The Reading Room

Hamlet

00:01

Oh FYI @Randal'Thor just wanted to let you know that your question here is pretty good

1

"The Seed-Merchant's Son" is a poem by Agnes Grozier Herbertson, often included in collections of WWI poetry. It doesn't go into the details of the war, like some other WWI poems; in fact, the war is only mentioned once in the poem, which mainly focuses on the father's reaction to his son's death...

I upvoted it, and i hope others do as well.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet Thanks! That means a lot coming from the site's biggest downvoter :-)

After my Parable question yesterday, I decided to dig through my collection of WWI poems - might have a few more questions coming up from that general area.

Napoleon Wilson

00:15

Which reminds me of a WWI poem we once read in school and which I don't remember the title or author of.

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Ask an ID question! :-D

How much do you remember about it?

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor Meh.

@Randal'Thor It was about a guy. It told the story of him running, through various phases of his life, until he ran into a Russian curtain fire.

Rand al'Thor

Was it a German poem?

Napoleon Wilson

Yes.

Rand al'Thor

Here's a bunch of German WWI poems, but none of them look promising (at least after I put them through Google Translate).

> While there are numerous examples of poetry written by Germans during the First World War, very little of their work is available in English translations.

Hmph.

Napoleon Wilson

00:34

Don't worry.

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Do you remember roughly how long the poem was?

Riker

@Gallifreyan vacation

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor No. Not excessively long, though.

Riker

Back in 4h tho

Well maybe 5 but off plane in 4h

Napoleon Wilson

I think to remember it was titled Paul and I always wondered if it was related to Paul Bäumer from All Quiet on the Western Front or if that was just a coincidence.

BESW

00:55

Was it contemporary?

Napoleon Wilson

I would think so.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor i think i've upvoted a decent amount of your stuff

BESW

'cause I'm also finding a lot of WWI poetry by subsequent generations.

Hamlet

04:32

@Randal'Thor re: activity and asking questions: I've asked about five questions this week.

I'm starting to reconsider my stance on answers. Maybe it's better for people to post incorrect answers, just so that they're learning how to write answers.

I personally am capable of writing more answers, and would do so if I had more time.

(See my profile on the mythology stack exchange if you want examples of what my answers look like.)

We probably also should think about recruiting outside of the site. Have you gotten a chance to skim the link I sent you?

Part of it is SEO. We might also want to think about submitting some of our links to reddit?

The SEO part will come naturally.

There are also forums/discussion groups online where people talk about literature. As well as blogs and podcasts. We should try to build relationships with them.

One way to do it is to find articles that ask questions about literature, ask the question on this site, get an answer, and then link the article author to our site

It's about building relationships, making people aware of our site as a source of information.

I used to run websites several years ago, and that's how I got traffic

I eventually got to the point where I would post fake news as an april fools joke and have several sites link to it.

Also, most of the questions I've asked this week are definitely answerable, particularly the Kendrick ones. They just require reading the book/song and some thought

Bookworm

04:50

0

Q: Understanding the reference to yams in Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta"

Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta" contains several references to yams. For example: When you got the yams—(What's the yams?) The yam is the power that be You can smell it when I'm walkin' down the street (Oh yes, we can, oh yes, we can) I'm not quite sure why yams are so important to t...

song-lyrics kendrick-lamar

Bookworm

05:57

0

Q: In Beatrice and Virgil, why does Erasmus kill Mendelssohn?

In Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, there is a bizarre scene where Henry's dog, Erasmus, gets rabies and attacks Henry's cat, Mendelssohn. Because of this, both characters need to be killed: Mendelssohn because of the injury sustained in the attack and Erasmus because he has rabies. What's bi...

yann-martel beatrice-and-virgil

Hamlet

Some more late night thoughts:

The hardest problem this site faces is answers.

We'll get pageviews no matter what because of Google.

