Category: Uncategorized

Never a trivial question from you, eh Michaelis?

Something I’ve actually being discussing at some length with Jennifer Edeburn, to whom I seem to have outsourced my superego. (You’ll have noticed I took a day off of that today, Jennifer?)

Nothing I would not have learned from engaging with humanity in general, if I got out more. But some lessons are always salutary, the more so if you learn them ten times running.

• People are wonderful. Randoms have unfathomable reserves of empathy, kindness, and respect. Which I have drawn on, and which I hope to have reciprocated.
• People are awful. Not just the discernible reprobates, the trolls and the bigots: that’s too easy, that’s too fertile a ground for “but I’m above that”. The smug, the judgemental, the unthinking, the bien-pensant. The cliquish, the reactive, the indignant. That get applauded for it.
• And that at times, that can include me. Not a pleasant learning, but a useful one. To be conscious of it is not enough, but it’s an advance anyway.
• People are complex. You can admire one facet of a person, and find another repulsive; or at least problematic. Which makes evaluating whether they are in or out with you difficult.
• People are duplicitous. Or rather, subtle. I hear reports that a lot of people have been unmasked by anonymity fails, under the new regime. I wouldn’t be chortling about it: who among us does not have things about them they’d rather not be broadcast?
• You, perhaps, Michaelis. But you are a nihilist, after all.
• Oh, and I also wouldn’t be chortling, because “upstanding citizens” too can be embarrassed by privacy fails. And they have further to fall.
• Large organisations are stupid and don’t care about you. However many buffets they lay out for you. A relatively easy thing to learn, and I’m astonished that a critical mass don’t seem to have.
• Large organisations have their own agenda, and that’s no more immoral than you having your own agenda. That takes a bit more getting your head around. As I said towards the end of my coming to terms with it: if Quora’s Moloch, then there’s no use getting angry at a furnace. That’s what furnaces do.
• (I’ve taken to calling it a Wall since. Less… incendiary.)
• Communication is possible with people of good will, who let go of their dogmas. That’s a useful lesson that comes with BNBR self-policing.
• Communication is impossible with people who do not share your postulates about the basics. I can talk politics with communists; I cannot talk politics with libertarians. I can talk theology with the undogmatic, I cannot with the self-righteous. There are limits to BNBR.
• Privilege is real, and so is hegemony, and so is complacency. There’s a reason no revolution ever worked on BNBR.
• There is a place for a salon of the thoughtful and the critical, whether Mountain View intended it thus or not. If that’s an abdication from the pressing urgency on the streets, well, let me have it. If Rome is falling, there are worse things to do in its final days than recline on the couch and discuss pentameters.

Tough question, Habib le toubib: I don’t do heroes, I like my critical faculties about me, and I’ve been jaded for a while. And of course, anyone I’d choose would be morbidly obscure anyway.

…

OK, challenge accepted.

• Hubert Pernot. The underappreciated giant of Modern Greek historical linguistics. Not a polemicist, not a tub-thumper; he just got on with it, from a safe distance in Paris. His three volume monograph on the dialect of Chios is an accidental history of all of Modern Greek. His neogrammarian probity in his grammar of Tsakonian is a work for the ages.

• Giovanni Gabrieli. Author of the music of the spheres, the Canzone e Sonate. Thanks, man. It’s music that makes you proud to be human.

• Stephanos Sahlikis. If you don’t count Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the first poet to rhyme in Greek, rhyming about whores and gambling and doing time, in the 14th century.
• Woah! His poems just got published in Panagiotiakis’ long-awaited posthumous critical edition, in 2015! Why didn’t I know about this?! I’m going to have to have words to the maintainer of the Early Modern Greek blog. Thanks Habib, for helping me discover that!

• Helen Waddell. I’ve already written about my teen crush on her: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If you could take one historical person from history as a lover/date, who would it be and why? “If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.”

• Gough Whitlam. Flawed, self-important, chaotic politician (was this guy even Australian?), who built up my country’s pride and dignity, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.

• Charilaos Trikoupis. Taciturn, reserved, orderly politician (was this guy even Greek?), who presided over reforms and infrastructure and a bankruptcy, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.

• Theodore Metochites. For writing the most obscurantist overgilded Greek ever in his pseudo-Homeric poems, which posed the greatest challenge I faced in all my time at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. For decreeing that the Ancients left us Mediaeval Greeks nothing to say—in a foreword to 120 essays. For commissioning the marvels of Chora Church, while he was the moneybags-in-charge of the Empire. And for retreating into his own church with dignity, with his books and his sorrow, after he lost everything.

I’m just going to leave this statement in support of Quora made by another user here:

Had everyone behaved themselves, it wouldn’t have come to this.

I’ve edited out my BNBR about it. But statements such as these have led me to blocking users. I can have no discussion with someone whose notion of justice works like this.

Quora had a problem with anonymous content, and has destroyed the village in order to save it. What were they thinking? That this will make the problem go away. And that they will be able to keep the lid on fake accounts.

Which demonstrates again that they are in so much denial about being social media, they refuse to learn anything from social media.

As Talleyrand said: It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

BTW, per details:

1. If you make updates, you’re screwed because you’re no longer anonymous and everything is permanently recorded in the log.

If this is true, Quora is compromising its users’ anonymity without warning. And will richly deserve all the negative publicity it gets for it.

