Month: February 2017

Differunt pornographia eroticaque per luminatione.

I could try to come up with something more historically accurate for pornography and erotica, maybe invoking the Ars Amatoria. But frankly, the reference is to film, and I don’t think historical accuracy is worth it.

Pornographia litterae sunt uno manu legendae.

Most Viewed Writers by Jackson Mohsenin on The Quora Blog. Written Aug 14, 2015.

Every day, people on Quora share their knowledge and expertise across a wide range of topics — everything from broad popular topics like Movies and Food to smaller, more specific topics like Typography and Superheroes.

Or Chicken Wing Eating Contests.

But, regardless of the size of the topic, we want to recognize the writers who are most actively contributing and helping people within the topics they know and care about. So today, we’re introducing Most Viewed Writers on topics.

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We think Most Viewed Writers is a great way to highlight the writers who are most actively contributing to the topics they know about. It will also provide readers with a new way to discover outstanding writers and browse popular answers in their favorite topics.

So… how will “writers who are most actively contributing and helping people within the topics they know and care about” be recognised now?

Well I guess the badges are still there. For now.

Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates. Written Feb 15, 2017.

We found that the Most Viewed Writer component was often dominated by a random set of topics, not necessarily those in which the writer had made the best contributions, or wanted to write in the future.

So the solution is Not To Highlight Any Of Them. And instead:

Over the last year, we’ve made improvements to the profile page to help writers signal to readers what they know about and what they want to write about.

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We’ve updated the Knows About section, streamlined the Credentials & Highlights section to be more relevant for readers, and most recently introduced Credentials.

Ah yes. My PhD is bigger than your PhD.

(It probably was, actually. 700 pp.)

These changes and more to come should allow a writer to have more control over how they’d like to be seen on Quora,

…

…

Uhuh.

and will improve the relevancy of questions they’re asked, and how readers perceive their answers.

Because there will be no MVW on a profile or a topic page. So people will only have credentials to go on—credentials which don’t appear and won’t fit on the A2A modal window, which are meaningless in many a topic, and which leave Quora the province of the formally recognised expert: the tenured academic and the startup developer. (Which no doubt is the Quora that the Founders intend it to be.)

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Those that have been following me closely will know that I felt compelled to take a few days off Quora recently.

What did I think, when I found out that anonymous answerers will not be able to comment or be notified on comments—followed immediately by this?

I thought of the Greek saying Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δε μ’ αφήνουν.

“I’m trying to become a saint. But they won’t let me!”

Drop everything you are doing, and upvote Joachim Pense. Vote #1 Joachim Pense’s answer to My native language is English, but it seems that more inflected languages are widly more complex. Does every language really have equally complex grammar?

There are some bad answers here, and some good answers here. There’s a progression of sophistication that needs to be invoked.

• THESIS: Knuckledragger argument: Savages speak primitive languages, because they are savages, and they don’t have the sophistication to know any better.
• Reactive linguist argument: Savages have some pretty damn sophisticated languages. And we do not believe that they are lesser human beings than us.
• ANTITHESIS: Every language must be equally complex, because all humans have equal mental capacity.
• Supporting argument: Um… sure, language A has the most complex inflectional morphology in existence, and language B has no morphology at all. But have you seen the syntactic hurdles language B has put up, to make any sense at all? Language A doesn’t even have any syntax! So it must all balance out.
• Supporting argument: it’s pretty damn hard to quantify complexity in incommensurate parameters of language, such as morphology and syntax. Phew. So we can get away with saying languages are equally complex.
• Opposing argument: A Turing machine can work out an algorithm to generate language. That complexity is not as unquantifiable as you might think.
• Opposing argument: That Antithesis is not an argument, it’s a statement of faith. Of course, the original Thesis wasn’t even that, it was just uninformed racism.
• SYNTHESIS: some languages are likely going to be less complex overall than others, particularly if there has been creolisation in their past. Afrikaans is a good example. That depends on your metric for complexity across the various aspects of language, but that metric is not impossible to arrive it.
• That said, the fact that Afrikaans or, well, English is likely less complex overall than Latin or Finnish or Lakota in no way means that Afrikaaners or English people are mentally deficient compared to Finns or the Teton Sioux.

Lost connections by Archie D’Cruz on Bug? or Feature?

Well, if I’m going to be A2A’d by Ms Tsymbarevich, I am of course going to accept!

