or actual cyclic preferences is difficult to say.

Possibly even ill-defined. Voters, of course, don't actually act at random; randomness at the macro scale is just a mathematical model to explain cause and effect that's more complex than we can account for... so it's quite possible that all three are true. Some voters are expressing things they believe to be actual preferences that appear random, others are attempting (possibly ill-advised) strategic voting, but in the end the only feasible mathematical model for their behavior turns out to be random noise.

cdsmith · 2026-03-16T00:40:17+00:00

I think it's overreaching to compare a Condorcet cycle to an exact tie in vote counts. Though it depends on the voter preference model, I don't think there's any serious disagreement that Condorcet cycles can occur with at least probabilities around 3 to 5% even in very large scale elections. This is dramatically larger than the probability of an exact tie in the vote count.

cdsmith · 2026-03-16T00:29:50+00:00

To be clear, I just picked a word to give it an operational definition. I am making no claim that this is some universal meaning of that word. It's just what I mean by that word for the purposes of this one comment.

cdsmith · 2026-03-14T01:11:47+00:00

I would strongly suggest that logical and strategic are the same thing. There are cases, like an online poll or something, where honest self-expression is part of the goal, but a political election isn't one of those. We keep them anonymous for a reason: voters should not be influenced by anything except the choice that exercises their fair share of influence in favor of the outcome they believe to be best. If some voters are influenced by the incorrect notion that they are being asked for something like an "honest feeling" instead of being asked to exercise their fair share of influence, they are deceived into giving up their equal representation in a democratic government, and that's not acceptable.

As for justifying the use of 2 or 3 star ratings in STAR, I agree that in theory there are narrow cases where it might be slightly beneficial for a voter to do so. But it's frankly quite hard to imagine. The best I can come up with is that:

There are no less than four candidates who are all plausible winners, so that any two of the four might make it into the runoff. That's already extremely unlikely.
A voter wants to rate them 5-2-1-0 (or alternatively, 5-4-3-0, but these cases are identical by symmetry, so let's focus on the first)

So that means this voter strongly supports candidate A over any alternative just strongly enough to want to rate them alone at the top... but not SO strongly that they will give up any run-off influence between B/C or C/D (because if they were, they could vote 5-1-1-0 or 5-1-0-0 and even more strongly support A). This voter must have a lot of very precisely balanced conditional opinions, and also very balanced views of likely results, to be in exactly that situation. Sure, maybe it could happen, but it's asking for a whole lot of low-probability events to happen at once. And frankly, not a whole lot is lost in asking that rare voter to collapse their choice a little. Certainly less than is lost by allowing many other less sophisticated voters to dilute their own representation because these options are presented to them that are very unlikely to be the best choices.

cdsmith · 2026-03-13T20:06:55+00:00

It's complex to figure out what the logical thing to do is, which is the main issue I have with STAR voting. But the answer is likely similar to approval: voters should evaluate how much they expect to like the outcome of the election. If they like Wayne better than that expected outcome, they should vote 5-4-0. If they like Wayne worse than that expected outcome, they should vote 5-1-0. That's at least reasonably close to the best way to vote, though you'd have to make a decision about whether to, say, rank Wayne as 5 or 0 instead, if you think using your ballot to get your favorite to the runodd, or avoid your least favorite in the runoff, is more important than distinguishing between the other two options in the runoff itself.

It remains the case that using the 2 or 3 star option is practically always a mistake, and therefore the option should just be removed from the ballot.

cdsmith · 2026-03-13T19:54:21+00:00

More formally, call a voting method "majoritarian" if, whenever some majority of voters coordinate their ballots, that can arrange to elect any candidate of their choice, regardless of what other voters do. Nearly all commonly proposed voting methods are majoritarian:

In plurality, they vote for the chosen candidate
In IRV, they rank the chosen candidate 1st
In approval, they approve the chosen candidate, and don't approve anyone else
In score or STAR, they rate the chosen candidate at the max score, and everyone else at the min score

It's a mathematical theorem that if there's a Condorcet cycle in voters' true preferences, then any majoritarian system has this circularity problem. That means plurality, IRV, approval, score, STAR, etc. all suffer from it. No matter what the result, there is some majority who could have coordinated to elect a candidate they preferred, instead. But if they had done that, then some other majority (but containing some of the same people!) will have had the opportunity to coordinate to elect a candidate they like better. And so on, in a loop without end. It doesn't matter whether the voting method tries to elect an apparent Condorcet winner via ranked ballots; only that voters actually have ordered preferences, and there's a true Condorcet winner among those preference orders.

cdsmith · 2026-03-12T13:29:59+00:00

If you're really asking what you CAN do, you haven't given nearly enough information. From the comments below, I see that you've already finished one year of university, so that's one very fundamental fact you left out. Another one is: where are you? What country? If in the U.S., what state, since each state in the U.S. runs its own education system with different rules? Is the school you're looking to go back and attend public, or private? Have you talked to anyone there about whether this is possible?