We'll keep getting 1-2 questions per day no matter what, if nothing else because Rand is going to post a question a day ;)

We'll get more questions if people see this as a good place to discuss literature, but that won't happen unless people reliably get good answers. So we're back to answers on that front.

Promoting the site can be about getting pageviews and about spreading our name. However, we're going to get pageviews no matter what because of Google. For promotion to help us, it needs to be about attracting people who can write good answers.

So again, that's building relationships.

We might also find that everyone's off writing for schoolwork, and once summer rolls around people will have more bandwidth to write answers. But it's likely that we're going to need to promote the site.

And we're also at a disadvantage because of how broad our subject matter is. For example, mythology's scope is limiting in a lot of ways, but one of its advantages is that if you ask a question, the scope is so small that someone has expertise to answer it. Here you ask a question and there's a good chance no one has read the book.

No easy fixes, but a promotion strategy will help. We (1) promoting our site far and wide to get some basic name recognition (think posting links to good content on reddit),

(2) find questions that other people have about literature, post them on our site (with attribution), get an answer, and then go back and link people to our question and answers. If we do this with people who ask good questions, then they probably have good answers.

(3) we need to start conversations with people outside our website, perhaps through email, build relationships and then get them to join the site. One way is to ask experts an interesting question through email, get an answer, then mention the site. It won't always work, but sometimes it will.

I'm not trying to say that our content is currently bad. We actually have at least 30 answers that I would consider fantastic (i.e. above and beyond), and a lot of good/excelent answers as well. We can and should use this content to promote the site.

But literature is such a broad topic that we need more people, more perspectives than the ones we currently have.

Mithrandir

06:42

Unfortunately, I really am not active on the general Internet. Basically the only other site that I use that has people interested in books is aimed at kids and doesn't allow links to other sites (although I have a few of their emails. I could attempt to talk to the older ones...)

Also, good morning :)

Bookworm

07:47

0

Q: Is there 'darkness' at the bottom of every mine if you go deep enough?

In the January 2004 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, they ran a story called "Nimitseahpah". In this story, there is a 'darkness' at the bottom of a mine: Then that thing that all miners dread came to pass. Something big went wrong, and almost all of the 150 men in the tu...

short-stories nancy-etchemendy

Mithrandir

^few more questions about this story coming over the next few days. Hopefully.

b_jonas

10:41

@Hamlet I've never reposted questions of other people on SE (yet). Sometimes I've pointed people from other forums, urging them to ask on SE if they don't get an answer on that forum, but I don't remember any that followed through. I have cross-posted some of my own questions to SE.

Bookworm

11:02

0

Q: Why did "they" go to sea in a sieve?

In the poem 'The Jumblies' by Edward Lear, the protagonists go to sea in a sieve. They went to sea in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day, In a Sieve they went to sea! And when the Sieve ...

nursery-rhyme

Rand al'Thor

12:21

@Hamlet I've been looking at the Area51 stats for Lit (OK, they're not a perfect representation of what a site needs, but at least they're a quantitative representation). What it comes down to is we need more questions (which we've already talked about), more answers (both to unanswered questions and to already-answered ones), more users (this is the statistic we need to worry about least), and more traffic.

@Hamlet Hmm. People who post bad answers might learn from the experience - from constructive feedback, or even getting their answers edited and improved by other people - but it's not something I'd like to encourage in any way. The more bad answers we have, the less interesting the site looks to arriving experts. It's bad enough that we have loads of highly-upvoted subpar answers from early private beta.

And no, I haven't looked at your link yet, sorry :-( I'll try to find time for it, maybe later today.

I definitely agree with the idea of promoting our site elsewhere than Stack Exchange. Someone already did when it was still in Area 51, but now we can make new and better ads, if we can just find the right places to post them.

Also, I know a couple of people IRL who might be considered literature experts. I've already told one of them about this site; I should put the other onto it as well.

