The Reading Room

BESW

12:30 AM

The State of Disability on Book Covers

Bookworm

4:05 AM

0

Q: Why did Lillian Rearden appear to admire the Mills?

Shortly after their wedding anniversary celebration (p. 152 in my edition), Hank Rearden recounts Lillian coming down from New York on her own initiative to see his Mills: [Hank] remembered the day when Lillian came from New York to his office, of her own sudden choice, and asked him to take ...

Gallifreyan

8:47 AM

@Shokhet Here it is: photos.app.goo.gl/4n8XrnlYXciGMq1X2

user61230

9:43 AM

Goal: finish Future Shock tomorrow. Read A Grain of Wheat over the next week. Read I Am A Cat after that. Read The Leaves of the Banyan Tree after that. Or jumble up the order of reading, who really cares.

BESW

I just added Jungle Fever: Panther's Rage to my "currently reading" without finishing anything.

user61230

I've never heard of it. What is it?

BESW

The first Black Panther serial.

user61230

Ooooh, interesting.

BESW

I've seen people saying that the upcoming film is based on the 1973 Panther's Rage but it looks a lot like the 1998 Priest-Texeira Black Panther Vol. 3 story to me.

So...

(Martin Freeman's character is definitely from the Priest run, but I know Priest took a lot of influences from McGregor for his version of the comic.)

Rand al'Thor

9:59 AM

@Mithrandir Two VTCs now. I'm really struggling to decide whether to vote to close or leave open.

BESW

Although the Black Panther was officially created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, he was revised and reimagined by Don McGregor in the 1973 revival of Jungle Fever, and it's that version which forms the foundation of the character ever since. However, Priest--as the first black author to work on the character--revised him again in the 90s in what is considered the best/most definitive version of the character to date.

I've read the Priest version, and it was excellent.

Rand al'Thor

On the one hand, there are going to be multiple possible answers. On the other hand, it's not really any more broad than some of the physical-books (or whatever tag is being used for them now) questions we've had, and we don't have any site-specific policy against it. And sites like Lifehacks deal with questions like this all the time, so they can't be argued to be a bad fit for SE as a whole.

user61230

@BESW This is so far out of my wheelhouse of content that I have no contextual basis for these things.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet Is being opposed to a whole class of questions for philosophical reasons a good reason to downvote them? (Or do you mean downvote the meta suggestion as opposed to the main-site questions?)

user61230

@Randal'Thor I was fairly close to mod-reviewing Leave Open. If I were a regular user, that's what I would have done. We're also totally lacking usage guidance for any close reason, and Primarily Opinion-Based is one of those close reasons that really only works when used for specific, intentional reasons.

Rand al'Thor

10:03 AM

@Hamlet Hmm, interesting thought. That could work. (Btw, sorry I still haven't answered your meta about those tags. I have some notes for an answer somewhere, but I've just been busy/away for so long now.)

BESW

@Zyera Basically, people are saying the upcoming Black Panther film is based on the comics from the 70s, but to my eyes it looks like it's based on the comics from the 90s which are kinda inspired by the 70s comics.

Rand al'Thor

@Zyera (It's being VTCed as Too Broad, not Primarily Opinion-Based.) Do you think an attempt to establish usage guidance on meta for our close reasons would be useful at this stage, or is our question pool still too small for a meaningful result?

BESW

The 90s comics are probably better overall, and are the first version of the Black Panther character actually written by a black author.

user61230

@Randal'Thor (Right. I think the same thing applies to Too Broad, as well. "Too" implies that it's broad relative to something else. It needs a consensus as a basis for comparison.)

BESW

Also, kinda weirdly, the 90s comics have a white "reader avatar" character who is already in the Marvel film franchise played by Martin Freeman (Bilbo, Watson) but will probably not serve that purpose in the Black Panther film.

Rand al'Thor

10:06 AM

I think I've written something on meta about this ... [rummages]

user61230

To the second, I think it's hard to say whether it'd be useful. I've yet to see very many positive indicators that we should be using close reasons in a categorical way at all, yet, but it's very possible that one exists I'm not seeing.

