Word of the day: homiletics

@M.A.R. What makes people who know how to write SEDE queries less likely to do bad things with that information than a long time contributor in good standing who doesn’t? It’s not like information about people who cast close votes is dangerous. The worst that happens is they draw the wrong conclusions from it. Curiosity is a perfectly valid reason to want to know how to find publicly available information.

The crazy thing is that once someone who knows how writes the query, any anonymous user that can click a captcha can run it too. It’s dumb to get uptight about satisfying someone’s curiosity by helping them with a sede query.

If someone misinterprets the data, the answer to that is education not hiding the data.

knowledge should be shared, not hoarded.

@ColleenV Nothing, if they want to know it for 'curiosity', they can ask someone who knows nicely (often rene). He's made queries for countless questions, and continues doing so. I've asked him half a dozen times and he's written queries for me.

@ColleenV I've still not been persuaded that there is any other valid interpretation for data than brewing hate for close vote reviewers, and the folks who write queries perhaps thought the same.

@M.A.R. Isn't that exactly what they did on Meta? Asked people who might know the answer?

And the right people either didn't see it, or didn't care to provide an answer

@M.A.R. Rene provided an answer. My problem is the amount of abuse they got for asking the question

So you disagree with the vehement disagreement the post received. That's meta.SE

There's no ethical concern about satisfying someone's curiousity about how to get public uncontrolled information

People freely express their opinions

@M.A.R. My point is not that they shouldn't express it, but that such irrational take on it is so widespread

among people who are otherwise smart

I haven't found it irrational, even if so, it's opinions

Voters are given up and down arrows to express disagreement or agreement on meta.

I didn't even read the answers, it'd be nice if someone did write why the information would be useless or misleading or biased or impossible to interpret, but again, that no one has bars no one from expressing disagreement at the premise of the question, that such information would be of any use other than hunt close voters

If it's talk about being irrational, you should see how some misguided folks on SO feel about moderation and close votes specifically. Whenever they find anything like a close review link, they go on insulting the close reviews or serially downvoting them etc.

To base your assessment on how the post has been received is itself sorta irrational, if there was supposed to be any sort of rationality to opinions. Like that critic that gave Lady Bird a rotten tomato just because its tomatometer was 100% fresh

So . . . shrug

@M.A.R. Does not answering someone's question on Meta solve that problem on SO at all? The information is there for people to find. Irrational people don't look for information to check whether their belief is rational or not. That's something rational people do.

And opinions can be reasoned opinions - they aren't all irrational

But I suspect that's what the folks had in mind that led to the poor reception of the post. You're right that those people don't read, which I also said earlier is a bliss

The reasoning behind the "OMG don't tell them how to do that thing that a bunch of other people already know how to do and aren't abusing because they might do something annoying" is silly

I don't think refusing to answer someone's question about publicly available uncontrolled information makes sense in any way. If you think they might interpret the information incorrectly, that's a very opportune time to educate them on how to interpret it

@ColleenV What? The ones with the knowhow don't write scripts like these or whatever malicious thing they do with it gets reversed. In their case, that informational barrier is broken, so we just have to deal with the consequences. There aren't people who're actively looking for top close voters of their questions for non-abusive purposes

Instead of letting them remain ignorant

@M.A.R. Why do you think that someone asking for that information is automatically looking to do something bad with it? Especially if they are an active long-time contributor?

Why do you think there is any difference between posting a query on Meta, and letting it sit in SEDE where people can find it?

That's exactly the point: We can't trust more people with this script, and we don't trust the ones that can write it either, so let's just not make it easier for more people we don't trust to get their hands on the information effortlessly, or hell, there even be a reminder that doing such a thing is possible

@ColleenV Because, as I said, there are no good uses for it.

@M.A.R. Oh, so it's OK to keep people ignorant if you can't imagine a "good" use for that information

Said people can spend a few hours learning how to write the script and do it. It's not impossible for them.

So why not just tell them instead?

Unless you want to punish them for asking the question? Or make them pass a test before they're "worthy" of it?

If you can't tell I'm a bit of a knowledge sharing extremist

@ColleenV Why it's useless? Someone might or might not do it, doesn't stop others from expressing their opinions.

@ColleenV What does punish even mean in this context? TASTE THE DOWNVOTE, MWAHHAHA

And Q-bans are really rare on meta.SE

@CowperKettle This joke is probably as old as tangentzania

@ColleenV sure, we just discussing stuff

@M.A.R. No, I'm not talking about the Meta response. I'm talking about not wanting to share knowledge that some people have because of the belief that the unwashed masses can't handle that knowledge.

