Month: May 2017

Content policy: more lax than for questions and answers:

Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments?

Blogs on Quora are generally unmoderated. Most policies that apply to question-and-answer pages do not apply to blogs. However, there are several rules for blogs and posts:

(The exceptions are spam, and a much higher barrier than BNBR for “niceness”.)

Language policy: Question already asked, with no official reply: What is Quora’s language policy regarding blogs on Quora?

Unresolved, but *probably* English-only, given the wording of Quora’s answer to Does content on Quora need to be written in English?

Quora requires that content on English Quora (quora.com) be written in English.

That’s “content”, not just “questions and answers”.

I have seen a couple of blog posts not in English, but I haven’t gone looking, nor known of instances where Quora requested a blog not in English be taken down. I don’t get the impression Quora moderation is that engaged with blogs to begin with.

It depends on where the Greeks are.

Greeks in the diaspora loved it. It is a movie that pokes caricatured fun at the antiquated notions that the first generation of migrants had, and how they did not assimilate and retained a rural worldview. That kind of caricature is a commonplace of second-generation members of diaspora when they get into comedy; it’s hardly unique to the Greek diaspora. (Compare for example the comedy done by the Indian and Pakistani diaspora in the UK.) Greeks in the US, Canada, and Australia were in on the joke, and they lapped it up.

Greeks in Greece and Cyprus… dunno, and I’d be interested to hear. What’s critical is that the worldview caricatured in the movie is a worldview that has long died out in Greece itself: the first generation of migrants remained in a 1950s rural timewarp. Greeks in Greece are likely to feel extremely detached from it: it’s not their modern-day reality, and its not their country. There’s that underlying truth at work, painful for anyone in the diaspora: those who left and those who stayed behind are no longer the same people.

For what it’s worth, the Greek title of the movie was Γάμος αλά Ελληνικά, “Wedding, Greek-Style”. It was a title reminiscent of the madcap comedies of the Greek comedy film industry of the ’50s and ’60s, and that was not a coincidence.

The most interesting reaction, which I monitored at the time, was that of emigre Greeks. I’m using the distinction between migrant and emigre Greeks on purpose: by the latter, I mean the much smaller, much better educated, affluent and urbane wave of Greek professionals who have moved to work in Western Europe and America over the last 20 or 30 years, as opposed to the peasants who moved to become factory fodder and small-businesspeople in the early to mid 20th century.

The two waves have very little in common, and don’t particularly associate. The clash has been most prominent in Canada, where the “emigres” are earlier, political dissidents from the ’70s, and in much greater numbers. The ’50s migrants and the ’70s migrants have formed separate community clubs: they can’t be in the same room with each other. There’s a wave of Greeks coming to Australia now, where Greeks are into their third generation (they are most of the waiters in Greektown, where I live). I’m not paying attention, but I’m sure there’s some cultural friction here too.

Anyway. I was subscribed to the HELLAS-L mailing list at the time, which was the mailing list for those emigres, in Greeklish: it was the main vehicle of Greek online until the Web became a mass presence in Greece and Cyprus.

Many of the emigres on the list were dripping with contempt for the film, and not a few of them demanded that it should have been called My Big Fat Greek-American Wedding. Because they wanted nothing to do with the hicks that film depicted. (I was gratified to see the main complainer being needled by someone else: “You’ve already been in the US for a decade; watch out you don’t get de-Hellenised yourself!”

The vehemence is because the film does not depict a reality the emigres have grown up with—but it does depict a reality they are adjacent to, living in America and Canada and Britain; so they couldn’t feel the same detachment I imagine Greeks in Greece would have experienced. It was more pressing for them to dissociate themselves from it.

Some of the threads on that mailing list are available here: Google Groups—provided you can read Greeklish.

Bit of a big question there, and nihilism is a big concept—that often gets used quite loosely, to mean “relativistic” or “cynical”.

We are in a time in the West, of course, when a lot of longstanding moral absolutes have been increasingly questioned or scrutinised, and the outcome has been called nihilistic by both proponents and adversaries. (Adversaries more than proponents: the term is something of a cudgel.)