Because Quora, at a corporate and (mostly) community level, regards itself as an authoritative source of information, rather than a social forum: it deprecates the “interactivity” you speak of, as detracting from the authoritative tone it aspires to.

You will have seen a lot of answers that agree with this judgement. And a little more critically than that, the advertisers likely to want their ads promoted here will also agree with this judgement. (Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?)

This doesn’t mean Quora, or the harrumphing answers here, are right. It’s all conventions, they all change, they’re all socially contingent. But right now, in 2017, emojis have an association of levity and unseriousness, and non-emojis have an association that Quora and its core audience seek, of seriousness and expertise.

They’ll wrest my emoticons from my dead clammy hands though. 😐

I’ve spoken elsewhere of the Silicon Valley notion of what scholarship is all about: actual scholars can crack jokes. Just look at the terminology used in computer science. But for now, that’s the register, that’s the prejudice, that’s the expectation.

(Oh, and of course you can actually enter emoji in the editor: [math]unicode{x1F61B}unicode{x1F69E}.[/math] Do expect Quora Moderation to come after you if you do, though.)

The intention of the Unicode Regional Indicator Symbols was to represent current countries in existence (as encoded in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), as locales for software; the flags are a lagniappe. (A rather unfortunate lagniappe.)

Hence, no SPQR flag: the point of the codes is to indicate the country you live in, as a two letter ISO code, to be used for software localisation. (E.g. use Serbian rather than Russian italics for Cyrillic.) The Roman Empire doesn’t have such a code, because you don’t live in it—though a bunch of defunct 20th century states do.

There’s a proposal to throw the door open for Emoji flags to regions such as Scotland and California. Per UTS #51: Unicode Emoji, those are still restricted to present-day national subdivisions, and historical states are not in scope for them.

Maggie Q is a stage name, her real name being Margaret Quigley.

Many countries and states have Surname laws and Naming laws: see Naming in the United States. It depends on local legislation, cultural laissez-faire, and practicality for data entry. (If you make your surname a single EMOJI, I am coming to get you!) But in places like Kentucky, that have no naming laws on the books, the answer is yes.

They did:

• Dalmatian language – Wikipedia
• Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia
• Aromanian language – Wikipedia
• Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia

What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving.

The real question is not why don’t Yugoslavians speak Romance, but why Romanians do over such a wide area. Origin of the Romanians – Wikipedia shows that there is not a consensus around it, and of course the question is clouded by politics.

• Either there was a continguous compact Latin-speaking population in Romania, which resisted Slavonic assimilation (Theory of Daco-Roman continuity);
• or Romania was resettled by Latin-speaking populations (Aromanians) from enclaves south of the Danube (Immigrationist or Admigrationist theory). The Aromanians are highland shepherds, so they were not in regular contact with Slavs settling the lowlands.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world?

Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities.

Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; and the serious work on the origins of language is subsequent to my training as a linguist, so I’m not across it.

But even if there were a single origin of language, any trace of it is long since effaced, under the waves of language change after language change, millennium after millennium. In our mental and scholarly modelling of how languages have come to be, the single mother language doesn’t make any difference: there could have been one, there could have been a hundred, we’ll never know. So it doesn’t matter to me.

I have answered this question with regard to one of the Anglo-Celtic Australians pictured: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you think Australian singer Delta Goodrem is pretty? My answer is no different for the other three Anglo-Celtic Australians.

What can we do to stop situations like this from happening?

Be aware of the policies. Quora certainly won’t bother telling you in advance (Quora does not do onboarding), so find out about them, and find out about how they are policed. Do your own digging. Don’t just take me or my blogs’ word for it. And don’t just read the letter of Quora’s policies either; they are vague and generic. Look at specific moderation calls. Talk to former community mods about how they think the policies work.

Being aware of the policies is not to acquiesce to them and absolve Quora of any blame. We know Quora is fallible. We know that Quora can be tricked. And whether the sockpuppetting rules are justified or not is a topic worthy of discussion. Information is a good thing to have. Critical opinion about rules is a good thing to have.

But they are still their rules, not yours, and their processes of appeal, not yours.

How can we get her back?

Matt Zhang is unbanned not only because Quora recognised that they had been tricked (if what User says is true), but also because I gave him Tatiana’s email address for him to appeal his ban. I also gave those who wanted to appeal Brooke’s ban Tatiana’s email. (Tatiana’s email, and her availability as an avenue of appeal, is not secret information, so I don’t feel compunction about doing so. If that avenue is closed off, I’m sure I will hear of it.)

You can use that avenue of appeal alongside the normal, fill-out-a-form-and-Rory-the-Quora-intern-will-take-your-form-and-file-it process. I don’t know for a fact that this avenue is discouraged or encouraged. If that avenue fails, though, you are out of luck. No industrial action or protest will change it. And I can only assume by now that this is the case with Brooke Taylor.

Btw, because I have been getting a few emails lately about this from banees: I have no special access to the Corridors Of Power here on Quora. Quite the opposite in fact: I’ve had all of one (1) exchange with Tatiana, about my blog posts being throttled. I don’t know if Top Writers can advocate successfully for or against banees, as I’ve seen alleged here; I can only assure you that I’m not such a Top Writer, and I wouldn’t want to be.