Rand al'Thor

> While the thresholds for how much subjectivity is too much will vary from site to site, the basic principle is always the same: some questions will be too subjective to be answerable in the SE framework, while some subjective questions will be acceptable and properly answerable by subject experts. The close reason does take account of both of these; all an individual site has to do is decide where to draw that line.

Has our community decided where to draw that line? Not really, I think - or not very precisely, at least.

user61230

I'd agree.

user61230

With... a slight caveat.

user61230

Defining the scope of questions and close reasons has to be viewed as a process, not a static decision. Ultimately, in this case, that means that at some point we'll find questions that are definitively too subjective, and we'll start to close those. Later on, we'll start to close questions with increasing frequency, as we approach the boundary we'll settle at long-term.

user61230

10:12 AM

But I don't think we have enough case examples of questions that are too POB in a categorical sense to start that process yet.

Rand al'Thor

Yeah, naturally it's an asymptotic process. And the line will never be completely defined anyway; there's always going to be some grey-area questions. Which is why multiple people have the ability to cast votes either way, I guess.

user61230

Yeah. And it's why the process has to start as categorical definitions. Right now, I'd almost argue that (at least in an absolutist sense) we shouldn't be closing questions as POB. We have no set communal reason to.

Rand al'Thor

I've tried to argue on SFF that if the community is divided on whether or not a certain class of question should be closed, then the default should be to leave them open until such time as there's consensus to close them. But I keep getting shouted down by proponents of 'mob rule' - if the most active reviewers feel they should be closed, then they all get closed :-/

user61230

Mmm. I've messaged and eventually suspended someone before for incorrectly voting to close questions in a systemic way.

user61230

It was a little more clear-cut - there was established negative consensus against what they were doing.

Rand al'Thor

10:25 AM

Of course, that only works if it's very clear that what they're doing is "incorrect".

user61230

'course, saying this without details really fails to contextualize it and so probably just seems needlessly harsh and tyrannical.

user61230

Yeah, it was very clear.

Rand al'Thor

And if they're the only one, I'm not sure I'd bother with a suspension. How much harm can they do if everyone else is voting to Leave Open?

Mithrandir

you still need to get the point across that what they're doing is Not Okay

user61230

Eh, that's fair. A mod message might help, but it probably wouldn't be worth escalation.

Rand al'Thor

10:28 AM

I once messaged someone for flooding the review queues with systemic close votes on a particular class of questions.

user61230

Yup. Wrongful VTCs can do real harm, even acting individually.

user61230

There's a flipside to this: consensus isn't just built on meta, it's built experientially. If people see a ton of questions in the CV queue of a certain category, they'll start to automatically categorize them as closeable, or at minimum start to doubt their uncloseability.

2

Bookworm

11:32 AM

1

Q: Is "The Good Work" by Theodore L Thomas a commentary on any kind of real-world society?

While skimming through answered story-identification questions on another SE site to look for good short stories to read, I came across "The Good Work", written in 1959 by the American author Theodore L Thomas, and available to read here. It paints a grim picture of life in a future world, with a...

short-stories politics theodore-l-thomas

BESW

11:43 AM

@Zyera We've had several cases on RPG.SE where there was overwhelming consensus on meta about a topic, but all the mainsite action--even by the same people!--went the other way.

Turned out that in theory we wanted to be one way, but whenever we were faced with a practical example of the thing we saw that it should be the other way.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW How do you resolve that kind of situation?

BESW

Eventually we stopped trying to reach meta consensus on any topic until we had a reasonable number of mainsite examples to base our discussion on.

This also gave us a chance to learn that rule by precedent is not a good look for a Stack site.

We judged each case on its own merits and looked to earlier cases to see what we could learn, but didn't feel any need to rule the same way on a new case just because it was ruled that way on a previous one, until we had enough experience to say something useful about tendencies and trends.

And if trends changed months or years later, we paid attention and revisited the consensus with new eyes.

(If I'm making this sound easy, it's very much not.)

Rand al'Thor

@BESW Did that solve the issue of having meta consensus go one way and actual main-site practice go the other way?

BESW

It significantly reduced it, yes.

Nowadays when somebody starts a meta post about something, there's an expectation that they treat it as "What should we do about this particular incident" unless they can present evidence of a common trend AND a problem the trend is causing--only then it can be a policy discussion.