Mithrandir

12:36

@Randal'Thor ah, Rince :)

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet We'd have to be very careful about doing that kind of thing. Without attribution, it'd be plagiarism; even with attribution, it might be seen as dodgy, like copying questions from other SE sites (I agree with your answer there and disagree with DVK's, but the voting suggests a lot of people would see that kind of behaviour as dodgy).

@Hamlet Not sure if I agree with that, at this stage. In order to get pageviews from Google, we first need to show up on Google's results. Most of our questions are getting <100 views, presumably nearly all from site users rather than Google searchers.

Also, don't expect people to have more time for SE in the summer once they don't have schoolwork to worry about. In my experience, people are on SE more when they do have work to do IRL. There's always less activity at the weekends, and often also during 'holiday' periods. Most people come here when they're procrastinating their work (or their code is compiling or whatever), not when they don't have work to do.

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor Obligatory:

'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'

I never understood why people weren't here on weekends. Seems counterintuitive.

Rand al'Thor

I did contact a couple of experts by email about that Pookworthy question, and included a link to the question. One of them wrote back and the other didn't (yet).

Mithrandir

@Gallifreyan well for me, religious reasons.

Rand al'Thor

Also, you've given me a great idea for a meta post. Once I find time to write it up, of course.

@Gallifreyan A lot of people use SE for work: computery types for whom it's a useful place as well as somewhere to hang out and have fun. At the weekend, they're not programming any more and want to spend time with their families.

Gallifreyan

12:51

@Randal'Thor Hmm. Everyone has a life in real world. Except for physics students.

Rand al'Thor

Praxis has a life IRL!

Mithrandir

I have a life? :O

3

Gallifreyan

* physics freshmen

Mithrandir

Also, I'm afraid I have to ban Sci for impersonating a mod. He stole my hat.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

13:15

ok, what did all'yall do again do make Shog come back?

Mithrandir

@DVK-on-Ahch-To talked about Story-ID, apparently.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Hamlet I wouldn't object to the site being more-literary-analysis (though not exclusively). As long as it's not 100% post-modernist analysis which I personally am not a big fan of :)

BESW

13:37

Some lovely tributes (and a poem) to Teresia Teaiwa on E-Tangata today http://e-tangata.co.nz/news/teresia-taught-us-to-ask-the-tough-questions

Tweeted by modernletters on April 9, 2017 at 5:31 AM

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@NapoleonWilson Have to agree with Napoleon. I upvoted the answer, and I'm not ahem too well known for blind diamond-worship. I simply upvote any reasonably OK answer that agrees with my Meta policies/views; and I'm not a fan of ID Qs.

Gallifreyan

14:13

@DVK-on-Ahch-To DVK iz back!

Care to translate the Russian bits here?

Hamlet

15:25

@DVK-on-Ahch-To what is "post-modernist analysis which I personally am not a big fan of"?

@Randal'Thor here's an example of a question based on a point in a blog: literature.stackexchange.com/q/2270/111

@Randal'Thor "It's bad enough that we have loads of highly-upvoted subpar answers from early private beta." absolutely.

@Randal'Thor SE sites do really well in Google. it takes about a year for questions to start showing up, but once they do... (I'm speaking from experience on the mythology stack exchange)

"Pull up on your block, then break it down" sounds quite a bit like Tetris. How well does that part of the line fit into the wider context of the song? — Rand al'Thor 3 hours ago

@Randal'Thor you clearly have never listened to rap 😂

@Randal'Thor maybe the real problem is people upvoting bad answers? Don't know how to fix that.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

17:12

@Gallifreyan Um... to be honest, not very motivated to, sorry.

@Hamlet Get rid of HNQ, raise upvote cost to 1 from 0, raise upvote rep requirement from 15 to 115

Gallifreyan

@DVK-on-Ahch-To No problem ;) If you don't mind then, I'll edit them in some time later.

@DVK-on-Ahch-To What? Upvote limit?

