Nick on Quora

Actual lesbians have answered this question, and now, despite my better judgement, so will I. Using the insightful comment of one of their number as a springboard:

Molly Juul: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-…

The “aesthetically finding women more beautiful”-phenomenon is 100% social. Women are sexualized sooo much in the media, and men are constantly being told that “women are the only ones who should care about beauty, men can never be beautiful”. At least, this is my theory.

You know Ancient Greece? Men was seen as the aesthetically more beautiful and perfect gender.

This. And it’s salutary to spell it out:

• Individuals find people of varied genders hot, through a nebulous interaction of their innateness, their socialisation, and social constructs.
• The dominant narrative of hotness in Western society is heteronormative and male–centred. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to find, I dunno, Sophia Loren attractive, because I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to be cis het male. It is a perspective, that happens to be the dominant one, but is as true as any other.
• The notion that this dominant narrative is the universal narrative, though, is pernicious to anyone who isn’t its direct beneficiary. Gay men deserve their beefcake too (and they get it). Straight women deserve it too, and a lot of them are socialised not to seek it—because blokes are unlovely. If blokes are so unlovely, why boff us at all? That gets very unhealthy very quickly.
• And I know noone should cry for the poor cis het male, but being told all your life that only chicks are attractive, and that you can only be a consumer of beauty and not a producer? That’s not healthy for blokes either. As you can see in the questions asked in the Relationships topic here.
• As for lesbians… my reaction downstream from Molly, via Melinda Gwin, was to reject the question as implying “are there lesbians because girls are hot according to heteronormative contingent cultural norms of femininity that a lot of lesbians overtly reject?” The heels-wearing, unironically femme “lesbians” of straight porn doing endless kissy-face may match the criteria of “hot” underlying the question; but they do not correspond to the life experience and predilections of all actual lesbians.
• Or so I am told.

So yes and no. Lesbians are lesbians because girls are hot. But the girls a straight man finds hot are not necessarily the girls a lesbian finds hot. Guys are hot too, despite the pernicious standard narrative. And lesbians aren’t lesbians because of a straight man’s notion of female beauty. Or because women are somehow intrinsically and objectively more attractive than men.

Now normally, there would be some banter in comments between me and Melinda about the objective facthood of feminine pulchritude, and how her current, atypically male partner violates her better judgment. But you know what? He too is lovable, including physically lovable.

Of the four non-English​ Quoras to date:

• I don’t have an account on the Italian yet, and I’ve never formally learned the language. Informally, I have faked the language through reconstruction from music scores and Latin, but I would be reluctant to commit my improvisation to writing.
• Taxi cabs are another matter.

• I spent some time watching Univision while living in Southern California, but I have not studied Spanish either, and Speedy Gonzales cartoons are no substitute for musical scores, when it comes to reconstructing a language. The four Quora languages are in fact the four European languages taught at Melbourne Uni, when I was hanging out there in IT; but Spanish was a late addition, and I didn’t get on with the lecturer. So less incentive there.
• The languages I have had formal training in are French and German. My command of the two is equally bad, but I’m clearly gravitating towards the German.
• I already know two users well on the German site, Clarissa and Joachim. (Can’t tempt you to join, Kat?) I’ve been doing good banter with both. On the French site, I only know Habib well, and I didn’t get the impression he was a frequent poster.
• I have aesthetic reasons to prefer German to French. Although that aesthetics is as much to do with their music as their language.
• I have had my one French answer corrected 4 times. The first time by Sihem herself. The first two times, it’s flattering. By the fourth time, you start suspecting that maybe they’re trying to tell you something. My German answers have been corrected too, but only once (so far). And my German interlocutors tell me they find my German adorably eccentric.
• … They should be careful what they wish for…

Why yes, I do have footage of me speaking German in a cab, too:

See? They should be careful what they wish for…

As I expect you know, Collapse Bot hates Non-Roman scripts.