I couldn't care less about meta downvotes and such

I have a strong negative reaction to the reasoning behind it

It's not unethical to share public knowledge with someone

Lol, they definitely can handle the knowledge, except anything that can be called handling is going to be abuse and extra work for mods, if they detect it

@M.A.R. That's a problem that should be solved when it happens, not by proactively refusing to give information to some people and not others

You're basically saying that the information is dangerous for some people to have - if that's the case, access to it should be controlled

Refusing to share knowledge of it with some people is not controlling access to it

If you can't SEDE it and someone refuses to SEDE it for you, you don't have much cause for complaint because you can learn the language

@ColleenV It's not, but what method of restricted access are you suggesting?

@M.A.R. Make people sign in and sign an agreement not to abuse the information or whatever

Other CV queries, like finding out when it came and which post, are as useful as a timeline in solving some disputes on meta or for the heck of it

If it's really that dangerous

@M.A.R. Knowing who close voted my questions is discoverable without a query, so all refusing to help me with a query does is make it harder for me to find the information

Again, it's not dangerous, because I guess dangerous in this context would be extreme damage that'd be kinda irreversible, but it's a whole lot of headache which could be caused much faster if such a question exists

Refusing to give the information to a upstanding member of the community doesn't prevent any headaches.

Posting on Meta is just as obscure in practical terms as the queries already being available on SEDE

@ColleenV Well, exactly. Case-by-case, you see who did it and can contest it. But if a query results are MAR closed your questions 9 times, Snail 15 times, and Cowper 21 times doesn't tell you anything useful above that. It doesn't help you contest closure, just maybe point a finger and call out someone on meta.

@M.A.R. Or maybe the query tells me that there is no pattern at all to who closes my questions beyond more active users than not

Or maybe i can ask Cowper what they see as the biggest problem with my closed questions and get some advice on improving them

Information is inherently valuable, whether it has a use or not

@ColleenV It was a useless query before, it's a useless query now

I have no reason to know the average gestation time for an elephant, but I still found it interesting

The numbers are always going to be so close to each other for at least a bunch of people because it takes 3 or 5 folks to close a question

No surprises there

@M.A.R. Exactly - seeing the data is feedback that could positively affect someone's view of the system

Hey, I'm not being persecuted - lots of people thought the question should be closed

Or all of them are part of a clique. Your imaginary user is hopelessly optimistic. Maybe Flanders

Assuming that people will automatically go to the retaliation mindset instead of the learn and improve mindset doesn't help anything

People with the retaliation mindset are going to behave badly no matter what

The people who might improve if given data could be rare, but it doesn't cost much to give them the public information they could get regardless when they ask for it

Then I suppose people don't like it because there's no why. A blind devotion to focus on content, not users, perhaps, and the query is at best incomplete. People don't want a two column set of data with a user ID and a number

The problem, as I see it, is not that the interpretation will automatically lean on the bad, with a few good apples not assuming bad things, it's that for 99.9% of the users it's going to be simply meaningless and impossible to make either intepretation

Something like UID 1, 3, UID 2, 3, UID 3, 2, UID 4, 3 etc

I should really go back to my lessons now, we've been talking for an hour almost

> Replaces Exhibit L from BLTQP010 and aligns to BDSQP010.

What could this mean, if the BLTQP010 is a document?

BLTQP010 is a document titled "Design verification and validation", that's all I know about it.

Is an exhibit an appendix to a document?

I've never come across this use of the word exhibit

@snailplane Hello! It's nice to see you in chat again - we missed you.

@CowperKettle An exhibit makes me think of legal proceedings - it's an artifact used to support a claim.

Let me poke around for some examples

But in the context you have I would choose a document or material object produced and identified in court or before an examiner for use as evidence

If the document is talking about validating a design, exhibits would be used as evidence that it does meet requirements

"Exhibit A" can be used jokingly in conversation, like Some of my coworkers at my new job are really strange. Oh look, here comes exhibit A. (directed toward a "strange" coworker)

@M.A.R. Sorry to bend your ear but it's one of my pet peeves.

@ColleenV It's all good

What else would we be talking about

@M.A.R. ????

@AIQ ??? ????

Is it a Unicode Parsing Error or

I suppose we could talk about the terrible grammar crimes the character limit on Twitter causes. Or the people who insist on "correcting" the British/American spelling when they see their spell-checker's red squiggly lines.