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Gallifreyan I never object to people improving answers, mine or anyone's :)

Postmodernism

Postmodernism describes a broad movement that developed in the mid to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture and criticism which marked a departure from modernism. While encompassing a broad range of ideas, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including notions of human nature, social progress, objective reality and morality, absolute truth, and reason. Instead, it asserts that claims to knowledge and truth are products of unique social, historical...

@Hamlet (I'm not conversant enough in the lingo to answer with a more concise wording that Wikipedias, so please don't assume that the onebox was a snide attempt at blowing you off)

My specific problem is the absolutism of relativism. ("Only Sith speak in absolutes")

@Hamlet My specific problem is the absolutism of relativism. Or, as lyin' Obi-Wan put it, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"

Hamlet

17:45

@DVK-on-Ahch-To you haven't really given a critique, but I'm not sure you're correct to dismiss "the absolutism of relativism"

@DVK-on-Ahch-To all things I agree with, but the upvotes mostly came from when we were in private beta

Actually, I agree with about half of what you said. But it would be nice to have some changes to how voting and HNQ works. At the very least, mods should have the ability to stop specific questions from appearing on the HNQ. I think the HNQ should be abolished, but I understand that SE needs it to make money.

VicAche

Sorry if it was mentioned, but what is HNQ?

doppelgreener

@VicAche hot network questions. see the lower half of the sidebar on main site.

Hamlet

@BESW you'll love this: How academia uses poverty, oppression, and pain for intellectual masturbation

2

@VicAche we're complaining about how the HNQ brings people who aren't familiar with the subject matter who then upvote incorrect answers/questions that aren't really on-topic

VicAche

18:02

@Hamlet Is this specific to litt'? I guess what's really different here is that many people disagree on what's a correct answer

@Hamlet if we manage to develop a sane downvoting culture, we should be through with that

instead people feel they should only downvote when they're involved in the question, it seems.

Hamlet

@VicAche actually, I don't think the HNQ has ever been a problem with lit. It's been a huge problem for other sites, particularly when they try to discuss controversial topics.

@VicAche people think that?

VicAche

@Hamlet I sure do at least - I've been fighting my inner to downvote bad answers when needed

@Hamlet so I mostly downvote answers that are both bad + that I disagree with

I don't think it's the effective way to go, but I have a hardtime clicking on that button

Hamlet

@VicAche well, the thing about voting

Downvoting is actually pretty mean. It's anonymous, the feedback isn't put into nice words (e.g. "you do a good job doing this, but you can improve with this"), and it's upsetting to see that you're posts have been downvoted.

VicAche

@Hamlet exactly. It's even worse for me when I "have"/decide to downvote a post that has an otherwise high rating (e.g. literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1054/…)

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Hamlet Ironically, I love this as well (I disagree like hell with the views of the author overall, but the specific attitude about virtue signalling by neoliberals is spot on, even if it comes from philosophy and views vastly different from mine, informed by growing up on the wrong side of iron curtain)

VicAche

18:09

@Hamlet by some user that I believe should stay there

Hamlet

@VicAche what Stack Exchange official guidance essentially says is that downvoting is supposed to be mean, and that you should do it anyway, because it's an efficient way to give feedback and Stack Exchange is designed to be efficient, not care about people's feedback.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Hamlet My lifetimes on SE has been a sinusoid of opinions about anonymous downvotes. At this point I accepted the fact that there's just no way to meaningfully reform the system to achieve any of the benefits of non-anonymous DVs, without being dragged down by the very real and meaningful downsides of non-anonymous ones. IOW, the evils of anonymous DV outweigh the evils of not having them.

Hamlet

You ask a question and the best answers rise to the top. Feelings are secondary to that (according to Stack Exchange).

VicAche

"the best answers rise to the top"

Hamlet

@VicAche yeah, it's actually a dumb system that doesn't work in practice.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

18:13

@Hamlet It definitely works on technical sites e.g. SO (for overwhelming majority of cases, though I saw some point failures on SO as well), but it does have demonstrable failures on more soft sites where you can't have a mass of people with a clue obviously knowing good answer from bad.

