Category: Uncategorized

There is not one community. Something anticipated as far back as 2010: Seb Paquet’s answer to Does Quora actually need a community? There are clear splits in the community, enabled by the fact that different Quora users see very different feeds, determined by the topics and people they follow.

quora numbers by the departed Laura Hale demonstrated this with what statistics she could glean, and it is corroborated in all your experience. American Quora users notoriously know very little of what happens in the Indian Quora, and their demographics and interests are vastly different. Most Quora users have no idea who the Discord teens are, or who the Insurgents are. I certainly know very little of the Venture Capital old core of Quora.

Whenever I see too many people agreeing on something in their own interest here, I grow contrarian. It brings out the inner Michaelis Maus in me; there are uses to nihilism.

Others have spoken well, and to applause, about the anti-intellectualism and bias of the Urban Dictionary definitions. Michael Masiello has conceded in comments that there is plenty of vapidity on Quora, but that the anti-intellectualism of the Urban Dictionary definitions is the greater enemy.

I’ve given up on anti-intellectualism as something I can have any engagement with. Fight with the dullards of Urban Dictionary? Why bother? As we say in Greek, “from the miller’s wife’s arse, one expects no orthography.” But I do expect better of the vapid than of the stupid, and I’m going to be contrarian about this.

I’ll do my own close reading of the infamous first definition, and I’ll ignore its stylistic infelicities:

The internet’s self-conscious act of intellectual validity and authority.

Well, https://www.quora.com/about:

Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. […] We want to connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it, to bring together people with different perspectives so they can understand each other better, and to empower everyone to share their knowledge for the benefit of the rest of the world.

Quora Inc claims authority, and markets itself as such—whatever its actual users are doing. There’s a fair bit of hubris in that mission, and in those aligning to that mission—particularly in the notion (naive in so many fields) that there is a best or right answer to a question, and that that answer is to be had here.

Unsurprisingly primarily self-centered and authoritarian instead of rational.

This could be the response of a disgruntled libertarian, but the same Quora Inc would tell you that the Quora users had no business making the libertarian feel like that to begin with, because users should be made to feel welcome regardless of their ideology: hence Bodnick saying that BNBR applied to Trump during the election campaign.

Appeal to authority, to self-interest, or to one’s own righteousness in political debate are certainly nothing to take pride in—even if right wingers’ construct of “rationality” is often blinkered.

Some of the more objective or positive entries might at first make one assume that most people there are not just as insufferable as anywhere else and like any community on the internet,

Hold on to that concession. Have we not all felt that Quora is better than other fora, because of the elevated level of discourse, the relative civility, the conscious exercise of scholarship and objectivity?

albeit maybe at the same time with an even more all-encompassing entitlement and smug self-satisfaction.

… and have we then not all been disappointed to see that some popular writers here are still smug, self-righteous, know-it-alls speaking outside their domains of knowledge, and hostile to any questioning of their premises?

Surely it isn’t just me.

And assume that the triviality of most of the questions would be self-aware and not lost on most of the people.

The bizarre use of “self-aware” notwithstanding, have users not been complaining about the quality of questions, and political questions particularly, for years?

Highly restrictive, not only in the artificial question and answer format,

Is the Q & A format not restrictive? Quora is not Medium; that’s why blogs on Quora exist. That’s why plenty of users use the questions as springboards rather than as requests for information. And let’s not even get started on Survey Questions, solicitations of anecdote rather than answers to questions—which are so contrary to what Quora thought it was about, they were on limdist for the first few years of the site.

You can retort that if you came to write on Quora, you came to answer questions, and if you want Medium, you know where to find it; yet there is clear evidence here of people wiggling against those constraints.

but also the ultra-strict length limitations

Hands up who has come up against the length limits on questions or question details. Even if you accept the rationale for them, they are restrictive, and Quora users feel those restrictions.

and rampant auto-correct functions, Content Review and straightforward censorship.

I’ve seen answers decrying the protest against censorship, as being democratic or in the cause of moderation decency. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone praising Quora’s auto-correct, topic bot, and certainly not Quora Content Review. And radicals of both left and right will tell you how tone policing and sanctions on speech is a repressive instrument that quashes dissent and advocacy of change.

I think BNBR is overall a useful thing too, sure; but do not pretend BNBR is politically neutral, or that Silicon Valley corporations are, just because they aren’t an arm of the US Government.

Moderation is more concerned with keeping up appearances than with moral tasks, consistency and transparency.

I’m actually not convinced Moderation is particularly concerned with appearances either, although I can see why a right-winger taken to task for the vehemence of their opinions might think so. And I certainly would not entrust morality policing to Quora moderators or mod bots, just as Quora itself is reluctant to.