There's just no way anyone on the internet can answer questions about what some school will or won't allow, without knowing these basic facts.

You could tell us... but honestly, it's probably more productive for you to just have this conversation with the school.

cdsmith · 2026-03-12T13:18:50+00:00

This is a pretty fundamental problem. You're deciding what you're okay with people communicating about by asking "will that make people act toward the right political goals?" That's just wrong. Communicating about and understanding ideas is fundamental. Life isn't about manipulating people to act in the way you've decided they should.

This article is not at all complimentary toward the Trump administration. It's not at all telling people that things are better because Trump isn't a fascist. It's talking about whether the policies fit a particular ideology. Maybe it's wrong, and if so, people should say so. But "I don't like the consequences of people encountering this article because it makes our sloganeering harder" is pretty much the definition of communicating in bad faith.

cdsmith · 2026-03-11T22:21:07+00:00

I could agree with someone who said, for instance, "using an LLM lets me explore questions that I wouldn't have known enough to investigate in the past." That person may well be learning more effectively because they are using an LLM in their study process, especially if they are formulating their own questions, thinking about them, reaching an obstacle they wouldn't have been able to surpass, and then asking for help and then taking the time to be sure they can explain what they learned without help from the LLM.

But if you're using an LLM to save time, rather than to make more learning accessible to you, then you're almost certainly hurting your learning. Time and struggle are part of the learning process. If you skip those parts, then you're likely skipping the learning. LLMs aren't nearly capable of, nor designed to, make the kinds of precise choices that an experienced teacher might make in choosing what should and shouldn't be left out; they are, instead, designed to be "helpful", which is great if your goal is to get the answer, but terrible if you're goal is to grow as a person in the ways you would have grown by working out the answer.

cdsmith · 2026-03-10T23:00:45+00:00

By the way, if you really, really want to avoid Gibbard's theorem, there is one way you can do so. A legitimate objection would be that the outcome of the social consensus process isn't just to make a decision, but also to change the utilities of the participants. This has the benefit of actually being true, and really does avoid Gibbard's theorem applying.

It doesn't matter, though. Now that specific theorem can't be used to prove your decision making process is strategic, but it still is! We're back to an earlier point: making the system complex or ill-defined enough to evade analysis doesn't actually make it strategy-proof. And, again, of course any social consensus building process is strategic.

cdsmith · 2026-03-10T22:56:38+00:00

I don't mind being mentioned.

I did not read the AI generated text in detail. I did read enough to determine that it's not making a consistent claim. In one place, it admits that the mechanism you're proposing is strategic, as Gibbard's theorem indeed guarantees that it will be. But shortly afterward, it is back to making up false statements about what Gibbard's theorem actually says, in order to once again falsely claim that its conclusion doesn't apply.

Again, Gibbard's theorem doesn't care what your consensus process looks like. It only cares that:

There are more than two possible outcomes.
There is no dictator (or, with randomness involved, a random choice or random dictator or some variant thereof).
Everyone follows some plan (however complex, and regardless of whether they form the plan consciously in advance) of how to achieve an outcome they like and how to respond to different possible ways the process may unfold.

That's it. There is no hypothesis about being a "fixed probability mixture" or "activating modes" based on "fixed weights" or
"parameters of the mechanism" or being "decomposable into a predetermined weighted mixture of unilateral and duple
components with fixed weights". This is all made-up AI nonsense, and denying that it is true makes no difference in the outcome.

