Month: May 2017

Question answered: How is telecommuting working for you?

The plural of anecdote is Quora answers.

Herewith mine.

I worked for 3 years physically in a job that many of you will have already worked out by now, and 14 more telecommuting. The only way I could bear to keep working on that job was by telecommuting, and through the low level of supervision and engagement with management that entailed. And in fact, it’s astonishing I stayed with the job as long as I did.

Which is one way of dealing with difficult bosses, I guess.

Telecommuting can work, but you need a boss with clarity on their goals, a high degree of autonomy, a high degree of trust, a way of giving visibility to your work product, and an effective way of coordinating with colleagues. Particularly if you’ve got severe timezone clashes, these are challenges; I spent a lot of time on chat with my most excellent and generous and helpful programming colleagues; and weekly phone catchups with management were essential, all dysfunctions considered. I’m doing bits of work on Upwork now, and getting the attention of your British or US or even Indian client when you’re on UTC+10 is very hard; it’s getting me to stay up later than I should need to.

There’s high convenience and flexibility; but they come at a cost of lack of clarity and focus. I’m very happy to telecommute as a second job; I’d have misgivings about telecommuting for a primary job.

Vote #1 Dave Aronson’s answer to How is telecommuting working for you?, who’s gone into all of this in much better detail.

Not much, I regret to say, but a couple of things.

Curtis Lindsay’s answer to Chopin’s prelude #4 in E minor is his most famous. Despite the straightforward melody, it overflows with emotion. What is the main emotion expressed in the piece and why was this emotion used? This came at the right time for me to contemplate giving Chopin a second chance. I even bought a CD of the 24 preludes and 4 ballades.

I only liked the slow ones. But thank you, Curtis!

The other one was conceding that gender dysphoria is nature as well as nurture: a pathway from https://www.quora.com/Seeing-tha… , through https://www.quora.com/Seeing-tha… , to Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is gender dysphoria a recent phenomenon?

You’ll see me in the aftermath of changing my mind in comments; I was heading that way anyway, but actually listening to people experiencing dysphoria (such as Lux Li) was really instructive for me.

Victoria Weaver’s Star Trek technocommunism hasn’t made a convert of me yet, but I’m giving it a more sympathetic hearing than I’d have expected of myself.

Dimitris Almyrantis has an often contrarian, and always instructive perspective on history. I don’t know if he’s changed my mind, quite, but he’s certainly shifted me out of my comfort zone.

Actual lesbians have answered this question, and now, despite my better judgement, so will I. Using the insightful comment of one of their number as a springboard:

Molly Juul: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-…

The “aesthetically finding women more beautiful”-phenomenon is 100% social. Women are sexualized sooo much in the media, and men are constantly being told that “women are the only ones who should care about beauty, men can never be beautiful”. At least, this is my theory.

You know Ancient Greece? Men was seen as the aesthetically more beautiful and perfect gender.

This. And it’s salutary to spell it out:

• Individuals find people of varied genders hot, through a nebulous interaction of their innateness, their socialisation, and social constructs.
• The dominant narrative of hotness in Western society is heteronormative and male–centred. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to find, I dunno, Sophia Loren attractive, because I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to be cis het male. It is a perspective, that happens to be the dominant one, but is as true as any other.
• The notion that this dominant narrative is the universal narrative, though, is pernicious to anyone who isn’t its direct beneficiary. Gay men deserve their beefcake too (and they get it). Straight women deserve it too, and a lot of them are socialised not to seek it—because blokes are unlovely. If blokes are so unlovely, why boff us at all? That gets very unhealthy very quickly.
• And I know noone should cry for the poor cis het male, but being told all your life that only chicks are attractive, and that you can only be a consumer of beauty and not a producer? That’s not healthy for blokes either. As you can see in the questions asked in the Relationships topic here.
• As for lesbians… my reaction downstream from Molly, via Melinda Gwin, was to reject the question as implying “are there lesbians because girls are hot according to heteronormative contingent cultural norms of femininity that a lot of lesbians overtly reject?” The heels-wearing, unironically femme “lesbians” of straight porn doing endless kissy-face may match the criteria of “hot” underlying the question; but they do not correspond to the life experience and predilections of all actual lesbians.
• Or so I am told.