But complaints about Moderation consistency are legion, and have been for years; and Moderation is notoriously not transparent by design.

Sanctimonious, arrogant, prejudiced and irrational and with a cult-like devotion to their brand and policy taken literally and subjectively.

I’ve seen all of this here. Again: haven’t you?

Actual psychopaths, either self-proclaimed in order to effectively show off or those whose practices are harboured there, are the hipsters of the place.

… Yeah, ok, that last bit made no sense. 🙂

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And what would I offer to Urban Dictionary?

To its users, Quora is a site where people who think they are clever write essays answering questions. Often in dot points, sometimes good. Quora is smarter than Yahoo Answers, more unfocussed than Stack Exchange, and less free-flowing than Reddit.

To its owners, Quora is a Google Trap that is going to make them gajillions of bucks in perpetuity.

David Mowbray

There are underlying similarities between Turkish and Greek music at a deeper level, and there are clear similarities between Greek pop and Turkish pop at a more proximate level.

At a deeper level, the scales and instruments used by Turks and Greeks are related, through close to a millennium of coexistence. The tunings and modes of Byzantine chant have undergone microtonal influence from Turkish classical music. (The Greek chant preserved in Corsica does not have the same microtones.) Both the wind and the stringed instruments of the region have travelled in both directions. And of course the folk music of Christians and Muslims living in the same region was usually indistinguishable, whether it was Greece or Turkey. (Crete appears to have been an exception, but Christians took up the Muslim repertoire anyway after the Muslims left.)

At a more proximate level, the pop tradition of Greek music started with Rebetiko, and Rebetiko itself is clearly rooted in Smyrneika (Ottoman café music associated with Smyrna/İzmir). The scales and style were clearly Ottoman in the 1920s, although they evolved in more Western directions in Greece, from the 1930s (the Piraeus style) on.

Even before Rebetiko, there was a parallel outright Western pop tradition in Greek music, and the two traditions have mostly remained distinct; rebetiko has turned into Laïko (which in other answers I’ve termed “bouzouki pop”), and Western operettas of the 1910s have given way to rock, R&B stylings, and Euro disco.

Greeks are well aware that their Laiko tradition, and the revered Rebetiko that it comes from, has Turkish roots. Occasionally a nationalist might grouse about, but for the most part they’re happy that they’ve nativised it. It is worth noting that the Rebetiko that there is the most reverence for is not the Smyrneika of the 1920s, but the more nativised Peiraeus style of the 1930s.

With the thaw in Greek–Turkish relations since the 1990s, there has been a lot of traffic of “serious” musicians between the two countries; the Wikipedia article I linked to points out that contemporary performers of Rebetiko, if anything, overemphasise the Turkish style of the music. There has been some traffic of pop songs between the two countries, although that in itself is not remarkable; Arabic and Indian pop songs have also been covered in Greek.

In discussion with Turks on Quora, I’ve found that we understand each others’ music, it is familiar to us—but also that we would not mistake one’s music for the other. One user (and I’m annoyed I don’t remember who: it was in a comment, so good luck searching it) offered to me that there was something more impassioned about Turkish music, and more fatalistic about Greek music (“What can you do? Let’s have an ouzo”). That threw me, but then I realised that what came across to them as fatalistic comes across to me as stern and restrained: that was the contribution of the Piraeus style.

I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me.

It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty good, despite the fact that it was written within the grammaticalisation framework.

Hypothesis is likely too strong a word, since it’s opened up to refutation through the counterexamples. But the tendency towards more grammatical, more reduced, more bounded, more obligatorified, is a thing, and it’s both quite useful in reconstruction (as Daniel concedes), and something to be explained.

Formalists in an online discussion on unidirectionality I read once dismissed unidirectionality in grammaticalisation as an epiphenomenon. The retort was: aren’t most interesting phenomena?

This fate has befallen me: e.g. Am I shallow or superficial for thinking Australia’s aboriginals are the least attractive race of humans in the world? (QUESTION DELETED) by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. I’ve just been asked this in PM about another instance of an offensive question with answers skilfully refuting its problematic assumptions: Mike DiGirolamo’s answer to Is it right to be publicly anti-gay?

Even if the questions are offensive, good answers refuting those assumptions are useful and constructive, right? They spread knowledge and virtue, they can motivate great writing, they can challenge readers and make them more critical. So why get rid of them?

Go read Jeremy Arnold’s answer to What are common characteristics of very popular Quora users who are not Top Writers?

Read it, because he nails what it is Quora is after, and indirectly, why Quora would not give a toss about the virtuous answers deleted along with the offensive questions.

Quora is only interested in answers to questions. Specifically, answers to questions people are likely to google (and, I should add, that will not scare off advertisers).

