Month: August 2017

This has been said plenty by others, and I’m just clearing my backlog with this, but:

All justice is reasonable when administered with equity. See Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?

BNBR sure does not look like it is administered with equity. Moderation does not do context or extenuating circumstance, and it’s not supposed to.

But that’s the complaint about the implementation of BNBR.

I have plenty of concerns about BNBR as a policy itself: I think it is problematic.

BNBR licences bad knowledge and truthiness: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has Quora become a magnet for flat Earth and Moon landing conspiracy questions that must be given BNBR respect, even though they’re undeserving? BNBR suppresses criticism of individuals, and has a chilling effect on criticism of a lot of things. BNBR gets fetishised as an end in itself, rather than a means to more civil discourse. And BNBR is blatantly culture-specific: there is no universal measure of niceness or respect. (So everyone gets measured by a Northern Californian norm. Or that of the subcontractors thereof, or that of the bots thereof.)

These are all controversial claims, and there’s plenty of arguments to be made for and against. But saying BNBR is reasonable as a given, before moving on to how it is misapplied in practice, is not how those arguments get had.

Ἰθάκηνδε, which occurs five times in the Odyssey (1.88, 1.163, 11.361, 15.157, 16.322).

I agree with Dion Shaw’s answer: detecting irony is a subtle skill, which requires you to deduce, from real world knowledge, that the speaker intends the complete opposite of what they’re literally saying, and that they think it’s appropriate to do so because they regard the question as not worth answering literally (typically because they regard the answer as obvious).

Computers aren’t doing well at detecting irony in general, and the problem is AI-hard. (Real Artificial Intelligence, with a social and intentional factor, not just machine learning.) In fact, the one paper I read about it recently was as crude as it possibly could be—it only got so far as working out that the person was speaking an untruth, ergo, Irony! But of course lying, error, and irony are not the same thing at all, even if all of them reduce to the same truth-conditional purview of a statement not being true.

Quora’s algorithms, sadly, as not in the business of extracting truth from ironic answers, which is at least part of the reason why Joke Answers are frowned upon. I have to say, I find it difficult to see how Quora’s algorithms are extracting meaning from the wide range of answers given here at all. But they don’t have to; they merely have to understand upvotes, credentials, and social networks of users.

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium confirms John Bard’s answer:

As late as the 4th C., the Mediterranean continued to be an “inner sea,” totally surrounded by the territory of the Roman Empire. It was the only sea for Greeks, the esō thalassa [internal sea] (Aristotle) as opposed to the exō thalassa [external sea] or ocean; for the Latins the mare internum, intestinum, or nostrum. The term mare mediterraneum did not appear until the 3rd C.; Isidore of Seville used it in the early 7th C. (O. Maull. RE 15 [1932] 2222). The Byz. did not have a general term for the Mediterranean, although they used special names for its parts—the Aegean, Ionian, Tyrsenikon (or Tyrrhenian), Sikelikon, Kretikon pelagos [sea].

I delighted once or twice in doing drive-by gloats of threads in which Top Writers have just been shocked to discover that Quora doesn’t particularly care what they want, and peppering comments with repeated use of the word “fungible”. That’s dwelling on it, though, not really dealing with it.

I’ve worked at raising consciousness about what happens here, in and beyond those drive-by gloats. That’s still dwelling on it, though, and Quora has no shortage of fresh missteps to document.

I’m trying to move on from answering too many questions about the Removal of Details, which is one way.

I delight in making fun of Quora Inc., which is another: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What was the last thing you wrote by hand?

I write impossibly obscure and detailed, Medium post-like answers to non-personal but snowflakey questions, that no computer could feasibly extract meaning out of, and no canonicity is relevant to. Like Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the so-called Greek word Albania/Αλβανιά (derogatory word), and from what does it stem?; or Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why didn’t the Greeks convert to Catholicism under the Latin Empire? Those were fun. Those were long. Those were not addressed to Quora bots. In some ways, in fact, those are the postludes to my Der Krämerspiegel.

It’s a somewhat stretched analogy (which I’ve used here once before). Let me work through it.

Richard Strauss: Der Krämerspiegel, Op 66

Unfortunately, in the contract for Opus 56, he had unwisely allowed a clause to be inserted giving Bote & Bock the rights to his next six songs whenever they might be composed.

Becoming increasingly at loggerheads with the firm, Strauss prevaricated for as long as he could. […] But in 1918 he found himself threatened with a court case. By then he had in his desk drawer the six Brentano-Lieder, later published as Opus 68 (see Volume 5), but he had no intention of surrendering such a magnificent set to Bote & Bock.

Instead he turned to Alfred Kerr, a well-known Berlin literary critic, who in March 1918 produced for him a witty set of satirical verses lampooning music publishers, and mentioning many of Strauss’s principal enemies by name. By May Strauss had set all twelve poems to music and dispatched them to Bote & Bock, who not surprisingly refused them out of hand. […]

It is easy to understand why the cycle is now rarely performed, given that the texts consist entirely of in-jokes, and that the lion’s share of the music is given to the pianist. But Strauss’s music is well worth savouring, not least for its humorous references to Strauss’s own works, such as Der Rosenkavalier and Ein Heldenleben, and especially for the beautiful prelude to the eighth song and its reprise as the final extended postlude. This has a history quite independent of the cycle, as Strauss revived its lyrical, Schumannesque theme nearly a quarter of a century later, in his opera Capriccio.