Ooo, or we could talk about the Grandiloquent word of the day.

@ColleenV Is getting annoyed by people who insist on using two spaces between sentences ageist? That is something that I wanted to talk about.

@EddieKal I don't think that's ageist, it was annoying even back when people still had a typewriter in the house, I'm sure

I am annoyed by certain folks who ,for some odd reason ,,insist on spaces before punctuation........and excessive and inappropriate repetition of punctuation.Yet they don't put even one space between sentences.

I guess I should blame auto-correct and poor English curriculum for all of it.

@EddieKal huh how can getting annoyed at someone or something be ageist?

I mean unless you are doing something to them after being annoyed

MS word now flags two spaces as incorrect - as of April of this year. Wow that took a long time.

thewritelife.com/double-space-after-period

@AIQ I think it was a joke.

@ColleenV I know ... I was asking how that word would fit

treating people unfairly because of their age

Oh, well two spaces after a sentence is only really needed when typing on a typewriter, because there the letters are all equally spaced

So if you are biased against people who use the old fashioned way, you are biased against old people, aka ageist

It's like racist - it just means you're biased against them. You don't actually have to act on it.

@ColleenV A lot of first-time askers on ELL do that. And I really wish there was a comment template that told people "Please check your basic punctuation and spelling", or "Please don't upload pictures. Consider typing out your passage."

@AIQ Because double-spacing is a hangover from the typewriter era. I didn't know that until pretty recently some of my edit suggestions were rejected on other SE sites and I looked up double spacing. I thought it was a mistake on the part of the post author. Well...

@EddieKal Oh I wasn't asking that ...

@AIQ Sorry I misread what you said

Like for you to be an ageist, I thought you have to discriminate against the elderly, but just being annoyed at them isn't really discriminating

@ColleenV but Cambridge says treating people unfairly because of their age and MW says prejudice or discrimination against a particular age-group and especially the elderly

@EddieKal I really really don't like screenshots of text.

@AIQ Not really. If someone is uncomfortable being around gay people, they are homophobic for sure

both definitions show you have to actively discriminate ... no?

@ColleenV That makes two of us

@AIQ Common usage for X-ist when describing a person is "that person is biased against people based on X"

Although that doesn't work for all words that could be "X"

@EddieKal homophobic is fine because the definition is involving a fear or dislike of gay people which is a state of being or feeling ... whereas ageist is one who does sth

because "nationalist"

Although I guess that would be against other people based on the nationality

that doesn't match your own

But "ableist" tends to just refer to discrimination against disabled people, so that whole explanation falls apart

@ColleenV yes ok biased against someone, but how does being annoyed at someone's habit makes you biased against them? to be biased, you have to actively do sth that goes against their interest

@AIQ No you don't. You can dislike all old people and everything they do

and say mean things about them

@AIQ I know we share the common practice of deferring to dictionaries for accurate definitions, but here I think we need to consult better authorities

because dictionaries do not always keep up with the times

I dislike my roommate ... that does not make me biased against them ... for example.

If someone says hateful things about old people, they could be described as biased against them.

@ColleenV but Eddikal just said he is annoyed at their use of double space or sth ... that isn't hateful

Well, it was a joke, so there's always exaggeration involved

@ColleenV ditto the joke part...

It wouldn't really be funny if there was no stretching of the truth

Either by pretending something trivial is serious, or something serious is trivial

btw, can someone be racist against their own race?

Btw that shot was taken from "Implicit Ageism" by Becca Levy and Mahzarin Banaji

@AIQ Yes!

absolutely

I don't know if it is ever going to cost me dearly - I don't have a twitter account, linkedin account, ... and none of the other social media accounts ...

i have fb but i stopped using it 2 years ago

I don't do FB and I rarely do Twitter any more

I like the non-political stuff on Twitter

i mean i use messenger to chat but no activity in social media

I held off for a long time getting involved in social media. And some days I wished I had never signed up lol

But every so often you find something really cool on their, like the WrathofGnon account

yeah i feel like I became much happier and at peace when I stopped checking fb feed

Threadreader will let you read threads of tweets others found interesting enough to "unroll"

threadreaderapp.com/user/wrathofgnon

Like i don't need to know who says what and who does what and then get all angry and upset at how stupid some people can be

That works better for me because I'm not being manipulated by the feed activity

and I can just read stuff from accounts that aren't trying to outrage people