So yes and no. Lesbians are lesbians because girls are hot. But the girls a straight man finds hot are not necessarily the girls a lesbian finds hot. Guys are hot too, despite the pernicious standard narrative. And lesbians aren’t lesbians because of a straight man’s notion of female beauty. Or because women are somehow intrinsically and objectively more attractive than men.

Now normally, there would be some banter in comments between me and Melinda about the objective facthood of feminine pulchritude, and how her current, atypically male partner violates her better judgment. But you know what? He too is lovable, including physically lovable.

Of the four non-English​ Quoras to date:

• I don’t have an account on the Italian yet, and I’ve never formally learned the language. Informally, I have faked the language through reconstruction from music scores and Latin, but I would be reluctant to commit my improvisation to writing.
• Taxi cabs are another matter.

• I spent some time watching Univision while living in Southern California, but I have not studied Spanish either, and Speedy Gonzales cartoons are no substitute for musical scores, when it comes to reconstructing a language. The four Quora languages are in fact the four European languages taught at Melbourne Uni, when I was hanging out there in IT; but Spanish was a late addition, and I didn’t get on with the lecturer. So less incentive there.
• The languages I have had formal training in are French and German. My command of the two is equally bad, but I’m clearly gravitating towards the German.
• I already know two users well on the German site, Clarissa and Joachim. (Can’t tempt you to join, Kat?) I’ve been doing good banter with both. On the French site, I only know Habib well, and I didn’t get the impression he was a frequent poster.
• I have aesthetic reasons to prefer German to French. Although that aesthetics is as much to do with their music as their language.
• I have had my one French answer corrected 4 times. The first time by Sihem herself. The first two times, it’s flattering. By the fourth time, you start suspecting that maybe they’re trying to tell you something. My German answers have been corrected too, but only once (so far). And my German interlocutors tell me they find my German adorably eccentric.
• … They should be careful what they wish for…

Why yes, I do have footage of me speaking German in a cab, too:

See? They should be careful what they wish for…

As I expect you know, Collapse Bot hates Non-Roman scripts.

I’ve had several bouts with the bot over the question Which conjugation is Gnōthi ‘know’, as in Gnōthi sauton ‘know thyself’?

The Greek used to be in Greek characters, and without glosses. Shifting to transliteration and italics, and adding glosses, sometimes works; this time it hasn’t.

Some of you will have put non-English in questions. How do you get the bot to shut up?

I’m going to answer a different interpretation of this question. If all languages have access to the same, finite repertoire of segments (phonemes), then why do they sound as different as they do?

There are several answers to this.

• The repertoire of phonemes may be finite, but the realisation can be phonetically different. A Dutch /x/ is much more fortis than a Greek /x/.
• Different languages employ quite different subsets of the available phonemic inventory.
• Languages differ in sound, not only at the level of individual segments, but also in how they arrange those segments, their phonotactics. People are very attuned to phonotactic differences, because that’s what they are listening for when they are trying to make sense of strings of segments as words.
• Languages, dialects, and for that matter idiolects differ hugely in their suprasegmental phenomena, the aspects of speech that range beyond the individual segments. That includes intonation, loudness, and timbre.

Panos Skoulidas‘ answer is right. To elaborate:

• Κομψός means “elegant, clean cut”. It has ancient lineage. It does not explicitly mean that someone is fashionable; it can correspond to “classic”, and it can certainly be used approvingly by an 80 year old.
• Σικ, from French chic, explicitly refers to being up to date with fashion.
• Both posh and preppy are negative evaluations, posh more so. The closest of the three is κυριλέ, which is derisive slang about someone with upper class affectation in how they present themselves (so posh, but without the British connotations, and more about parvenues). It is derived from κύριος, (in this context) “gentleman”, plus the French fashion style suffix -é.
• The /l/ is a random consonant, inserted so the word wouldn’t end up ambiguous with κύριε “sir!”

