Month: March 2017

I’ve already written Nick Nicholas’ answer to How can one use the word “Quora” in a limerick? But how could I pass up an A2A from Vicky?

1. I would have felt much jubilation,
   had Quora sent notification
   that User
   limericked mentioning me;
   but @-mentions… lack mitigation.
2. So, there once was a young synaesthete
   who gained fandom with Quora’s elite.
   She’s regaled us with stories
   of her working girl glories
   and entranced us with jokes indiscreet!
3. When on Quora, I write unabashed.
   A2A me? I’ll give it a bash!
   I make friends near and far,
   and I follow my star.
   But UX fails shall sting to my lash.
4. Where the erudite gather to grumble,
   and the recondite rally to rumble:
   where the droll draw their japes,
   and the heroes their capes:
   there you’ll find me, in rough and in tumble.
5. “Share and grow the world’s knowledge,” said D’Angelo,
   crisp as bacon, and sharp as a tangelo.
   Yet on Quora we socialise,
   because knowledge, we realise,
   is much harder to pin down than flan jello.

• Looks like questions have been seeded into French Quora by machine translation; reportedly that has also happened in the Spanish Quora. Réponse de Alexandre Coninx à Les premières questions de la beta de Quora en français ont-elles été écrites par des robots ou traduites aléatoirement ?
• The French sounds odd to some: Est-ce que c’est juste moi, ou est-ce que les questions et réponses sur Quora en Français ont l’air bizarre pour vous aussi ? That’s reportedly not primarily because of bots, but because the users are not all native speakers, a bunch of native speakers are long-time residents abroad, and a lot of native speakers are used to the style of the English Quora.
• Wow, Habib le toubib comes across very different in French. So… courtois!
• Speaking of which: BNBR in French is Soyez Courtois Soyez Respecteux.
• They’re using vous instead of tu in French Quora. Les Quorans francophones devraient-ils plutôt se tutoyer ou se vouvoyer entre eux ? That’s not going to happen on the German Quora, I presume.
• The limit of 300 characters on a question shall not be relaxed for the more prolix French language. Réponse de Sihem Soibinet-Fekih à La limite du nombre de caractères dans une question sur le Quora Français a-t-elle été adaptée en fonction du taux de foisonnement ?
• Sihem Soibinet-Fekih: “International Writer Relations chez Quora (2017-présent)” (What, they don’t translate job titles in Mountain View?) At least she cited Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux in defence of the 300 character limit, which wins her points. Whether Boileau would welcome the twitteresque (and maudit anglaise) char limit is a different matter.
• The site is very new, and the questions aren’t grabbing me quite yet, but I’m seeing a lot of potential, and it’s not just French Politics 24–7.

Obvious, but confirmed:

Marcia Peterson Buckie [es]

Marcia Peterson Buckie [en]

Michael Masiello’s answer to Which would be better for humanity in the long run, everyone being a Catholic Christian or everyone being an atheist?

I would argue that what would be better for humanity in the long run has something to do with the cultivation of eudaimonistic virtues — ethical and civic values that aim to maximize human flourishing and minimize discrimination.

The Magister has defined eudaimonistic for us right there. It is a quite resonant word, though you have to be across Ancient Greek philosophy to pick up the nuance (as indeed the Magister is).

Eudaimonia is an Ancient Greek word for happiness. It comes from eu “good” and daimon “daemon”; originally the daimon was not a demon, but a spirit—and a spirit that people have with them. In fact, the notion was not too dissimilar to the notion of a guardian angel.

Aristotle famously defined eudaimonia as the highest human good, and the goal all humans should be working towards. It’s not just being happy for yourself, selfishly. It’s not about getting ripped with hookers and blow. It’s the happiness which comes with being virtuous, righteous. It’s the happiness that sees you flourishing to your full human potential.

It’s the warm fuzzies you get, as if you realise that there’s a guardian angel looking after you—but you know that the guardian angel is only going to be looking after you so long as you Do The Right Thing. And the philosophers weren’t Calvinists: their discussions were all about You doing the right thing, and the eudaimonia being its own reward.

Just launched:

Dispatches from the Other Language Quoras

Feel free to post your own impressions and experiences in the other-language Quoras, and comparisons between them and the English-language Quora.

We can. Anyone can answer anything about anything, Quora’s creeping credentialism notwithstanding.

As a Quora reader, you have the responsibility to weigh against each other peoples’ credentials, answers, tone, and the exchanges they have in comments (including errors and disagreements pointed out there).

It really varies according to who I’ve been upvoting of late. Currently, the first two people on my feed refresh are Vicky Prest and Jordan Yates, with astonishing regularity. A month ago, it was Laura Hancock week. I get notifications from Michael Masiello, which I presume is why he’s not more heavily represented on my feed.

Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I have a running pretend feud about how we disagree about lots. We don’t disagree about lots, though, and we’re always pleasantly surprised when we disagree about anything! She gets an upvote when we don’t, and she gets an upvote when we do: she argues her point well, and sometimes even changes my mind.

Don’t tell her I said that, though.

I benefit from different political opinions to my left, and I particularly appreciate answers from Victoria Weaver. I’m not going to become a communist, but I’m interested in where’s she’s going with technocommunism, and we have enough good will for each other that’s she’s promised me a lovely bridge to shoot me under, when the Revolution comes.

No, I haven’t listed Clarissa Lohr here. I don’t know that I actually disagree with her all that much. She’s too circumspect about her own ideology for me to.

On my right (and to me, American libertarianism is to my right) I did upvote Rob Weir a fair bit, because he presented that ideological perspective cogently, and I was vaguely interested to hear more. More vaguely than the Quora feed assumed I was: I was soon deluged with libertarianism 24–7, and I ended up muting him.

When Bergsland and Vogt (1962) debunked the assumption in Glottochronology that core vocabulary is lost at a constant rate among languages [Bergsland, Knut; & Vogt, Hans. (1962). On the validity of glottochronology. Current Anthropology, 3, 115–153], the lexically conservative language they brought up was Icelandic.

The lexically innovative language they brought up was Inuit, which has taboo replacement of words. (If a word has been used as the name of someone recently deceased, or even sounds like it, you get rid of it. It might come back in a couple of generations, if anyone remembers it.) Australian indigenous languages do the same. Such languages may well be stable grammatically, but their vocabulary undergoes a huge amount of churn.

Just to get the ball rolling:

• Short variable names
• Error checking routines (the !err testing gets prolix quickly)
• Never use a var when you can use a :=
• defer is your friend