Category: Uncategorized

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.

Google translation does not work by rules and grammars. Machine translation gave up on that decades ago. Pity, because I spent well over a decade coding morphological rules for Greek, and it was a lot of fun.

Machine translation works on statistics. To gather the statistics, you need a large amount of bilingual texts.

Now, there is an order of magnitude more ancient Greek than ancient Latin texts, much of it translated. And there are a substantial number of mediaeval Greek texts as well.

But even if the interest was there in ancient Greek machine translation, the material would not be.

• Optical character recognition for the squiggles of polytonic Greek is not great, and would degrade the quality of any bilingual corpus substantially, unless someone had typed the text in. (Both Perseus and the TLG have; Google did talk to the TLG once while I was working there, but it was about teaching materials, not machine translation.)
• The classical corpus is probably not big enough to be useful for statistical machine translation; and there is a lot more bilingual text for mediaeval Latin available than for mediaeval Greek.
• Unlike Latin, the classical Greek corpus is multidialectal, which would compromise any statistics even more.

So machine translating ancient Greek would be a lot more hassle than for Latin. And because of the cultural history of Western Europe, there is much less demand for it than there would be for Latin.

Compare the number of translation requests for tattoos on this site, in Latin and in ancient Greek.

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.

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.

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.”

Nestor’s Cup is one of the earliest inscriptions in Greek, and it’s got a metrical inscription that may allude to the Iliad:

So it’s feasible that Homer started being transcribed as soon as vowels were introduced—which pretty much was as soon as the alphabet was adopted in Greek. (We have no evidence of Greek using Phoenecian letters without vowels, and vowels were as much as anything a misconstrual of how Phoenician worked.)

The Iliad seems to have been written at roughly the time the alphabet was introduced, and writing is mentioned in passing in the Iliad: The “Fatal Letter” in the Iliad: Introduction of Written Language to the Greeks (Circa 750 BCE). But it’s likelier that Homer really was first written down when the Greeks said that Homer was first written down, two centuries later in Athens; oral transmission would have kept it around till then, and from what little we know, there was a lot of textual variation about, outside of the version that was written down.

On seeing this question, I thought, “Huh? Why is this not a question for Wikipedia?”

And then I looked at Wikipedia—English and German and French; and I realised that it’s not as trivial a question as you might think.

The last three letters of the Coptic alphabet listed on Wikipedia (all three languages) are Ϭ, Ϯ, Ⳁ.

The French and English article on Wikipedia starts with this image:

In this image, that last Ⳁ is missing.

The third last letter, tshēma Ϭ, is a straightforward letter, derived from Demotic Egyptian. It is transliterated as <q> or <tsh>, and pronounced as [kʲ] or [tʃ].

The second last letter, ti Ϯ, is also from Demotic. It is pronounced as [ti] in Sahidic, and [de] in Boharic.

Now, this will immediately throw most people. Coptic grammars calmly say that several letters are equivalents of two other letters: ⲑ is /th/, ⲝ is /ks/, and so forth. But /ti/ is different. If Coptic is an alphabet, then its letters are meant to be either consonants or vowels, but not both. [ti] is not something you find in an alphabet, it is something you find in a syllabary.

The Demotic script that the letter originates, though, was not an alphabet: it was an abjad (consonant-only) script, which meant that single letters often could end up standing for syllables. That ended up happening with ti. And all accounts of Coptic list ti as a normal letter. So a letter it is, even if it is not the kind of letter you expect in an alphabet.

The final letter, Ⳁ, does not have a name or a pronunciation. It is a numeral, with the value 900.

Coptic, like Greek, Hebrew, and (early) Cyrillic, used a different letter of the alphabet for each of 1–9, 10–90, and 100–900. That requires 27 letters. In the case of Greek, which had 24 letters, the numerals for 6, 90 and 900 were represented by archaic letters, that were not considered part of the alphabet normally: ϛ Ϟ Ϡ. Coptic had no shortage of letters, but it still was reluctant to assign numeric values to Demotic letters, as opposed to letters that came from Greek; so it added ⲋ for 6, reused the ϥ for 90 as the letter fai /f/, and came up with Ⳁ for 900.

Does Ⳁ actually count as a letter? The precedent of Greek says no. Alphabet copte — Wikipédia refers to it as a “abbreviating ligature”, which would say no. Coptic numerals only are in common use in the later Boiharic dialect; the earlier Sahidic dialect did not use them, so that is a vote against as well. And the two Sahidic grammars I’ve had a look at, Johanna Brankaer’s and Bentley Layton’s, do not give Ⳁ as a letter. Layton doesn’t even mention Ⳁ until his discussion of numerals.

Wikipedia and Unicode list Ⳁ as a letter of the Coptic alphabet, because they have to list it somewhere; but in the normal Coptic understanding of “alphabet”, Ⳁ isn’t part of it. The atypical ti Ϯ is it.

So what would happen if hypothetically an announcement came out that started like this?

