Category: Uncategorized

Generalising from “perks” to “functionality”:

• Old-time Quorans who were involved in moderation, and others that Quora has so designated, are Trusted Reporters: Trusted Reporting (Quora feature). They can insta-collapse answers when they report them, but they are not otherwise moderators. See Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog; How do you tell if you are a trusted reporter?.
• A number of Quorans each year are designated as Top Writers: Top Writers (Quora program), Top Question Writers (Quora program). They get a badge on their profile, and what Stephanie Vardavas mentions: Stephanie Vardavas’ answer to What perks are offered to only some people on Quora?
• More popular writers don’t get explicit perks from Quora that we know of, and any implicit perks are the subject of (typically resentful) speculation. For example, I’ve heard claims both that they are given more of a pass from moderation, as MVPs or old friends—and that they are given more scrutiny from moderation, as having more eyeballs descend on them.

What do people believe linguistics is?

All the answers given here have been excellent. I particularly liked Kai Neagle’s.

Several factors have contributed to Australia recently turning into postwar Italy, and most of them have already been pointed out.

• Labor has always been factionalised. The Liberals have become much more factionalised recently, with the resurgence of the reactionary right.
• Both parties have moved to The Mushy Centre. As a result, there is not a lot of sunlight between them, and there is pressure on them from their extremes: from the Greens, and from One Nation and other right wing populists.
• This has made the parties much more managerial than ideological, and accordingly much more prone to panic at poll results rather than sticking it out. If you don’t have an ideology, the only reason you are in power is to stay in power.
• Labor as a movement has suffered much more from the Twilight of the Ideologies, the demise of socialism, and the Hawke-Keating neoliberal reforms. So the cracks were always going to show there first.
• Labor was also structurally more prone to do this kind of thing, to begin with.
• Pundits at the time talked of federal Labor contracting Sussex Street disease—referring to NSW Labor, which has always been much more ruthless.
• The unionist Paul Howes, who was instrumental in toppling Rudd for Gillard, was derided as one of Labor’s faceless men. The insult is 50 years old: it comes from Menzies. The only difference with Howes is that he didn’t stay faceless: he gave TV time to anyone who would ask.

Many of these factors are shared throughout the Western world, and other answers have already mentioned them. They don’t explain why Australia has remained unstable. Others have brought up procedural reasons, which are beyond my expertise. I’ll offer a simpler reason.

Precedent.

Yes, the party leader is leader only by the grace of the party room. But toppling a sitting prime minister used to be Unthinkable. And the country was shell shocked when Rudd was toppled. I was in Melbourne’s Fed Square when it happened, and I remember dozens of us staring mouths agape at the TV screens.

Once it happened, the unthinkable became thinkable. And eventually, expected.

As is so often the case here: there are some good answers (Vote #1 Andreu Massana’s answer; Vote #2 or #3 Laurie Chilvers’ answer), there are some bad answers, and this is my answer.

• The initial hope of Zamenhof, and indeed of most people in the auxiliary language movement, was that the global language would be imposed top-down, by a committee of wise people.
• That’s not what happened, and that was never likely to happen. Lingua francas are bottom-up affairs. They are bottom-up affairs, to be sure, that harness an existing structure of power. But usually people don’t learn the empire’s language because the empire told them to. They learn it because it’s in their interest to.
• Esperanto, FWIW, endured as a bottom-up affair itself; and as I was discussing with Clarissa Lohr in the related answer to Could Esperanto seriously become the lingua franca?, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Esperantists are now what Zamenhof had called “Esperanto chauvinists”.
• When a language is adopted bottom up:
• Noone cares how perfect the language design is. People are prepared to jump through all sorts of hoops if it will get them advantage. They put up with English spelling, after all.
• When China overtakes America, it’ll be interesting to see whether Chinese As Lingua Franca will put up with Chinese characters. It may well do.
• Noone cares how rich the culture of the empire is. You think all those kids learning English in Indonesia give a damn about Milton?
• Conversely, all those people who assert how culturally vacuous Esperanto is? I give even less of a damn about you. That’s an argument from ignorance.
• Noone cares how flexible and adaptable the language of the empire is. They’re learning it for purely instrumental reasons.
• Noone cares how fair the power imbalance is: yes, the natives of the empire speak the language better than you ever will, but we redress the power imbalance in our face with the tools we have now, not with the tools of future hope.
• People care about their own culture surviving, and keeping the empire’s lingua a second language; but they don’t care as much as you might like. Languages die all the time, after all, and they usually die through the choices made by their speakers.
• What people do care about is how much access to power and money they can get through the lingua franca. That’s why the native languages of empires tend to do quite well. There is a niche for pidgins (such as the original Lingua Franca), when there isn’t a clear dominant player, or when the language contact is more circumstantial; but that isn’t the world we’re talking about now.