Latin confirmed with a check in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Latin was clearly on the wane from the 7th century, but it seems not completely lost:

Lawyers preserved some knowledge of Latin, often superficial, from the 8th to 11th C., and Constantine IX’s novel establishing a law school in Constantinople prescribes the teaching of Latin. From the 11th C. onward, closer, if sometimes hostile, contact with the West led to increasing knowledge of Latin in leading Byz. circles; Romanos III spoke Latin and Psellos claimed some knowledge of it. Still, cultural arrogance usually marked Byz. attitudes to the West and its language.

Knowledge of Latin was even greater after the Fourth Crusade, and Maximus Planudes and the Cydones brothers even translated Latin works into Greek in the 14th century.

Nonetheless, Mehmed II’s diplomatic correspondence with the West was in fact in Modern Greek.

I seem to answer a question like this every few months. This is this trimester’s iteration:

• No transparency
• Low clarity
• The policies are often as vague as any article of the US constitution
• Low visibility
• No visibility of updates
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is Quora’s policy on adding images and videos to answers?
• No equity (consideration of circumstances)
• No accountability
• Worse still, if you aren’t aware of Tatiana’s email address or role as a user: random accountability. There are any number of moderation decisions that Tatiana has publicly repealed and apologised for, but only when they were pointed out to her in public. Most users don’t know who Tatiana is; and less do now than did 6 months ago. Whatever is happening with appeal, the normal avenues are clearly not always working or getting escalated up to her.
• Infantilising tone-policing, as part of BNBR
• Enforcement by robots
• Robotic enforcement (even if they aren’t robots)
• Culminating in Bodnick’s Bodnickism that moderation does not consider content when judging infractions. Not context. Content.
• Low community confidence in enforcement
• Widespread suspicion of selective enforcement
• I think we can all name the TWs who seem to repeatedly get away with murder. I’ve blocked most of them already.
• Breathtaking arrogance on the part of their defenders
• No, just because Quora is a private company does not mean it is morally neutral.
• No, just because Quora is a private company does not mean I should joyfully accept their constraints on my speech or others’.
• No, just because you follow the letter and not the spirit of BNBR does not make you a better person, argumentative and arrogant TW from my home town that I have already chosen to block, and who has expressed shock that people don’t do BNBR in real life. Thank God they don’t do BNBR the way you choose to, anyway.
• Breathtaking radio silence on the part of their implementers
• Although it’s not much better when they aren’t silent

… How would I fix it?

Going back to 2013 would be a start. There are things Achilleas Vortselas or Christopher VanLang or Tracey Bryan or Marcus Geduld have written here over the years as community moderators, that I’ve disagreed with. But when Marcus says that community mods used to agonise over decisions to ban people, I believed him, because I trust people who’ll show their face in public, and take accountability for what they do.

Trust in-sourced Quora Moderation, on the other hand? Whatever unholy mix of bots, contractors, and employees behind the curtain it may be? With so many visible errors and so little effort to restore trust in its processes? And with even former leads quite happy to throw them under the bus, as has happened on the pages of Cordially Resistant?

I’d fix Quora Moderation by having Quora be the kind of organisation that feels it is important to rebuild trust from its users. In fact, by having Quora be the kind of organisation that pays any attention to its users at all. Over and above giving a few of them a jacket and snacks, circulating the occasional SurveyMonkey form, or measuring their clicks when Quora makes the notifications menu piss-coloured.

Latin: yes.

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?

Persian: probably not.

• Were ancient Greeks and Persians aware of their Indo-European roots?
• History: During Alexander’s invasions, would his soldiers have found Old Persian or Indic to be somewhat familiar sounding given their closeness to Greek?