VicAche

I'm not saying this is wrong, but it is positively not always true. + it's always: is it always on top because it's the best (rated) answer or is it the best rated because it was before so i upvoted it

Hamlet

@DVK-on-Ahch-To that's because (1) it's easy to check if answer is correct, you see if the code compiles, and (2) because most of the people on technical sites are experts.

@VicAche if you look at my profile, you'll see that (1) I have the most downvotes out of any user on the site, and (2) I leave comments on popular but incorrect answers telling people how to improve the answer.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@VicAche I have thought of two solutions to this, one of which earned me a major Meta spanking on SFF a while back: (1) Ability to 100% reset the votes on all/specific answers if enough experts agree that the answer is incorrect; (2) Measure and cleanly display the velocity of upvotes (e.g. later answer that gathered 10 upvotes in 1 week is likely better than earlier answer with 50 votes that got +2/-3 in the same week)

VicAche

@Hamlet I would if my English was not so clumsy - I have the feeling that I'm losing a lot of clarity as soon as I try to disagree in English :P. Not the kind of words/structures you learn at school.

Hamlet

I don't do this because I'm obsessed with having correct answers. If I thought that this site was going to be a place for expert answers, I would have gotten frustrated and quit by now.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

18:17

@Hamlet Wait till people start DVing every post you made to learn the true measure of feeling like someone's mean to you :)

Hamlet

I do this because I find the conversations interesting,

VicAche

@Hamlet for example, on the aforementioned bad answer (note: by a user that has contributed a lot to this website elsewhere), I feel I should comment in a way that makes it clear I believe this is a destructive comment and that empty references to the author's other work cannot hide its comment nature. But then I see 12 upvotes and I think I'll have a depressing time arguing this...

Hamlet

And I do this because, as a mod, there's no point in participating on Stack Exchange if I don't buy into the concept of one person one vote, even if it might not be true.

@VicAche you can leave one comment and ignore any followups

VicAche

@Hamlet in doing so you have to be sure you're clear. In this case, just flagged the answer

Hamlet

@VicAche no, I've been very unclear in some of my comments.

Either my comment gets them to put in the time to think about their answer, or it doesn't.

VicAche

18:21

@Hamlet yes, still trying to figure the one on terminology you left on my Odysseus answer. And find it frustrating

@Hamlet that's because you assume that incomplete answers are the result of incomplete effort, it's not always the case

Hamlet

@VicAche if you give me the french words I'll try to give you the English translation

@VicAche well, no, I've gotten used to the fact that the vast majority of the time my comments will be ignored.

It's useful because it continues the conversation.

VicAche

@Hamlet those are the exact French words:

Hamlet

We're trying to build a knowledge base. Critiques, instruction for how to write answers and think about literature, it's all part of the knowledge base. Hence why I leave comments even though I know they won't be implemented; I'm contributing my knowledge.

@DVK-on-Ahch-To I call them "fake internet points" for a reason.

VicAche

"Le terme « scripsiste » a été inventé par Oliver Taplin (O. Taplin, Homeric soundings : the shaping of the Iliad, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1992) pour faire pendant au terme « oraliste » qui était employé généralement pour critiquer la thèse
d’une composition orale des poèmes homériques."

Hamlet

@VicAche can you give the author's definition of those french words?

VicAche

18:28

@Hamlet yes of course!

Actually no :P

he doesn't define them

Hamlet

@VicAche ok, so those terms' meanings are specific to the Iliad. They don't have anything to do with oral literature in general.

VicAche

@Hamlet I guess "the oralist" can be of wider use

at least that what's the above comment imply

for the other, it's not

Hamlet

@VicAche no, the term "oralist" is used for people who believe that Homer's poems (the Illiad and the Odyssey) are (I think recorded versions, but maybe the author means "based on") of oral tradition.