Ernest W. Adams’ answer to How is deleting others’ comments on your answer justified?

Ernest W. Adams’ answer to Why does Ernest W Adams disable comments?

I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did.

But while a lot of work over several years went into the TLG redaction of the 1940 LSJ (involving myself among others), that work involved proofreading, corrections to mistagging, typos or misprints in the digitisation (and very occasionally the source text), and updates to the hyperlinked citations. No substantive textual content was altered or added. The hyperlinks wouldn’t make sense in print, and the corrections over the source text really were slight. I don’t see an incentive for the TLG to do so, when the original LSJ is still in print.

The TLG Canon hasn’t been reprinted since 1990, and that represents original TLG work, which is updated and available online. If that has not been reprinted in book form, LSJ is far unlikelier still.

Again: I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did.

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.

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.

A2A, and I don’t speak Cypriot.

Well, this is quite the puzzle.

The lyric goes:

Τ’ άι Φιλίππου δκιάβηκε, τζι ήρτεν τ’ άι Μηνά,
τζι οι κορασιές παντρεύκουνται τζι αλλάσσουν τα λεγνά

St Philip’s day is gone, St Menna’s day is here,
and girls get married, and the slender ones change/and change the slender ones.

I’ve been through several Cypriot dictionaries, and the only definition they give for λεγνός (Standard Greek λιγνός) is “slender, slight”.

Lots of people on YouTube are confused by the term, but the consensus there is that it refers to slender girls, with a hypocoristic (“cutesy”) neuter. Λυγερή “my slender one” is a mainstay of Greek folk song.

So, the slender maidens change? Because they get married?

There’s a song lyric Larkos Larkou – Composer – Musician – Cyprus, which also refers to changed slenders:

Θεέ μου τζαι να πέθανα το Σάββατον το βράδυ
Τζαι Τζερκατζήν που το πρωί να κατεβώ στον Άδη
Πον’ οι παπάδες αδειανοί τζαι τα λεγνά αλλαμένα
Να συναχτούν να κλάψουσιν ξηχωριστά για μένα.

God, would that I died Saturday night,
and descended to the Netherworld Sunday morning
when the priests are empty (at leisure ?!) and the slenders are changed
so they can gather and cry especially for me.

Sunday is when priests are not at leisure, but I guess they are available for funerals, they’re at church anyway. But it would make sense that the male singer would like young girls to cry over his funeral. And on a Sunday, the girls have changed into their Sunday best. So I think that’s what the original lyric means:

“and girls get married, and slender maidens [used here as synonym for girls] change [into their Sunday best, for St Menna’s Day]”

Placebo effect, people.

A lot of this plays out in people’s heads. Not just the redhead-chasers’ heads, but the redheads’ too.

If you live in a culture in which redheads are told they are better in bed, a non-trivial number of redheads are going to believe that they really are better in bed, and act accordingly.

A culture in which redheads are told they are better in bed can, of course, serve for others as added pressure, or as a resented stereotype. But there doesn’t need to be a genetic factor in place, for a cultural perception to become realised in practice.

Of course, you can also say the same about any number of other physical attributes, that get stereotypically associated with being better in bed. It all plays out in the mind. And we aren’t as immune to those kinds of mind games as we like to think.