Month: April 2017

Because lots of Westerners know Latin (or at least know about Latin), relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek, and Latin is the language Westerners associate with the Roman Empire. Having Greek spoken in a movie would really just confuse people, who’d expect the Romans in Palestine to be speaking Latin.

That, and the logistics of getting actors to speak Greek (and which Greek?), precisely because relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek. Even the Passion of the Christ ended up going with Church Latin instead of Classical Latin…

I’m not contradicting Warren M Tang (see Warren M Tang’s answer to How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?), but let me try a different formulation.

• A functionalist explains language structures by appealing to the communicative function of those structures. (They do linguistics by metaphors.)
• A cognitivist explains language structures by appealing to general psychological processes of cognition. (They do linguistics by diagrams.)
• A structuralist explains language structures as a coherent system of signs. (They do linguistics by tables.)

These approaches are not mutually exclusive in principle—though they tend to be in execution.

Where’s Chomsky fit in all of this? He wishes he was a cognitivist; he’s actually a structuralist.

What can we do to stop situations like this from happening?

Be aware of the policies. Quora certainly won’t bother telling you in advance (Quora does not do onboarding), so find out about them, and find out about how they are policed. Do your own digging. Don’t just take me or my blogs’ word for it. And don’t just read the letter of Quora’s policies either; they are vague and generic. Look at specific moderation calls. Talk to former community mods about how they think the policies work.

Being aware of the policies is not to acquiesce to them and absolve Quora of any blame. We know Quora is fallible. We know that Quora can be tricked. And whether the sockpuppetting rules are justified or not is a topic worthy of discussion. Information is a good thing to have. Critical opinion about rules is a good thing to have.

But they are still their rules, not yours, and their processes of appeal, not yours.

How can we get her back?

Matt Zhang is unbanned not only because Quora recognised that they had been tricked (if what User says is true), but also because I gave him Tatiana’s email address for him to appeal his ban. I also gave those who wanted to appeal Brooke’s ban Tatiana’s email. (Tatiana’s email, and her availability as an avenue of appeal, is not secret information, so I don’t feel compunction about doing so. If that avenue is closed off, I’m sure I will hear of it.)

You can use that avenue of appeal alongside the normal, fill-out-a-form-and-Rory-the-Quora-intern-will-take-your-form-and-file-it process. I don’t know for a fact that this avenue is discouraged or encouraged. If that avenue fails, though, you are out of luck. No industrial action or protest will change it. And I can only assume by now that this is the case with Brooke Taylor.

Btw, because I have been getting a few emails lately about this from banees: I have no special access to the Corridors Of Power here on Quora. Quite the opposite in fact: I’ve had all of one (1) exchange with Tatiana, about my blog posts being throttled. I don’t know if Top Writers can advocate successfully for or against banees, as I’ve seen alleged here; I can only assure you that I’m not such a Top Writer, and I wouldn’t want to be.

I have answered this question with regard to one of the Anglo-Celtic Australians pictured: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you think Australian singer Delta Goodrem is pretty? My answer is no different for the other three Anglo-Celtic Australians.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world?

Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities.

Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; and the serious work on the origins of language is subsequent to my training as a linguist, so I’m not across it.

But even if there were a single origin of language, any trace of it is long since effaced, under the waves of language change after language change, millennium after millennium. In our mental and scholarly modelling of how languages have come to be, the single mother language doesn’t make any difference: there could have been one, there could have been a hundred, we’ll never know. So it doesn’t matter to me.

Maggie Q is a stage name, her real name being Margaret Quigley.

Many countries and states have Surname laws and Naming laws: see Naming in the United States. It depends on local legislation, cultural laissez-faire, and practicality for data entry. (If you make your surname a single EMOJI, I am coming to get you!) But in places like Kentucky, that have no naming laws on the books, the answer is yes.

I have received this from Raden Smith (see Follow up on Reddit trolls), and am posting it here at his request.

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I am Raden Smith from Quora and I am writing this email to you to apologise for trolling on Quora and my online behaviour. I found your email id from your Quora account bio.

I want to tell few things about myself first. I got diagnosed with clinical depression in June, 2016 and I recently failed a major exam for which I was preparing since a year. Things have not been going on too well for me lately. I went to Quora to seek support. Then I got to know about the subreddit ‘indianpeoplequora’. And so I started to troll on quora and cross post it on reddit to gain karma points. My trolling on Quora and cross posting on reddit was simply a means of escapism for me, a way of coping up when things were not going on too well in real life. The Karma points I received on reddit boosted my esteem a bit. It was never my intent to hurt anybody.