Nihilism – Wikipedia

Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods: for example, Jean Baudrillardand others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch; and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.

So one primary point of relevance is that it is a shorthand for the modern-day questioning of absolute values, which is prevalent, and which you need to be aware of to work out how the modern West ticks. Or fails to tick.

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The second primary point of relevance is not as time-bound. Nihilism, like solipsism, is a useful intellectual exercise. It is a useful phase to go through, if you like. The teen or undergrad who stumbles across solipsism in their intellectual development is something of a cliche: “Woah, man, like what if I told you everything was, like, an illusion!”

But it is useful because, when you come out the other end, you acknowledge better the contingency and fragility of your construction of the world: you know to be on the lookout for misconstrual and bias better.

Same with nihilism. It’s good to have values. It’s better if you’ve scrutinised those values, and worked out why they are a good thing, rather than to just passively accept what you have been handed down. And a phase of questioning everything, of early nihilism, is useful to help you build them back up again—and convince yourself that there are things really worth holding on to, after all.

None. From memory, that didn’t happen before Berlioz.

No.

The participle ἡγεμονεύοντος and its subject Κυρηνίου are in the genitive. That makes this a Genitive absolute, which corresponds to the Latin ablative absolute. Its job is to indicate the time or circumstance under which the main clause happened: it is a separate clause. English equivalents are Absolute constructions, such as The referee having finally arrived, the game began; All things considered, it’s not a bad idea. But in Latin and Greek, grammatical case is used to differentiate the two clauses (as well as the participle in the dependent clause).

So the main clause is “this enrolling first took place”. But the following participle means “under the circumstance of Quirinius managing Syria”. Greek wouldn’t use “of Syria” to describe a person, but “Syrian” or “from Syria”: the genitive for Syria is in fact the object of hegemoneuō “ruling, managing”. And it’s a separate clause, so the enrolling has nothing to do with the managing.

So: “With Quirinius managing Syria, this enrolling first took place.”

Which pretty much is the same thing as “When Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

I of course knew that as soon as I opened this question, I’d get several replies saying “no we’re not”.

White Anglo-Celtic Australians (and these days, White Non-Anglo-Celtic Australians) are not the people to ask this.

No, we don’t burn crosses in our yards. Yes, we did give Aboriginal Australians the vote, and we even gave them an apology for the Stolen Generations (although that had to wait for a change of government). No, you don’t see *lots* of brown people being beaten up. And yes, Australia has made an honest stab at embracing multiculturalism socially, and seems to have taken it to heart more seriously than many other places (although that again depends on how the culture wars are currently going).

But of course there’s racism in this country. It’s at its most virulent still with Aboriginal Australians, who have had a long history of paternalism, segregation, and othering. It’s at its most sensationalised with African Australians, who are the latest in the merry-go-round of underprivileged refugee children in street gangs. It’s at its most shameful with the out-of-sight out-of-mind warehousing and demonising of refugees, mainly from the Middle East.

It’s at its most understated, I guess, with Asians. The Yellow Peril phobia was killed off officially in the 70s, with the end of the White Australia Policy; it was alive in the 90s, when our local white nationalists warned against the influx of Asians; the same white nationalists are now warning against Muslims taking over the country. But it’s still there.

The South and East Asian Australians I stay in touch with from high school have spoken to me of the “bamboo ceiling”: you can only get to a certain point of social or professional advancement before you notice opportunities close down. They have remarked that the only time you’ll see an Asian face on TV is Masterchef: Reality TV in general is far more representative of the population than TV drama is.

That’s not explaining Why, of course, just noting that it’s there. Why?

As Peter Foran’s answer said, all countries have racist people. The more countries have ethnic (or racial) minorities, with a clear notion of one ethnicity being “normal” or “dominant”, the more expressions of racism you will find. African-Americans will recognise that the North was just as capable of racism as the South; the North just used to have fewer black people, so there was less opportunity for friction.

Now, of the racisms of Australia, Aboriginal Australians were dehumanised in colonial policy, and then segregated, and are now disproportionately underprivileged, and often ghettoised. Most (urban) white people never met any, and there were old prejudices that simply weren’t being redressed through exposure.

