English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

12:08 AM

A peat bog is on fire on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg. e1.ru/text/incidents/2021/10/14/70192145

The police is considering the evacuation of the Solnechny district.

I got used to the smell, but I live on the 9th floor, and the smell must be heavier below.

Peat bog fires are notoriously hard to put down.

Sometimes they linger on through the winter and reemerge in the spring.

CowperKettle

12:34 AM

Cerberus

Nice.

@CowperKettle Oh, dear, that's bad.

CowperKettle

> Philosophy Department

SmokeDetector

4:57 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at end of answer, potentially bad keyword in answer, potentially problematic ns configuration in answer (63): Which is correct: "web host" or "web hoster"? by Freelancer Robin on english.SE

CowperKettle

Current weather

> Yet still, e’en here, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm

Word of the day: quokka

CowperKettle

5:27 AM

Space: 1999

Space: 1999 is a British science-fiction television programme that ran for two series from 1975 to 1977. In the opening episode, set in the year 1999, nuclear waste stored on the Moon's far side explodes, knocking the Moon out of orbit and sending it, as well as the 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, hurtling uncontrollably into space. Space: 1999 was the last production by the partnership of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who divorced in 1980, and was the most expensive series produced for British television up to that time. The first series was co-produced by ITC Entertainment and Italian broadcaster...

It gave me the creeps.

CowperKettle

6:57 AM

SmokeDetector

7:19 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with a link in answer, link at end of answer (142): What can a skin specialist do? by Cody Evans on english.SE

CowperKettle

9:35 AM

Today we broke the alltime record in new daily covid cases and on daily covid deaths

Mitch

1:07 PM

@Cerberus That is possible (and also has happened in my experience both in asking and answering) but we don't have a good idea of the statistics over all questions/answers.

@Cerberus That is 1) extreme and 2) obviously wrong because you can choose to sort by activity rather than votes.

@Cerberus In my limited experience (confirmation bias and all that) most such late answers are 1) either someone answering poorly with information already provided, 2) a totally new user (rep 1) with a very ignorable answer (usually deletable), or 3) extremely rarely an interesting answer (and if memory serves almost always by Sven Yarg).

@Cerberus All of Araucaria's points are possibly relevant to the existing voting system ('candidates' can appear over long periods of time) and pose lots of legitimate problems (even the ones you mentioned that I just responded to). But is 'accepting an answer' the _only possible way to combat that problem? Obviously not since choosing other orderings (which are already. part of the choices a user can make) already exist.

How can a questioner, who is often barely able to articulate their own question, able to be a competent enough judge. All. they're doing is judging for themselves. Votes are the judgements of everybody else... who else is going to see the question and answers? More voters.

There are lots of problems with the voting system, but pinning an answer by the OP is pretty irrelevant to presenting a better answer to the community.

Oh... if the OP has 'accepted' an answer, they can't change their mind with new answers. Once accepted, it stays accepted (unless that particular answer is edited and only then the OP can change acceptance).

CowperKettle

1:24 PM

Acronym of the day: DREADDS (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs)

Cerberus

1:35 PM

@Mitch I have never, ever done that.

I doubt whether anybody does.

CowperKettle

Cerberus

@Mitch People do not use 'other ordering'! They see the page as it is and either read the top answers or close the tab.

CowperKettle

2:44 PM

"Kosmos" cafe, Perm, USSR, 1960s

> It is true that evil may gain wealth but the strength of truth is that it lasts; a man can say: "It was the property of my father".

Cerberus

Very much so.

CowperKettle

(Instruction of Ptahhotep, 24th century BC)

Cerberus

The past is important.

@CowperKettle A reliable source.