This also curtails a rather common problem of someone making a "re-open my question/undelete my answer!" post that's ALSO demanding a revision to the policy behind the close or delete.

We can talk about whether a particular post fits within a policy or can be improved to do so, OR we can talk about whether the policy is causing a problem and what to do about it. Trying to do both at once just makes a mess.

Rand al'Thor

But talking about whether the policy is causing a problem would be done only with reference to particular posts?

BESW

11:57 AM

One post does not a problem make.

Rand al'Thor

A recent problem on SFF involved meta consensus on a particular post which went against general meta consensus on that type of post.

BESW

A policy change discussion needs to start with evidence of a problematic pattern of behaviors. We don't re-wire the house when just one light bulb burns out; we wait to see if it's just the light bulb or if the wiring really is the problem.

Rand al'Thor

Making it difficult to know what to do - should the post be deleted because the community wants it deleted, or undeleted because of general policy?

BESW

There's always room for unusual exceptions (that's what historical lock was MADE for!)

Rand al'Thor

More than once I've wondered why people have the ability to vote to delete/undelete multiple times.

You can't VTC the same question twice, but you can VTD the same post as many times as you like.

BESW

12:00 PM

Often a case like that has some quality unrelated to the obvious policy involved, and the policy discussion is a red herring.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW Well, part of the problem in this case was that the user has had a lot of previous issues on the site. Which shouldn't really be a contributing factor, but it ... was.

BESW

Yeah, that's definitely a thing that happens.

A while back there was a massive policy shift on RPG.SE, where we'd tried a particular thing for a few years to see if it would work, in several different ways. Eventually there was an overwhelming pile of evidence that no, it wouldn't work no matter how we tried it.

But in the meantime people had gotten very attached to the policy either staying or going, and it became very personal when the thing was finally thrown out.

Rand al'Thor

12:18 PM

Mm, I can imagine.

BESW

Is there any better editor comment than a note that simply reads: *walks into kitchen, begins eating a stick of coping butter* ?

Tweeted by UrsulaV on October 17, 2017 at 5:03 AM in reply to UrsulaV

Gallifreyan

12:35 PM

^ jamesfregan.tumblr.com/post/166323827535

Librarian

5:26 PM

0

Q: What are some common reasons that people downvote?

Note: This is partially a follow-up to this Meta post. It is also inspired by http://idownvotedbecau.se/ for Stack Overflow, which features explanations of common downvote reasons and tips on how to improve the questions that were downvoted for this reason. Please feel free to add additio...

discussion faq-proposed

Librarian

7:33 PM

3

Q: What kind of research is expected for posts here?

The tooltip for downvotes says "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful." That being said, what constitutes adequate research effort? For that matter, what do we even mean by "research" in the first place? What kinds of things are users expected to do to resea...

discussion asking-questions

Hamlet

At the moment the only consistent reason I have for downvoting questions is if they're an XY question that will require a frame challenge. I think I might have also downvoted some questions because the OP didn't provide a quote in their question.

Mithrandir

You're remarkably active for someone who's on hiatus :p

user15026

8:13 PM

Okay I know I have that rule about I can't disparage anything I've not read but holy cow do John Green books really, really test my resolve where this rule is concerned

user15026

(I'm reading Turtles All The Way Down and it's just....blergh ungood)

Catija

He wrote a book about Katherines, though :P en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Abundance_of_Katherines

user15026

He did, I have read it

Catija

Was that one better?

user15026

Somewhat, yes

user15026

8:17 PM

I just find his super over the top characters exhausting and impossible to relate to

user15026

They're very pretentious and all have like at least one super quirky trait that basically becomes their entire character

Catija

I read it a while ago... years... and I don't actually remember it very well... and for some reason it seems to have disappeared. Not sure what happened to it. He wrote that one that was turned into a film, too, I think?

Fault in our Stars

BESW

9:00 PM

#TalesOnTuesday The Pulitzer Prize winning words of Hemingway (1953), meet the remarkable paint-on-glass animation of Aleksandr Petrov. 29,000+ hand-painted pastel oil paintings on glass. 'The Old Man and the Sea' (1999) dir. Aleksandr Petrov. https://t.co/IsGodRum2d

Tweeted by CreativeHists on October 17, 2017 at 11:39 AM