Nick on Quora

Bit of a big question there, and nihilism is a big concept—that often gets used quite loosely, to mean “relativistic” or “cynical”.

We are in a time in the West, of course, when a lot of longstanding moral absolutes have been increasingly questioned or scrutinised, and the outcome has been called nihilistic by both proponents and adversaries. (Adversaries more than proponents: the term is something of a cudgel.)

Nihilism – Wikipedia

Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods: for example, Jean Baudrillardand others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch; and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.

So one primary point of relevance is that it is a shorthand for the modern-day questioning of absolute values, which is prevalent, and which you need to be aware of to work out how the modern West ticks. Or fails to tick.

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The second primary point of relevance is not as time-bound. Nihilism, like solipsism, is a useful intellectual exercise. It is a useful phase to go through, if you like. The teen or undergrad who stumbles across solipsism in their intellectual development is something of a cliche: “Woah, man, like what if I told you everything was, like, an illusion!”

But it is useful because, when you come out the other end, you acknowledge better the contingency and fragility of your construction of the world: you know to be on the lookout for misconstrual and bias better.

Same with nihilism. It’s good to have values. It’s better if you’ve scrutinised those values, and worked out why they are a good thing, rather than to just passively accept what you have been handed down. And a phase of questioning everything, of early nihilism, is useful to help you build them back up again—and convince yourself that there are things really worth holding on to, after all.

None. From memory, that didn’t happen before Berlioz.

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.”

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.

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.

There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems.

• Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect.
• Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found some unexpected usage since for teaching communication to language-disabled children.
• iConji seems to be some sort of mix of Emoji and dingbats.
• And of course there’s Emoji themselves, which are increasingly being used in communication, though of either a more rebus-like or a less syntactic nature.

There are pros and cons to symbols as a universal language. Some symbols are arguably more iconic or indexical as signs than words, and less arbitrary, so they should be easier to learn. In theory. In practice, the minute you move away from concrete nouns, the signs symbolic languages use look pretty arbitrary; and even if they are conceived of as indexical, the metaphors may not be all that obvious. I’m not convinced the gains in iconicity would really be worth it.

The Jew’s harp is very widely used; in fact, according to History of the Jew’s Harp, the two continents where it was not indigenous were Africa and Australia. There is a long history of the Jew’s harp being used in the British Isles (The Jews-Harp in Britain and Ireland (SOAS Musicology Series): Michael Wright: 9781472414137: Amazon.com: Books); and inasmuch as Australian folk music is based on Anglo–Celtic music, that’s enough to explain its presence there.

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.

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)

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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.

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.