And then this person names Oliver Taplin invented a new term, "scripsiste", to refer to people who thought that oralists were correct.

Bear in mind though that my french is very bad and I could easily be mistranslating this

VicAche

@Hamlet that guy wrote in English (so I'm trying to grab the term he was using)

@Hamlet true. But the term, at least in French

Hamlet

@VicAche it's not the specific English spelling words that is the problem

VicAche

18:36

@Hamlet OK, so how could we edit the question to take into account your comment?

Hamlet

@VicAche OK, I took another look at your answer, and I removed my downvote.

I'm not sure that my comments were correct.

I think what was confusing to me is the structure and order of the answer.

VicAche

@Hamlet Actually I don't think that's the topic - if somebody takes the time to make stupid (excuse the hyperbole) comments on a question, it definitely has potential for more clarity

Hamlet

I would start by moving the heading "Shooting The Odyssey" to the top.

I actualy have to go right now, but I'll continue this conversation later.

BESW

21:41

@Hamlet I've seen this both in local academia and broader academic contexts, and I've even written an RPG about related issues.

Hamlet

@BESW it's not a particularly new idea

@BESW rpg related issues?

Rand al'Thor

A mere 8 hours' worth of pings.

I'm guessing I've got lots to reply to from @Hamlet :-)

Ooh, and lots of negative comments. Fun.

BESW

@Hamlet After playing Dog Eat Dog with Chamorro, Filipino, and white-local friends, the ensuing conversations made me think about a part of the indigenous experience the game neglected to explore.

At the same time I was thinking about entering a 200-word RPG challenge, so I combined the two and wrote Colonypunk.

Hamlet

@BESW not the biggest fan of genres that end with "punk"

But Colonypunk is a well-designed game.

What were your players' experiences?

BESW

21:58

I use it in the early punk/cyberpunk sense of usurping a broken culture's tools for one's own ends, rather than the more recent steam/dieselpunk sense of an anachronistic tech/aesthetic blend.

Hamlet

> For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

:)

BESW

@Hamlet Which is kind of partly the point of my Colonypunk game, yes.

@Hamlet Our first game of Dog Eat Dog followed the system's structures very closely, making a fictional setting and two fictional cultures, playing out a relatively large-scale conflict with the future of the two cultures' interactions together at stake.

But for our second game, my Chamorro friend suggested that we play as contemporary Chamorros on our island, working to get the Chamorro language more widely accepted.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet Right, but that's a question based on a review. "Reviewer A says X; are they right?" I was thinking more of questions based on questions from elsewhere. Your question seems original as a question, even if it's inspired by commentary from elsewhere.

BESW

The stakes were comparatively smaller; we weren't playing to find out if Guam would become independent of the USA, like the system's foundational assumptions would've had us do.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet I'm considering deleting this answer, because it doesn't say much that you couldn't find with plain old Google-fu, is much less good than HDE's answer, and doesn't deserve all the votes it's got. Thoughts?

Hamlet

22:05

@Randal'Thor oh well. The point is that if that question gets an answer (which I have and I may post eventually), we can link the author to our question, and the author will maybe want to engage in the conversation.

@Randal'Thor it doesn't seem that bad to me.

Maybe other people find it helpful.

BESW

But the drama was much higher, as we better understood the compromises we were being asked to make. And a recurring theme which came out, but which the system's mechanics didn't support, was the notion that achieving one truly decolonising goal was almost impossible without furthering assimilation in some other way: in order to usefully challenge an injustice, our characters had to engage with the system which perpetuated the injustice and be changed by it.

Rand al'Thor

And yes, I've never listened to rap. At least not knowingly - I'm so out of popular culture that I don't even know what rap is. I mainly listen to classical music, and purely orchestral at that.

@Hamlet That's something of a problem all over SE, thanks to the HNQ network (as I think DVK already mentioned). The only way we can really combat it is by voting responsibly ourselves and setting a good example. And bounties, maybe.

