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What’s the hamartia (fatal flaw) in your story?
A good question, and I hope to hear more stories from others.
Hamartia is about viewing your life as an Aristotelean tragedy. So,
Scratch me just a little bit, and I will lament the defining woe of my life, that I did not become a professional linguist: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree?
And the fatal flaw of the hero in Ancient Greek tragedy is more often than not hubris, arrogance.
Well, here’s the arrogance part:
- Where did you hope the degree will take you? To being a tenured academic, lecturing with adoring audiences at my feet, writing 20 papers a year, and living the dream.
But more insightful is this answer: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are your 3 worst mistakes? Would you fix any of them if you could go back in time?
And, perhaps most critically, I wasn’t prepared to leave Australia and spend the rest of my life hunting for the next tenure-track gig, like some modern day wandering minstrel. I knew myself—not just what I’d been brainwashed to be: what I actually was. I needed to lay down roots. I needed a sense of place.
[…] That Cavafy poem? He titled it Che fece… il gran rifiuto.
He left out two critical words in the Dante verse he was quoting. Che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto. He who made the grand refusal—through cowardice.
Was I a coward? Yeah. But I was also being me.
My hamartia was not so much arrogance, in the end, as fear of instability.
Can you write a limerick about a Quoran?
Masiello. Pegah. Jimmy Liu.
Sophie Dockx. Laura Hale. Ulrich, too.
de Guzman. Lisa Lai.
Jian Sun. By and by,
all are gone.
And then, me.
And then:
You.
What cultural factors caused the ecstatic, almost religious reaction to Wagner’s operas in the second half of the nineteenth century?
This isn’t the answer, and I hope it will trigger an answer from the more knowledgeable.
Notions of human-crafted art as an expression of the sublime are not particularly new. But in the 19th century, art inspired not merely “almost” religious reactions; it actually came to occupy the place of a surrogate religion. This was dispelled with World War I, and the various forms of art retreated from the Sublime in different ways. The visual arts did it with dadaism, and they’re still going on about it to this day.
I got the fullest articulation of this from looking over the shoulder of someone doing his PhD on the Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter; you can see a reflection of this in the Wikipedia page, where Man overpowers malign Nature through capital-R Rhetoric. Poor naive bastard, I thought. Just as well he killed himself before WWI.
Wagner was the most full-throated expression of this notion of a surrogate religion. He was a prolific writer despite being a composer; he architected his operas as Total works of art, combining the visual, the musical, and the literary; he ladled mysticism heavily both in the librettos and the staging of the operas; and he had a lot of loyal acolytes.
Why would Wagner think that up? There was a change in how music was produced, from court entertainment to subscriptions and paying customers. There was a change in how the artist was regarded, from decorator to conduit of the sublime to expressor of emotions. Both are wound up in where Romanticism comes from. But the extent to which Wagner took it must have come, in at least some part, from the diminishing of power that religion had over the intelligentsia.
Wagner comes before Nietzsche, but to many Wagnerians, God was already if not dead, sickly: in a rationalist, enlightenment worldview, religion just didn’t hold the same mystique. And since this worldview was still quite recent, the deist and atheist intelligentsia went looking for their recently lost experience of the transcendental elsewhere.
The tribunal of the marshals
The tribunal of the marshals by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
These two paragraphs indicate that reports against Top Writers are scrutinised by Quora Staff, in order to determine their validity, before any sanction is applied. Reports against other writers, by implication, are not subject to the same scrutiny, if any.
https://insurgency.quora.com/The…
(The tribunal des maréchaux was also called the tribunal du point d’honneur, because they were meant to replace duels, fought on points of honour. At least that much, we are being spared.)
(For now.)
Guest Post: Alfredo Perozo, Ultima Ratio Regum
In https://galleryofawesomery.quora…, Alfredo Perozo has portrayed everyone’s favourite bot in a little more detail than I have done:
the definition of ultima ratio regum
the final argument of kings (a resort to arms): motto engraved on the cannon of Louis XIV.
And on some executioners’ axes…
Could the Quora bots pass the Turing Test by being mistaken for stupid uneducated humans?
Some might query whether this question is insincere, and a pretext for complaining about Moderation by Bot.
I am not of that number. Our interaction with Quora Moderation is a preview of our interaction with Artificial Intelligence in general, as it becomes more and more widespread. We’re getting more of it here on the Quoras, because Quora has drunk the Bot/Machine Learning Kool-Aid, and thinks it the solution to all their scalability problems (modulo The tribunal of the marshals). But where Quora staggers, others are following, and I hear Messenger chatbots are all the rage now in small business.
A decade or so ago, I remember seeing a documentary on what our interaction with AI was likely to be. The talking head pointed out that a generalised AI, like Sci-Fi expects, was not going to happen in a hurry; what would happen soon would be AI trained in very specific niches, and ignorant of anything outside that niche. That you would walk away from the bank, muttering “That ATM was pretty dumb, wasn’t it.”
That Moderation bot was pretty dumb, wasn’t it.
So the bots you encounter in the near future, in the general case, are going to pass the Turing Test and fail the Turing test in the same way ELIZA did way back when: they’ll be fine as long as you’re talking within their domain of expertise, and they fall apart as soon as you try to hold a general conversation with them. Though the domain of expertise has broadened massively since the 60s.