The other racisms are explained more straightforwardly as unfamiliarity and majority/minority relations. I don’t know that Australia was more prone to racism than any country with a significant influx of migration. But there are some different circumstances, which explain why Australia has done racism differently to the US:

• The US has always had Blacks as the bottom of the heap to look down on. Australian Aboriginals, like American Indians, had neither the numbers nor the extent of contact with whites to serve in that role; so it was whatever the newest minority coming in was. That went from the Irish (who really were the target of prejudice in Australia for an exceedingly long time), then the Chinese, then the Southern Europeans and Lebanese, then the Vietnamese, then in different ways the Indians and the East Africans.
• As noted elsewhere, Australians are blunt and proud of being blunt—they define themselves, after all, as the opposite of the English. (Which blinds them to how similar to the English they really are.) That means they rib you in ways that get misconstrued for racism; that also means that when they are being racist, they don’t particularly care to hide it.
• Australia really has had a massive influx of heterogeneous peoples for a very long time. The dominant Anglo culture has not felt threatened until relatively recently (and as in the US, it’s not all the dominant culture that feels threatened, just the culturally/economically aggrieved portion). But it has had to confront the challenge of different cultures coexisting for generations, and it has struggled with it, both before and after assimilation was the norm of the land. And I do agree with other posters that it has done a lot better than many—certainly better than what Europe is doing now.

I should be careful about opining here, but this is a discussion that, as it happens, I’ve had recently with a couple of trans women.

Gender dysphoria–or at the very least, awareness of gender/sex mismatch—seems to be very old, given the number of attestations of gender-diverse instances in human societies, and of androgynous cultural artefacts.

What is new is the way that society—and individuals within that society—deal with gender dysphoria. That’s not just about veneration vs punishment from the social norm. That’s also about how individuals express a gender identity under dysphoria; what options their culture afforded them.

Some cultures had well accepted “third” genders. Some cultures had well established, even if not accepted, performative roles. In the West, even when gender reassignment became an option, being a street queen or transvestite were the default options in the 60s; the same people now would be be trans. Sylvia Rivera called herself gay till she died in 2002, and at the peak of her activism called herself transvestite. The disjunction of cross-dressing and trans identity is pretty solid now, but it was nebulous a couple of generations ago. The construals and options of gender, as social phenomena, have changed, even if the psychological and biological drivers behind dysphoria are the same.

I made the argument above to my friend Janna, that the dysphoria is old, but the social construals are new. And she made a very insightful point: the social construals have to be new. Because society is dynamic, in a way that biology is not.

There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems.

• Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect.
• Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found some unexpected usage since for teaching communication to language-disabled children.
• iConji seems to be some sort of mix of Emoji and dingbats.
• And of course there’s Emoji themselves, which are increasingly being used in communication, though of either a more rebus-like or a less syntactic nature.

There are pros and cons to symbols as a universal language. Some symbols are arguably more iconic or indexical as signs than words, and less arbitrary, so they should be easier to learn. In theory. In practice, the minute you move away from concrete nouns, the signs symbolic languages use look pretty arbitrary; and even if they are conceived of as indexical, the metaphors may not be all that obvious. I’m not convinced the gains in iconicity would really be worth it.

The Jew’s harp is very widely used; in fact, according to History of the Jew’s Harp, the two continents where it was not indigenous were Africa and Australia. There is a long history of the Jew’s harp being used in the British Isles (The Jews-Harp in Britain and Ireland (SOAS Musicology Series): Michael Wright: 9781472414137: Amazon.com: Books); and inasmuch as Australian folk music is based on Anglo–Celtic music, that’s enough to explain its presence there.

A question first posed 5 years ago.

A Quora UX philosophy that does not prioritise usability. What else can be said? UX is autonomous and reports directly to the CEO; it’s not like the usability conundrums of Quora are accidental, or can be blamed on the mice. Whatever is happening, it’s on purpose.

Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora? is as clear a statement of what the Quora UX philosophy as I’ve ever seen, and… I’m still having a lot of trouble understanding how it motivates what we’ve been seeing here, and how it works against usability.