I’ve had several bouts with the bot over the question Which conjugation is Gnōthi ‘know’, as in Gnōthi sauton ‘know thyself’?

The Greek used to be in Greek characters, and without glosses. Shifting to transliteration and italics, and adding glosses, sometimes works; this time it hasn’t.

Some of you will have put non-English in questions. How do you get the bot to shut up?

I’m going to answer a different interpretation of this question. If all languages have access to the same, finite repertoire of segments (phonemes), then why do they sound as different as they do?

There are several answers to this.

• The repertoire of phonemes may be finite, but the realisation can be phonetically different. A Dutch /x/ is much more fortis than a Greek /x/.
• Different languages employ quite different subsets of the available phonemic inventory.
• Languages differ in sound, not only at the level of individual segments, but also in how they arrange those segments, their phonotactics. People are very attuned to phonotactic differences, because that’s what they are listening for when they are trying to make sense of strings of segments as words.
• Languages, dialects, and for that matter idiolects differ hugely in their suprasegmental phenomena, the aspects of speech that range beyond the individual segments. That includes intonation, loudness, and timbre.

Panos Skoulidas‘ answer is right. To elaborate:

• Κομψός means “elegant, clean cut”. It has ancient lineage. It does not explicitly mean that someone is fashionable; it can correspond to “classic”, and it can certainly be used approvingly by an 80 year old.
• Σικ, from French chic, explicitly refers to being up to date with fashion.
• Both posh and preppy are negative evaluations, posh more so. The closest of the three is κυριλέ, which is derisive slang about someone with upper class affectation in how they present themselves (so posh, but without the British connotations, and more about parvenues). It is derived from κύριος, (in this context) “gentleman”, plus the French fashion style suffix -é.
• The /l/ is a random consonant, inserted so the word wouldn’t end up ambiguous with κύριε “sir!”

Latin confirmed with a check in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Latin was clearly on the wane from the 7th century, but it seems not completely lost:

Lawyers preserved some knowledge of Latin, often superficial, from the 8th to 11th C., and Constantine IX’s novel establishing a law school in Constantinople prescribes the teaching of Latin. From the 11th C. onward, closer, if sometimes hostile, contact with the West led to increasing knowledge of Latin in leading Byz. circles; Romanos III spoke Latin and Psellos claimed some knowledge of it. Still, cultural arrogance usually marked Byz. attitudes to the West and its language.

Knowledge of Latin was even greater after the Fourth Crusade, and Maximus Planudes and the Cydones brothers even translated Latin works into Greek in the 14th century.

Nonetheless, Mehmed II’s diplomatic correspondence with the West was in fact in Modern Greek.

I seem to answer a question like this every few months. This is this trimester’s iteration:

• No transparency
• Low clarity
• The policies are often as vague as any article of the US constitution
• Low visibility
• No visibility of updates
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is Quora’s policy on adding images and videos to answers?
• No equity (consideration of circumstances)
• No accountability
• Worse still, if you aren’t aware of Tatiana’s email address or role as a user: random accountability. There are any number of moderation decisions that Tatiana has publicly repealed and apologised for, but only when they were pointed out to her in public. Most users don’t know who Tatiana is; and less do now than did 6 months ago. Whatever is happening with appeal, the normal avenues are clearly not always working or getting escalated up to her.
• Infantilising tone-policing, as part of BNBR
• Enforcement by robots
• Robotic enforcement (even if they aren’t robots)
• Culminating in Bodnick’s Bodnickism that moderation does not consider content when judging infractions. Not context. Content.
• Low community confidence in enforcement
• Widespread suspicion of selective enforcement
• I think we can all name the TWs who seem to repeatedly get away with murder. I’ve blocked most of them already.
• Breathtaking arrogance on the part of their defenders
• No, just because Quora is a private company does not mean it is morally neutral.
• No, just because Quora is a private company does not mean I should joyfully accept their constraints on my speech or others’.
• No, just because you follow the letter and not the spirit of BNBR does not make you a better person, argumentative and arrogant TW from my home town that I have already chosen to block, and who has expressed shock that people don’t do BNBR in real life. Thank God they don’t do BNBR the way you choose to, anyway.
• Breathtaking radio silence on the part of their implementers
• Although it’s not much better when they aren’t silent

… How would I fix it?