So much for the general case. Specifically for Quora, there’s a couple of catches:
- Quora Moderation is by design not meant to be very smart, explicitly so that it can be scaled up and not involve judgement calls (modulo The tribunal of the marshals). As stated in the Bodnickism I like to cite: Marc Bodnick’s answer to Will Quora Moderation explain why a particular user was banned?
Our moderation process emphasizes rule-based decisions that are fair and consistent. Every moderation decision on the site must be based on an existing policy. All we care about are policies; we don’t make decisions based on the substantive nature of the content that a user has published.
(It’s possible that I’ve extrapolated more in that statement than Marc meant; but that interpretation suits me.)
Stupid uneducated humans, as OP describes them, would lack the ability to apply context, equity, discretion and judgement. Many moderation judgements seem to their recipients to do so, as is routinely protested for BNBR judgements—especially when the recipients can’t divine what their supposed infraction was. So you can in fact see where the Turing test comes into it.
(See e.g. discussion in comments of Habib Fanny: Yet another violation. Can’t use a historical quotation that features the word “nigger,” apparently. by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency. Was it because Habib was citing Lee Atwater? That would indeed be stupid. Was it, rather, because he was taunting Republicans? Possibly likelier, and a better judgement—but not what most readers assumed, including myself.)
The irony is, that bots, if anything, might, might just do a better job of at least some of context, equity, discretion and judgement. Consistency, at least, they would nail. But the existence of The tribunal of the marshals still tells me that Quora aren’t trusting the bots (and subcontractors) to moderate everyone.
- We have in fact had a reverse Turing test with Quora Moderation recently. We have assumed that the abysmal job done of moderating content in the new Anonymous system was because we weren’t getting the promised individual vetting of content, and it was being left to bots. In fact, as revealed in Anonymous Screening by Jack Fraser on The Insurgency, we have been getting vetting of content, by spectacularly incompetent subcontractors.
- As Jennifer Edeburn pointed out in comments, a bot would have done a far more consistent job of vetting content than the subcontractors did.
With which popular traditions, tales, and legends is the cuckoo related in your country’s folklore?
In Europe, the cuckoo is associated with spring, and with cuckoldry, for example in Shakespeare‘s Love’s Labours Lost.
In fact, cuckold is derived from cuckoo.
In Greek, the cuckoldry association has not captured people’s imagination: that’s all about horns (presumably via deer). The proverbial expressions about cuckoos are quite unlike the associations the bird has in English:
- solitariness—cuckoos don’t have their own nest, being parasitic, but they also don’t spent a lot of time in the host nest they take over; hence, various variants of “lonely as a cuckoo”. Also, Τρεις κι ο κούκος “three plus a cuckoo” = “almost noone”, the cuckoo being the Greek equivalent of tumbleweeds. (Apparently there is an anticipation of this in Aristophanes, Acharnians 598.)
- cheapness, low quality, compared to a nightingale: Θα σου κοστίσει ο κούκος αηδόνι “A cuckoo will cost you a nightingale” (i.e. you will be ripped off)
- harbinger of spring: Ένας κούκος δεν φέρνει την άνοιξη “one cuckoo doesn’t bring spring” (as opposed to the more common “one swallow doesn’t make a summer”, which dates from Aesop)
- going silent (in summer): Βουβάθηκε σαν ο κούκος τ’ αϊ-Γιαννιού “he’s gone dumb like a cuckoo on St John’s Day” (24 June)
What motivates you to write?
A2A by Abigail (Abbey) Beach. See, Liana? I’m not ignoring your A2As; it just takes me a while to get through them.
By the time I met PROF Anne FREADMAN,
I was the departmental IT guy, setting up Macs, and misquoting Peirce to her, a Peirce specialist.
She certainly did not owe me any academic mentoring.
Yet bless her, she did. And one of the pieces of academic mentoring she offered me was how to get me motivated to write academic papers.
Just read what other people have written. You’re eventually going to be so annoyed with how bad everyone else’s work is, you’ll want to write your own.
…
No, esteemed fellow Quorans! I am not saying that if I answer a question you have already answered, it is because what you’ve written is crap!
…
… at least, not always. 🙂
But yes, realising that other people do not have the last word on something, realising that you have something to add to the conversation; being, in fact, part of a conversation. That is a powerful motivator.
That’s what you get here.
You know what is not a powerful motivator? Just having something to say, if it’s outside of a conversation. I wrote a fair few academic papers. They were pretty niche, the only people that might care to read them were in Greece, and I wasn’t over there.
There wasn’t really a conversation: I was shooting out papers, and never heard anything back. After a few years, I stopped writing papers.
What is the most compelling, captivating, and impossible-to-put-down book you’ve ever read?
I started reading this book early in the evening:
I did not put it down until 10 am the following morning. I did not sleep; I just kept reading and reading. The narrative it presented, of L Ron sinking into his own mythos on board a Sea Org cruise ship meandering through the Mediterranean, was devastatingly enthralling.
How old are you and what bodily pain do you have right now?
I’m turning 46. Vague back pain, which I can mostly ignore. Occasional headaches and lightheadedness, apparently associated with adjusting to new medication, which I am finding it harder to ignore. And of course, the heartache of a middle-aged man’s disappointments.