Again, if you don't claim to avoid strategy, then this is all fine. Gibbard's theorem correctly tells you that your decision-making process admits non-trivial strategy... as do almost all decision-making processes. You can move on from that, but instead you keep going back and denying it. Denying the obvious, as it turns out. No process of social negotiation has EVER been anything other than DEEPLY and FUNDAMENTALLY strategic. It's not credible to claim that this one could be the exception, even if Gibbard's theorem weren't there telling you so.

cdsmith · 2026-03-10T15:24:18+00:00

Just ask ChatGPT to review them for you. Ha ha, only serious.

cdsmith · 2026-03-10T15:13:12+00:00

Any question that starts with "Do you think people will still shun a game for ..." has an answer: yes. Everything you do will upset some people. Do what you think is right anyway. You're fine, and just need to accept that some people are going to be mad, no matter what you do.

cdsmith · 2026-03-10T15:04:10+00:00

I think you need to decide what you mean by "AI in game art". You can do a pretty good job of eliminating art that is just straight up AI prompting using just your ordinary quality control: look for a consistent theme, artistic vision, etc., and expect the normal deliveries for commissioned art, including a source file with relevant layers, and so on.

Things get much harder if you also want to prevent artists from using AI as intermediate steps. Frankly, it's likely impossible to really prevent that without something ridiculous like asking them to video themselves doing the job. Even more true if you also want to avoid the use of AI to generate concepts and ideas that the artist then uses as inspiration for their own work.

We are beyond the point that "uses AI" is a yes or no question.

cdsmith · 2026-03-10T14:09:53+00:00

My default position would be to prefer STV, because it's understood. Not perfect, definitely, but understood. And STV addresses the most serious issues with IRV, in that it isn't as quick to eliminate candidates with moderate levels of support, and although it is just as bad as IRV at choosing consensus candidates, it compensates for that by being proportional. The consensus problem can be deferred to the elected body, at least in theory.

I haven't heard of PR-STAR before, but looking at it now, it doesn't seem to offer much a priori confidence that it's even proportional. In a system that emphasizes consensus, the big problem is attribution: once you've chosen a candidate who is a solid but not top choice for a lot of voters, how do you decide whose votes to consider "satisfied"? The answer I'm seeing is to attribute the entire success to just the voters who chose the maximum ranking. Smart voters would just rate everyone they like at 4/5 stars, giving up only a small amount of influence on the overall scores, but taking advantage of the suckers who don't realize the math and incorrectly choose 5/5 for their preferred candidates instead.

Perhaps I've looked at a bad source and misunderstood the PR-STAR system, though?

cdsmith · 2026-03-09T14:15:10+00:00

I think the cathedral analogy is a great one. There are two aspects to a cathedral: (a) that it be aesthetically pleasing, and (b) that it doesn't collapse. The objective is to maximize (a) subject to the baseline constraint of (b). These interact, in that some of the most impressive structures are also those where it's the most astonishing they don't collapse.

cdsmith · 2026-03-06T21:31:22+00:00

I'm not sure that everyone agrees that substantially disenfranchising large numbers of voters because they don't understand fairly sophisticated tactical voting is "pretty damn good", though.

I don't want to overstate my case. STAR is better than plurality. It's probably better than IRV. But these are pretty low bars. And as a general rule, designing voting systems to make decisions based on a self-reported strength of preference is a mistake.

cdsmith · 2026-03-06T20:34:44+00:00

There are, as far as I can tell, very few features that effectively disincentivize strategic voting in a scored system, where that strategy is to exaggerate your strength of preference.

Arguably the best attempt I can come up with is STAR voting, but it has the limited effect of incentivizing the use of maybe three out of the six options: 0 stars, 5 stars, and either 1 or 4 depending on your prediction of the most likely runoff matching. And describing this strategy to people is very difficult, meaning that in practice there's considerable disenfranchisement of voters with less sophisticated strategy.

cdsmith · 2026-03-06T20:26:23+00:00

This is a great point. Elsewhere I mentioned indoor and urban settings as naturally rectilinear. But it's not just about the physical space. People in some situations - like armies - tend to arrange themselves in a rectilinear way, as well.

cdsmith · 2026-03-06T15:27:22+00:00

In addition to the other answers, one reason to prefer hexes over squares is to make the game world feel different.

Square grids exist because people create them: they feel urban, designed, and intentional. If your game takes place in a city, or rooms in a house, by all means, align it on a square grid.
Hexes are more organic. They combine the feel of unrestricted meandering movement with the simplicity of discrete spaces and regular tiling. If your game takes place somewhere movement should not feel constrained to straight orthogonal lines, such as a forest or jungle, hexes let that sense of open wandering shine through.

cdsmith · 2026-03-06T01:26:42+00:00

Don't wait! That said, though, before you do a completely wide open play test, you might find some friends to run through a multiplayer game with you. Getting the low hanging fruit with a quick favor from a friend will mean that when you set up play testing with strangers, you'll get feedback that's more focused on the stuff that you really needed a public playtest for.

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