Their primary interest is not good writing. Not virtue. Not challenging readers. It’s providing answers to Google-worthy questions.

What brings new users to Quora? High-quality answers that provide domain expertise to questions as they are asked.

Going beyond is fine. Adding personality is fine. But many writers looking to build an audience end up doing the three things that Quora views as unhelpful, effectively treating questions as writer’s prompts instead of narrow knowledge queries.

While there can be genuine value in this (e.g., exposing the hidden bias inherent in a short-sighted question), the future value of Quora as a platform is tied to the IPA market (Siri, Google Assistant, etc.) — which means that bio credibility and domain expertise are far more valuable than writing or entertainment skills.

[My italics]

In fact, look at Quora’s answer to What does a good answer on Quora look like? What does it mean to “be helpful”?, which Jeremy cites:

You should always assume that people are asking in good faith and really want help. Helpful answers don’t change the subject, obsess over faulty premises, or make fun of the question.

Quora does not want you to “obsess over faulty premises” of an offensive question. And the offensive question will attract undersirables, and repel advertisers. Quora just wants the question gone.

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Btw, I deeply enjoy writing answers that “obsess over faulty premises”, both in the question and in other answers; I love applying my critical faculties and going beyond the glib first answer that pops through people’s outrage. That enjoyment is certainly worth more to me than a jacket.

How do you remind Australians on Australia Day that they should really be a republic after all?

By getting them to sing the Australian Royal National Anthem in an ad.

You know the one.

‘God save the Queen’: Royal anthem gets republican twist in new ad campaign

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2RQ_M55Jhaw

Good work, Australian Republican Movement. You didn’t even need the people in the ad to stumble over the words (“something and glorious”). The incongruity is already plenty obvious.

(You might want to update your HTML title on your website, though, to reflect your rebranding to “Australian Republic Movement”…)

The YouTube comments, btw, indicate that the ad did not have the same resonance with monarchists that it has had with me…

By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?—

The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than a couple of hundred words and they can’t use it except for their routine communications. It’s more like a trained parrot reciting some sentences.

—I have been copy-editing a paper on the Sanskrit spoken in the village of Jhiri. The researcher estimates that of the 600 villagers, 20 have conversational competence in Sanskrit; and (as you’d expect) there is clear syntactic influence on their Sanskrit from Hindi. The revival effort in Jhiri, as elsewhere, is through the work of Samskrita Bharati, although the village has stopped working with them.

Of course, 20 out of 600 is not the impression you get from googling Jhiri. There is a lot of romance to the notion of reviving Sanskrit.

They all do. And let me elaborate on that.

For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential.

For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are vehicles for culture. Yes, some literature cultures will have a huge backlog of canon to allude to; but oral cultures are no slouches there either. The subtle allusions to layers of Roman mythology make Latin literature very dense, and difficult to get through for an outsider. But Roman mythology is not that far removed from the religion of any given preliterate tribe, and their oral literature will not be any less powerfully allusive for it.

The languages that are in a disadvantage there are constructed languages. Esperanto is not at a severe disadvantage, since much of its literature for the most part is still squarely in the European tradition, and there are both internal and external allusions it still makes. But compared to ethnic languages, it’s fair to say, Esperanto is a bit more of a blunt instrument.

Klingon’s even blunter, though at least Klingon has a mythos. I still have a soft spot for the Klingon terza rima I came up with though…

Then there’s the formal element of poetry. I have to say, talk of which languages it’s easier to rhyme in is cheap. The forms adjust to accomodate the possibilities of the language. If rhymes are easy, you have rhyme-rich forms like the Petrarchan sonnet. If rhymes are less thickly strewn on the ground, you dial that back to the Spenserian or the Shakespearean sonnet. If rhymes are hard, you’ll allow all sorts of off-rhymes; if rhymes are facile, you’ll frown on suffix rhymes, and put hurdles in the way like Rime riche. The resources of the language are so harnessed in the language, that the exercise of craft is enough of a challenge to be appreciated, and not so much of a challenge as to be impossible.

Not all poetic traditions use rhyme, but many poetic traditions do something like that. (I’d like to think all do.) In Latin poetry, having the ictus coincide with the metre (stress coinciding with the feet of quantitative metre) was gauche, tolerable only in the very first poets in the language like Ennius.

So, I could say that Italian is a rhyme-rich, clear-sounding, culturally fertile language, well suited for Petrarch. And English is rhyme-poor, muffled, and came into the 17th century blinking and deracinated. So Early Modern Italian must be better suited for poetry than Early Modern English, right?

Yet, Shakespeare.

Possibly off for a week.

Hiatus by Jordan Yates on Jordan Yates’s Blog