Hamlet

@BESW what do you mean by further assimilation? How does that help fight injustice?

BESW

You can't change a system without engaging with it: working completely outside the occupying system is largely futile and does nothing to fight injustice. However, it's nigh impossible to interact with the system without being changed by it.

Hamlet

@BESW how did that realization come about?

BESW

22:11

When I described this to some academic friends a few weeks ago, they saw their own experience in it: the higher they advanced in the (US) educational system the further withdrawn from their culture they became, and they constantly fight to be indigenous scholars rather than simply scholars who are indigenous.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor you could make it a community wiki post if you don't want the reputation

BESW

@Hamlet For me? It wasn't a sudden brilliant hammer-blow, it was a coalescing of experiences and observations since childhood, like remembering the angry man who spat on returning indigenous veterans because they were giving their lives to uphold the occupiers of their own land, and how he was considered a crazy old fool.

Rand al'Thor

@VicAche Thank you for commenting - I do appreciate honest feedback, even if it's negative. But I think "there is no answer, and you're asking the wrong sort of question" is a valid answer to questions like that (and also the St Ives one that I answered yesterday). I believe I've seen that kind of answer called a framing challenge (?). Would it help if I moved the final paragraph to the top and expanded on it, to make the main point more clearly?

BESW

43

Q: How do we handle a desire to challenge the frame of a question?

Sometimes, someone asks a question that seems like it might suffer from the XY Problem (asking about your attempted solution instead of your actual problem) and you want to point that out. Or you feel that something about the question frame makes answering the question invalid and the only tenab...

discussion faq questions frame-challenge

Hamlet

@BESW that was too fast

Rand al'Thor

22:16

@Hamlet Eh, I don't care about the rep. It's the quality of the answer that I'm concerned about.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor it was a hilarious joke, not a serious suggestion :)

Rand al'Thor

Ah yes, now I remember the CW drama :-)

@BESW Thanks; I'll read that. (I tried Googling "framing challenge" but came up blank; makes sense that it's an RPG.SE-specific phrase, and that's why I've heard it from people like you and Emrak.)

BESW

Aye, it seems to have originated in RPG.SE, but has been offered to the Stack at large:

5

A: Does Stack Exchange allow for answers which question the validity or stance of the original question?

On RPG.se we call these kinds of answers “frame challenges”, because they challenge the frame of the question. It comes up often enough that it's become a piece of local jargon. Yeah, they're valid answers. They're more valid if you answer the surface question, and then solve the “but actually y...

Rand al'Thor

Also, would be nice if someone could provide a new answer to this. The votes on the question suggest people think it's a discussion worth having, but so far there's no solution which people can agree on.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor the important thing is that people feel comfortable leaving comments when they downvote something. Your response does a good job challenging the comment but in a non confrontational way. Good work!

@BESW the question about scholarship is who is the scholarship for? who is consuming the scholarship?

@BESW I don't think it's the act of challenging injustice that does this. I'm still curious why you associate challenging injustice with assimilating to injustice.

BESW

22:27

@Hamlet I'm not sure I can explain it clearly right now. That's part of why I made it a game rather than an essay.

But I can say that it's not the act of challenging injustice which does it.

It's that challenging injustice in ways which actually get things done is almost guaranteed to involve interactions which further assimilation in other ways.

In a climate where (as Dog Eat Dog puts it) the first Rule is "the (Native people) are inferior to the (Occupation people)," you must adopt the trappings of the Occupier in order to cause change in Occupier behavior.

Hamlet

@BESW I don't agree with that, but it's a contentious and interesting debate and I want to talk about it.

BESW

This is probably not the place for it, nor, I suspect, am I the best person--I am not a (Native person).

But yes, it's not a claim I make absolutely. It's a trend I've observed, but I've seen exceptions as well.

Hamlet

@BESW if you look carefully on my profile (this requires knowledge of the works I've been asking questions about), you'll find that some of the questions I ask do touch on this.