Going back to 2013 would be a start. There are things Achilleas Vortselas or Christopher VanLang or Tracey Bryan or Marcus Geduld have written here over the years as community moderators, that I’ve disagreed with. But when Marcus says that community mods used to agonise over decisions to ban people, I believed him, because I trust people who’ll show their face in public, and take accountability for what they do.

Trust in-sourced Quora Moderation, on the other hand? Whatever unholy mix of bots, contractors, and employees behind the curtain it may be? With so many visible errors and so little effort to restore trust in its processes? And with even former leads quite happy to throw them under the bus, as has happened on the pages of Cordially Resistant?

I’d fix Quora Moderation by having Quora be the kind of organisation that feels it is important to rebuild trust from its users. In fact, by having Quora be the kind of organisation that pays any attention to its users at all. Over and above giving a few of them a jacket and snacks, circulating the occasional SurveyMonkey form, or measuring their clicks when Quora makes the notifications menu piss-coloured.

Latin: yes.

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?

Persian: probably not.

• Were ancient Greeks and Persians aware of their Indo-European roots?
• History: During Alexander’s invasions, would his soldiers have found Old Persian or Indic to be somewhat familiar sounding given their closeness to Greek?

I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding your question, but what I think you’re asking is: can a word be both onomatopoeic (or otherwise iconic in some way), and borrowed?

The lazy answer, which is in fact the default answer from what I can tell, is no: if a name is an onomatopoeia, then its form is non-arbitrary, and you don’t need to go to the country next door to make sense of it. Dogs in English go “woof woof”, and you don’t need to look at German or Russian to know that; you just need to listen to a dog. Same for “splash” or “bang” or “bleep”.

Except that this is not true. An onomatopoeic form is not completely arbitrary, but it is still somewhat arbitrary; that’s why dogs in Greek go ɣav ɣav and dogs in Korean go meong meong and dogs in English go arf arf and yip yip and bark bark. Add to that that onomatopoeic forms can often end up inflected, and the inflections are certainly arbitrary and rooted to a place.

And the partially-arbitrary form one language picks for its onomatopoeia can travel to another.

I had my own epiphany about this just this year. The Greek onomatopoeia for sneezing is apsu (cf. English a-tishoo).

The Turkish onomatopoeia, I learned on Quora, is hapşuu.

If you pronounce hapşuu in a language with no /h/ and no /ʃ/, you get apsu. That is not a coincidence. The Greek word is an onomatopoeia, but it is still borrowed from Turkish.

That presupposes of course that there is a single spirit of Quora. There isn’t, any more than there is a single community on Quora; plenty of people here I can’t break bread with. For that matter, that presupposes that there is a spirit that is distinctively Quoran, which I’m unsure of; and I definitely think that Quora Inc has not had much to do with cultivating it. (It doesn’t get cultivated in a buffet.)

I’ll identify the spirit of Quora that I choose to subscribe to, as curiosity, helpfulness, and willingness to go beyond the superficial. That, you would hope, is the mark of the well-equipped citizen, and not just the user of a Q&A site. But we live on shifting sands now, and we get our Bildung where we can.

How do you carry it offline? Well, the helpfulness is sadly harder to pull off to your neighbour than to the anonymous peer online; but that, you can get to by having access to a group of people who ask questions, and don’t demand a Google-search one-liner for an answer. (A goal even D’Angelo has walked away from for Quora.)

The curiosity and the non-superficiality? Question things. Question what you see in the news. Question the givens of your culture. Question the easy answers. Suspect what narratives and interests and delusions underpin them. And come up with a framework to make sense of them, that works for you.

That isn’t about the spirit of Quora even, primarily. That’s about being a well-equipped citizen.