QUORA PRODUCT UPDATES

Rory Devin

Here at Quora, our mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. Today, we’re excited to announce a new enhancement to your reading experience.

Seven years ago we introduced Comments (Quora feature) in beta, to explore new ways for readers to provide feedback to writers. We learned a lot from this beta, and are excited by the content and ways that comments were used.

At Quora, we’ve been excited to rethink the comment experience for a few reasons. Comments are a great resource, but they can become a vector for debate and abuse. If you’ve been on other websites, comments sections can sometimes become a pretty toxic place. It’s important for us to avoid that outcome as the community continues to grow rapidly, and we’re excited to be taking proactive measures to make sure Quora stays a safe and civil place.

In fact, I’ve discussed this question with others, and I’m still looking forward to their answers as to how this would change the content of answers themselves. I’ll limit myself to the obvious social consequences of such a move.

• There would likely be an exodus of the more socialising subgroups of Quora users. (The Cats and many Dolphins, in my taxonomy: Quora Compass by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency.) Teen Quoran numbers in particular would nosedive. Writing answers about being locked in a room with a bunch of unanswerable questions just wouldn’t have the same appeal.
• It is not a value judgement to say that that subgroup of users is not the strategic focus of the company.
• A small number of Quora users (all Dogs in my taxonomy) would feel vindicated by the decision, would defend it to the hilt, and would be abominably smug about it.
• A number of users (Bees, some Dolphins, fewer Dogs) would be troubled by the decision, would point out why it is a bad idea, and would protest it. Those protests would take place both on Quora, and on the Facebook groups. A response from Quora itself would be extremely unlikely on any forum.
• There would be less for moderation to do, whether they are robots, hypothetical contractors, or employees. Nowhere near 0, but certainly less.
• The passive users, who are Quora’s major source of eyeballs, would be undiminished. They don’t come to Quora for the comments.
• Some expert users would be troubled enough to leave. I think many people would be surprised how low that number would be.
• I hereby undertake that I would be one of those users.
• Any such exodus would not impact Quora’s bottom line, even if they all did delete their content and posted it elsewhere (which is the only way Quora’s bottom line could be impacted.) As I myself believe Quora’s approach to user management has demonstrated, writers are fungible.
• Most expert users would stay, and adjust. As I said, the question of how the content would adjust is a fascinating one, that I’d like others to address.

I’ve had the opportunity to travel a bit in my time; and because Australians are food snobs, I’ve used the opportunity to sample what the locals eat.

I’ll put down two memorable meals.

The first was in Amsterdam. On my last day there, I opened up my Lonely Planet guide book, flicked past the hoity-toity restaurant recommendations and Argentinian steakhouses and the Indonesian Fusion, went down to the Hotel Amsterdam De Roode Leeuw, and ordered myself some Stamppot.

Shh.

Listen.

Listen closely.

Do you hear a faint popping sound?

That’s the sound of a whole bunch of Dutch minds being blown.

The meal was memorable, because my Dutch waiter at the Red Lion Hotel had the selfsame reaction. He just could not even about the fact that an obvious tourist was chowing down with some Dutch comfort food. The kind of Dutch comfort food, he told me, you go skating across frozen lakes with.

Oh, what did it taste like? Stodgy. Filling. Reassuring. The kind of Dutch comfort food you go skating across frozen lakes with.

(This was my account at the time: Fine Dining In Amsterdam)

---

The second memorable meal was in Kadıköy, a hip suburb of Istanbul, where my wife’s cousin lives. We tried to pay her a visit one evening while we were in Istanbul for our honeymoon.

Getting the brand new Marmaray metro under the Bosphorus, from Sultanahmet to Üsküdar, was a seven-minute breeze, even if the subway was congested. The next three hours, not so much: waiting half an hour to get a cab, discovering that no cab drivers in Turkey speak English, being stuck in traffic for an hour, being dumped at the start of Kadıköy ’cause “just walk down a bit, you can’t miss it”, missing it, finding that none of the hip young things lounging around Kadıköy cafés speak English either, realising we had the wrong number for Tamar’s cousin, finding an Internet café so we could Facebook a red alert to Telma, having a generous lounger walk us for another half hour in the dark to the address (without any English)…

Oh, distance of Üsküdar to Kadıköy? 11 km.

It was way past 9 by the time we got to Telma’s. Telma, her husband, her newborn, all had grand plans on entertaining us, and sadly, we’d plain gotten there too late. They had to settle for the local kebab joint: KASSAB.

I asseverate to you, by all that is pure and righteous on this good Earth.

That was the best meat I have had the privilege of eating in all my days in this Vale of Tears.

(The Wagyu steak I had on the weekend comes close, but the Wagyu steak just had divine texture, like an oyster that kept on looping. This meat had spice and punch and character.)

Kaleidoscope yet good honest flavours—familiar from Greece, but with a bunch of twists I hadn’t expected; knock-out firewater; newly met family; casual friendly owners; neighbourly chow-down. It doesn’t get better. It truly doesn’t.

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.