BESW

And at the end of the day, a lot of such discussions are predicated on the attractive but ridiculous notion that you can un-make soup.

VicAche

22:45

@Randal'Thor I've myself answered in such way on questions where I can rule out the alternatives, but this is not the case here. Rulling out every other possibility - and resorting to "I read the rest of Borges, don't worry nothing to understand here" seems a lot lower than what I came to expect from this SE! At all rate keep up the good work here :)

Bookworm

0

Q: Why did the police go to The Orchard Keeper?

In Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper, the eponymous old man is visited by the cops. They do not get a warm welcome. Why did they go there at all, and why was the old man so hostile to them? I might have just missed the fact that it was spelled out in the book, but if not, there are three pos...

cormac-mccarthy

Hamlet

@BESW The Case for Reparations

Rand al'Thor

@VicAche But I wasn't ruling out possibilities in order to come to a conclusion about the answer: I was saying that the question is unanswerable, and providing evidence for why it's the wrong question to be asking and any answer is possible.

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor Da...wuuut? So what? Don't delete valuable content.

VicAche

@Randal'Thor I don't see that as an answer, and am too tired to launch the discussion truly, but I think this is just the kind of answers a teacher - with limited means and time - can provide but we should take the time to do better. If a question isn't answerable as is, close, edit, reopen. If it is, answer.

Napoleon Wilson

22:54

@Hamlet No, that's not what CW is for.

Rand al'Thor

@VicAche Not being answerable doesn't necessarily mean a question should be closed. "There is no answer" or "we don't know" can be a perfectly valid answer to a question; I see it all the time on SFF.

But I won't push this conversation if you're too tired :-)

Napoleon Wilson

@Hamlet Ah, I see.

Rand al'Thor

37 mins ago, by Hamlet

@Randal'Thor it was a hilarious joke, not a serious suggestion :)

VicAche

@Randal'Thor exactly. But you're saying that's not the case with this question

Napoleon Wilson

1 min ago, by Napoleon Wilson

@Hamlet Ah, I see.

And even if not, a question that never gets answered isn't necessarily an invalid thing either, since that point where its unanswerability is definitely decided is infinitely far away anyway.

Bookworm

22:58

0

Q: Tracking Llewelyn Moss

How is Llewelyn Moss tracked by Chigurh and the Mexicans in No Country for Old Men? I'm asking several clarifying questions here, but I'm really just wondering what I missed about the tracking device(s) (where there more than one?). Llewelyn made a dumb decision when returning to give water to t...

cormac-mccarthy

BESW

@Hamlet Reparations are an excellent example of not being able to un-make soup. For example, the USA's attempts to acknowledge Native American sovereignty are based on European concepts of national inheritance through bloodlines.

That's a good example of having to embrace one form of assimilation in order to begin to right another injustice.

We may, eventually, be able to reach a point as a human race where such injustices are redressed. But by "un-make soup" I mean that we can't return to a period before such injustices happened, before assimilation and colonisation. Whatever we wind up having, it will be stable and healthy inasmuch as it comes to terms with the effects of history rather than trying to undo them.

Rand al'Thor

23:39

@Hamlet Re promoting our site elsewhere by showcasing exemplary posts, I'm hoping this will help:

0

Q: Best Questions & Answers from 1st Quarter of 2017

@Hamlet mentioned in chat that one way to promote this site would be to post links elsewhere on the internet to some of our best content. In order to make this easier to do, I thought it would be a good idea to gather a collection of particularly good posts here so far, so that we have some easy ...

discussion best-of

Librarian

0

Q: Best Questions & Answers from 1st Quarter of 2017

@Hamlet mentioned in chat that one way to promote this site would be to post links elsewhere on the internet to some of our best content. In order to make this easier to do, I thought it would be a good idea to gather a collection of particularly good posts here so far, so that we have some easy ...

discussion best-of

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