Michael S. Hurst did his PhD on Der Krämerspiegel in 2007: Interpreting Richard Strauss’s Der Krämerspiegel from the perspectives of the performers and the audience. The sense he makes of that postlude: it’s Strauss telling his publishers, “this is the music you could have had from me, if you’d only treated me with respect.”

Write the content you want, because it makes you happy, and it makes the people you’re trying to help happy. What Quora wants is secondary. It cannot but be secondary: we write for us, not for D’Angelo. It’s not like he’s paying us to write here.

Make yourself proud of what you write here. That’s the best revenge, and that’s the best way of getting over it. In particular, if you’re here to help specific question askers, and not a canonicity bot, then strike up a conversation with them in question comments on what they’re after. That’s still allowed.

And if that becomes untenable, *shrug* take your content elsewhere. Strauss did end up reusing that tune, after all.

Yes indeed. Bear in mind in particular that Greek and Latin fall under the rules of Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. (Greek is almost always borrowed into English via Latin; but there are late exceptions like kudos, not †cydus.) Those rules are not the rules of French words in English. For example, final –e in a Greek word like psyche is always pronounced; it is never pronounced in French or Germanic words.

(That link should be mandatory reading for everyone ever btw. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learned from it.)

Germanic and French spellings get squashed together via the crucible of Middle English spelling—and Middle English itself; but you can still discern differences. For example <k> is a Germanic thing; word-final stress is a French thing.

On days when I’m catching up on A2A backlogs (such as today), me. My time on Quora varies between half an hour and six hours a day. It is, on average, way too much.

Yiannis Tsiolis’ answer nails it:

There are three “components” in to verbalising a language. One is the correct pronounsiaton of vowels and consonants, the other is the correct intonation but the most important is how well you know the language (vocabulary, grammar, syntax, catchphrases). Unless one can copy all three there is hardly a chance he/she will be mistaken for a local.

To the question comments, I’ll add that having a lot of Greek loans and a /θ/ is not going to be enough for even the first component. Yes, θ is a cross-linguistically rare sound. But how does Brazilian Portuguese prepare you for [x, ɣ, ð]? How does it prepare you for the allophony of [k, ɡ, x, ɣ] and [c, ɟ, ç, ʝ]? How does it prepare you for where to use [n] and where to use [ɲ]? (Something there’s real variation on between Greek dialects—as anyone from Patras knows, who has had the misfortune to be made fun of it over.)

Brazilians are not intrinsically better or worse off for learning how to pronounce Greek phonemes natively; I think Spaniards have a bit of an advantage, because of the substantial overlap in their phonemic inventory with Greek, and the rat-tat-tat of their lack of vowel quantity; but they’re also the ones who will be tripped up by [x] vs [ç]. As with any language, you’re going to have a bit of an accent, unless you’re immersed for a long time and you have a good ear. (I know that’s insensitive of me to say, Gustavo, but there’s no way around it.)

But having a bit of an accent is far from the end of the world. After all, it’s not like they won’t know you’re “not from around here”; and it’s not like they won’t truly appreciate you making the effort to learn Modern Greek. Not many do.

I’m answering this with all the coldness that Quora Moderation has earned. Remember: it’s just business.

The normal appeals process is the only one that Quora wants you to use. Anyone can lodge a ticket, saying they’re appealing, and nothing’s stopping you from naming person X rather than yourself in the free text of the “I want to appeal a moderation decision” form. The form certainly doesn’t specify that it’s a decision against you that you’re appealing; you can hyperlink to someone else’s collapsed answer, for instance.

That’s the normal appeals process. It can take months for a reply (many of us can confirm as much), and if the decision is negative, you get no reply at all.

Quora used to have dedicated email addresses for appeals, which are now officially being phased out: Why does ‘moderation@Quora.com’ not work? And why does the email Quora gives, ‘appeals+other@Quora.com’ not work either? They want you going through the one channel, which is manageable.

This likely is why the informal channel, of directly emailing a moderator (or topwriters@quora as a proxy), is no longer being volunteered on Quora, though it was last year. You can still try that channel on the user’s behalf. You can, if you are a Top Writer, chat to a moderator directly on the user’s behalf. I have seen occasional reports that this still happens. It may work, it may not.

Of course it’s not in Quora’s interest to promote by-passing formal channels, and relying on the favouritism of Top Writers.

Of course having a default appeals process that takes months and acts like a Schrödinger Cat In A Box is not in Quora’s users’ interest.

The divergence between Quora’s aims and the users’ is an exercise for the reader.

Looking at Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca, we know that Plato (Cratylus 427a) describes both δ and τ as stops. The first unequivocal evidence is the differentiation between б and в in Cyrillic in the 9th century AD. It turns out though that at the same time, beta was being transliterated in Georgian as as ბ b rather than ვ v. Cicero (Fam ix 22.3) says that βινεῖ ‘he fucks’ is pronounced as Latin bini. On the other hand, Allen concedes that some non-Attic dialects (Boeotian, Elean, Pamphylian) may have started fricating voiced stops as early as the 4th century B.C.

Allen is reluctant to commit to any time of transition. The really long description at Koine Greek phonology – Wikipedia, pitting Allen against Gignac’s investigation of papyri, indicates that it was probably over a drawn-out period, with variation by region or register. However, the usual assumption I have seen is frication starting as [β], around the 1st century AD.