• Lived in Launceston, Tasmania, but I got better. (I actually do say this!)
• Tasmania bio: “Was born in Tasmania, but I got better 🙂 ”—see?
• Lived in Irvine, CA, but I don’t really consider that living.
• Former Project Scientist at University of California, Irvine, but let’s not open that sad chapter again.
• Senior Business Analyst & Standards Architect at National Schools Interoperability Program, Australia, but really, more policy analyst AND infrastructure developer these days. Yes, it is an odd combination.
• Nicknames: Linguist, but I couldn’t fit my usual bio “PhD in Linguistics from Melbourne University, lectured historical linguistics” into the new Credentials system, because Quora Knows Best.
• West Wing: Married to an addict of The West Wing, but after the first 20 viewings, all the holes in the show become really visible, and I want to embed a pickaxe in Josh Lyman’s head.
• Grammaticalization: Used grammaticalisation as the framework for my PhD. (It didn’t quite fit.) But I think it’s a great framework for understanding language change, even if it is hazy on the causations and overly optimistic about the unidirectionality.
• Roman Empire: Have read about the BYZANTINE empire, co-wrote monograph on a Byzantine poem, but the Quora Ontology has decided not to differentiate between Rome and Constantinople.
• Survey Questions: I… occasionally succumb to answering survey questions, but likely not occasionally enough.
• Quora Usage Data and Analysis: My kingdom for a functioning Stats page, but I have learned to manage my expectations. And yes, it’s functioning better than it used to, but it’s still not that informative.
• Politics of Australia: Federal Australian Politics. Gladiator sports for the 2010s, but really, not much less gladiatorial in previous decades—just less corpses.
• Nick Nicholas: I am a world expert on at least one Nick Nicholas, but you’re going to have to work out which one on your own.

I post some answers anonymously, due to their subject matter.

I will not now be able to engage about any of my anonymous content, nor find out if anyone has engaged with it.

This makes me disinclined to continue to post any of my content on that subject matter anonymously. Even if it is anonymous, I still write to be engaged with, not to hurl out a message in a bottle. And since I can’t post on that content under my own name, for reasons of sensitivity, I am considering not posting it at all.

Anonymity was being abused and used frivolously, and some action was needed. This action is excessive, even if it does have technical reasons (overscrupulousness about anonymity), and it is a disincentive for me to post anything anonymously.

Trusted Reporting (Quora feature): Trusted reporters (who are not moderators but designated power users) can insta-collapse an answer or comment: Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog. They cannot delete them though.

Moderators who are in-house Quora staff are also Quora users (all in-house staff seem to be), and they can still upvote and downvote. Their upvote or downvote may count for more than others’, just as mine likely counts for more than J Random Quora user’s: their impact depends on the user’s PeopleRank, and in-house Quora staff are likely to have high PeopleRank just by virtue of seniority, if not office.

There may or may not be moderators who are outsourced; we don’t know. If there are outsourced moderators, we do not know whether they are Quora users as well, and whether they can accordingly upvote or downvote.

But like I said, the capability for insta-collapse, which trusted reporters have (and which I’d assume moderators have) has far more potential to, as you put it, sink a proverbial ship than a mere downvote does.

I’m with Lyonel Perabo. Vote #1: Lyonel Perabo’s answer to At what point does a spiritual tradition cross the line into a religion?

The distinction between spirituality and religion is not a particularly old one. People who want to believe in something beyond the material, but want to dissociate themselves from Christianity or other formalised religions, say that they’re spiritual instead. Noone talked like that before the Enlightenment. And what is the stark dividing line between a spirit and a god supposed to be? Between reverence and worship? Between belief and creed? Just organisation? But how can organisation be… prevented? And why exactly should it be?

The distinction looks bogus to me, and reminds me of another bogus distinction. In the 19th century, Westerners discovered that the Ancient Greeks practiced magic. There are full on voodoo dolls and curse tablets in graves.

The Westerners who claimed intellectual descent from the Ancient Greeks were pretty distressed to discover this: their Graeco-Judaean construct of religion was a noble, elevated thing, nothing to do with voodoo shit. (Wait till you look more closely at Talmud lore, let alone the Kabbalah; Rabbinic Judaism wasn’t immune from magic either.) And Western scholars invested decades trying to establish a bright red dividing line between the stupid ancient commoners’ magic and the noble ancient philosophers’ religion.

The recent conclusion I’ve seen: there is none. It’s all expressions of faith in a world beyond the material. The incentive to differentiate them is a modern, class-based prejudice against magic.

And I suggest, the incentive to differentiate spirituality from religion is similarly a modern prejudice against contemporary organised religion.

Well, I haven’t been, but Steven de Guzman has. Three times:

• Has Steven de Guzman written anywhere about his third ban from Quora? (relayed by third party)
• Incorrectly banned on @Quora for allegedly having sock puppet accounts (by Steven on Medium)
• Incorrectly banned on @Quora for allegedly having sock puppet accounts (Part 2) (by Steven on Medium)

Btw: people do get unbanned. In fact, one writer got banned, unbanned, and made Top Writer, all in the past two months.