Having said this, I have come to realise what I did was wrong. And I apologise for my behaviour and any hurt that I have caused. I have realised that there are better ways to seek support for depression and by trolling I am simply harming myself. I have also realised that failing in exam is not a death sentence and my failure does not give me right to troll others and I just need to prepare better and I too will pass the exam.

When I was small (like 5 – 6 years old) I always thought that I would grow up to be a nice person. However, when I look back on my online behaviour I feel ashamed. My smaller self would never have imagined that I would resort to such means as coping mechanism. I feel very ashamed about the way I behaved and I this is when I realised that I need to apologise.

I have deleted both my Quora as well as Reddit account. (I never trolled on Reddit though). I won’t be back online unless I am going to contribute positively.

I have also, as a means of repentance decided to make a donation to an NGO working in sector of woman welfare or animal welfare. I do not earn much so the amount of donation will be small. But I will donate for sure.

I would be grateful if you can post my apology as an edit to your followup blog post on Reddit trolling as I want to convey to people my apology. Kindly keep the email id anon please. This is my dummy email id but I regularly check it so we can communicate to this id.

I do not have email id of Reddit moderator but if you can pass on my apology to him I would appreciate if very much. I have abused the reason for which that particular sub reddit was created and hence I want to apologise to him.

If there is anything else that I can do let me know. If it is within my means, I will do it.

2016–12–04 by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

I have just been contacted by Linda:

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Great job about The Insurgency by the way, if this doesn’t come off as patronizing.

(But no more drawings? [disappointed emoji])

You may or may not remember the answer over which I got banned, but there was an off-Quora exchange with the mods (admin? I admit to not knowing the difference) that I find more offensive than the “faked-an-e-mail-and-maintained-sock-puppets” charges.

So, a few hours after I got banned, Jason Li sent me an e-mail expressing his sympathy and saying he’d written to Quora to protest the ban. I’m not what the exact response he got was, but a while later, he posted in the comments section of a question pertaining to my ban that Jonathan Brill had assured him that they’d tried communicating with me before and that it hadn’t gone well (and that after reading through my edit log, he was more in sympathy with Quora’s position. And, admittedly, that answer wasn’t very nice. But I tried to stay respectful!).

Whether he (Jonathan) meant that they’d talked to me directly after the ban or during the six-odd months I’d been active on Quora doesn’t matter – because there was never, ever any direct contact (other than the reply to a message I’d sent after the deletion of my answer inquiring as to why a certain Power User went unpunished for rudeness, discrimination and plagiarism, which Tatiana insisted – more than once – was faked).

Just thought some people might be interested to know I was swiftly and directly banned over of two BNBRs (the answer and a comment underneath in which I merely quoted the subject of my answer – don’t I get an edit-block first?) and that afterwards some people tried to make it sound as though it was a last resort after reaching out to me and getting a prickly ignore, i.e. tried to make it sound better than it looks—and was.

Eh, maybe this message is a bit rambling and I’m overbeating a dead zebra. Wanted someone to know, so….thanks for reading?

And hi to everyone, if you do publish this 🙂

Let me sidestep the substance of the question, which has been addressed well under:

• What’s your view regarding Quora’s new anonymity policy changes (March 2017)?
• How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of March 20, 2017?

And let me go to the underlying question: how can Quora make decisions that users disagree with?

Anonymity has been complained about for years.

• It has been complained about, with suggestions for improvement, on Quora, a forum which Quora staff as far as I can tell don’t accept any feedback from. (And please. Evidence to the contrary welcome. Being yelled at in comments by current or former leads does not count.)
• It has been complained about, with suggestions for improvement, on the Facebook and IRL top writer groups, some of which putatively Quora staff do accept feedback from.

What we get is… not necessarily addressing the core concerns around anonymity, such as being able to mute anonymous questions. In fact, I’d like to highlight this exchange:

https://insurgency.quora.com/Wel…

Robert Maxwell : My favorite part of all of this is how Quora’s solution to anonymity abuse was to make anonymous questions and answers even more anonymous.

John Gragson : Supposedly it was to be balanced by more aggressive moderation (“pre-review”, they called it).

Viola Yee : All we really wanted was to block a particular anon.

So why would the changes to anonymity not meet our expectations as a community? And why would they have been delayed for five years?

Here’s some possible explanations, and I think they’re all in play:

Why did it take so long?

• There may be a leadership vacuum in Quora; it’s been rumoured here, and it’s hard to discern, with the secrecy Quora maintains about itself. (I’ve just started reading Sun Tzu; that’s one bit they seem to have learned from him.) I suspect that there is no advocate to push user concerns around anonymity to the forefront, and that there may not be a lot of strategic thinking going on anyway. In that case, anonymity instead degenerates into a technical puzzle, a computer engineering rather than a social engineering issue. Which would also account for the chasing-one’s-tail activity around Quora UX.
• And don’t get me started on ongoing inaction about the accessibility of Quora. Marc Bodnick: No, we haven’t (2011) by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• Quora has an on-going slowburn PR disaster on its hand with anon abuse, which it has publicly blithely dismissed until it couldn’t any more. The more users, the more abuse; Violet Blue had plenty to report on in 2014, and I’m sure it’s exponentially worse now, because there are exponentially more users now.
• Quora’s primary responsibility is not user well-being, but whatever its leadership deems a strategic or tactical priority. That is a good thing: Quora isn’t a non-profit that exists to make its users happy, it exists to turn a profit by commodifying its users. That is also a bad thing: it does not mean that Quora is immune from making bad decisions, just because its users think it’s making bad decisions.
  As a result, user discomfort around anonymous trolling has not been a priority to do something about until now.
• Remember that allowing users to disable comments on specific questions came in 2016, two years after the articles highlighting misogyny on Quora, and advocating for more effective blocking: Quora’s Misogyny Problem; Quora’s misogyny problem: A cautionary tale | ZDNet. Two years. What, implementing Google Voice has been more pressing?

Why don’t we like it?

• Quora has limited resources—understandably, as it’s still burning through venture capital six years after launch, and has only started to do something visible about monetisation (ads) within the past year. Anything it does will be on the cheap. Bots, and eliminating as much workflow as possible (hence blanket removal of comments). That maximises the scale of the solution, but of course not its quality.
• Which of course is why they should never have undertaken to review all anon questions before publishing them. And have a Quora staff member put his name to that statement. It was never going to happen, it hasn’t happened, and bots don’t count as review. Good to know we have the most well-spelled trolls in the business though. (I’d just found an answer saying that a troll question got through with QCR fixing a spelling mistake. No I can’t find it; I was convinced it was by Heather Jedrus, but that’s not turning up anything.)
• Mountain View, and Silicon Valley in general, seems prone to Not-Invented-Here, which lends them a certain arrogance and lack of consultation in dealing with these kinds of concern. I think it’s been compounded by the insistence that We-are-not-social-media (so we don’t need to learn from social media on how to do moderation), and Shiny Toys (bots will solve everything! And they’re cheap!)
• If anonymity leaks (and there’s been a few answers suggesting it): lack of QA, lack of real user engagement, reactive implementation, possibly distracted by Shiny Objects rather than security holes.
• I am privy to an security hole unrelated to anonymity that a friend discovered, which I am not publicising (and which has been reported). I am aghast at it. Things like it are getting through into production, and they should not be. That also points to failure in management: the buck does have to stop somewhere.
• I think Anonymous’ answer to What’s your view regarding Quora’s new anonymity policy changes (March 2017)? nails it. We have been utterly puzzled about the insistence on true untraceable anonymity, the Wikileaks or Bunker In Syria scenario, whereas overwhelmingly anonymity here is cultural (“don’t feel comfortable putting my real name to this” is a real cultural norm on the internet, and I wouldn’t be sneering about it if I was you). Anon delivers, and I think this theory makes much more sense, as something that would stir Quora leadership into action.

This reminds me of the Apple iPhone case. These new anonymity changes are basically Quora’s way of distancing itself from the responsibility if any law enforcement agency asks about it.

There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled.

Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the 17th century.

But you did not say European, you said Indo-European. The obvious place to look is India. There was clearly translation in the other direction of the Buddhist scriptures, to the extent of the Chinese theorising about translation practice: Chinese translation theory. But the earliest indication I’ve found of the reverse direction is in the 7th century AD:

Translation in China

The most important figure of the first peak of translation in China was the famous monk of the Tang dynasty—Xuan Zang (600-664), who was the main character in A Journey to the West. […]

Xuan Zang was also the first Chinese translator who translated out of Chinese. He translated some of Lao Zi’s (the father of Taoism) works into Sanskrit. He also attempted to translate some other classical Chinese literature for the people of India.

The next indication of translation activity into Indo-European I find is 14th century, under the Pax Mongolica, by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani: (see here). “Among Rashideddin’s other works are four volumes of translations from Chinese into Persian, works that he could not have produced by himself, as well as works on agriculture and medicine that incorporate either translations from Chinese or extensive information on Chinese practice derived from Chinese sources.”