CowperKettle

The Maxims of Ptahhotep

The Maxims of Ptahhotep or Instruction of Ptahhotep is an ancient Egyptian literary composition composed by the Vizier Ptahhotep around 2375–2350 BC, during the rule of King Djedkare Isesi of the Fifth Dynasty. The text was discovered in Thebes in 1847 by Egyptologist M. Prisse d'Avennes. The Instructions of Ptahhotep are considered didactic wisdom literature belonging to the genre of sebayt. There are four copies of the Instructions, and the only complete version, Papyrus Prisse, is located in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. According to William Kelly Simpson, some scholars debate that the...

CowperKettle

3:08 PM

Matt E. Эллен

looks like some kind of dinosaur

CowperKettle

The virus is sending signals to us.

Matt E. Эллен

:-o

CowperKettle

3:30 PM

Hypothesis of the day: dreams as an overfitting correction mechanism -- By hallucinating out-of-distribution sensory stimulation every night, the brain is able to rescue the generalizability of its perceptual and cognitive abilities and increase task performance.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Is that real?

Those changes in Britain seem suspect.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus It uses a log Y-axis, which confounds the viewer. This is from a Twitter account termed Graph Crimes

It provides examples of bad charts and graphs, like this one.

LOL at this particular one.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Who made that?

CowperKettle

@Cerberus I did not pay attention; the account provides details

Probably some TV channel

Or a website

Cerberus

@CowperKettle I have no problem with the scale, but those legs seem suspect.

Mitch

3:45 PM

@Cerberus I was very surprised at its existence when I first found it. set it to sort by activity, eventually got annoyed by it and then changed it to sort by vote. But this is all a matter of UX patterns that require statistical study, and are not principles of democracy as it seems Araucaria is claiming.

@Cerberus You still have the choice, it's not forcing you to see things a certain way. If given the choice I would choose 'don't force the accepted answer above everything else, just mark it as accepted whereever it lies in the default ordering.

Cerberus

@Mitch It's not about choice: I can always see the answer with the most votes anyway.

It is about what you see first.

And, as I said, very few people will use anything other than the default ordering.

Mitch

There is also an appeal to complexity here. It is more complex to think about "Where do we put the 'accepted' answer? in a sorted list than it is to sort them all by user chosen preferred. sorting method and just put a 'accepted' star next to that one where ever it lies.

Cerberus

I don't think the current situation is "complex".

It's easy to understand and perfectly clear.

What would be fine with me is putting the accepted answer immediately below the one with the most votes (if not the same answer).

Mitch

So you're saying the designers of the system should make a decision for all users and make the default be 'sort by votes' -and- put the accepted item at the top (after moving it out of the sorted list).

Cerberus

The goal is to have both immediately visible.

Mitch

3:50 PM

@Cerberus But implementation-wise it is an extra complicated step

Cerberus

@Mitch ...exactly the way it has always been?

@Mitch I don't see what's complicated about the way it is now.

Sometimes, the accepted answer is not the one with the most votes. You simply notice this because you immediately see the next answer has more votes.

So you see both. No problem.

Mitch

@Cerberus Oh sure, I don't think it is a big deal to have it at. the top. I find it annoying when the OP doesn't realize that there is a better answer, but not enough to consider requesting a change or even thinking idly 'Gosh it'd be nicer to change it to how I like it'.

Cerberus

@Mitch Yay.

Mitch

But in designing the system, it is much easier to sort everything by whatever criterion and add a tick mark to note the accepted answer than it is to 'put accepted at top, then sort everything else by whatever criterion'.

That's the appeal to complexity

Cerberus

It might be nice if the asker were to receive a special message if another answer has twice as many votes as the accepted answer, so that he might reconsider.

Mitch

3:54 PM

(it's not terribly complicated to implement but it is an additional thing to do.)

Cerberus

@Mitch Trivial complexity, then, since it's already implemented?

Even I could do that sorting with a few lines of Javascript.

CowperKettle

They should just create a super-AI that will determine how to sort the answers best.

Mitch

@Cerberus To me that's a fallacy of irrelevance (which means it is sometimes a fallacy but sometimes not). "It's already done this complex way so it's easy". That can lead to more complex and hard to understand errors later

Cerberus

@Mitch Well, I do not think that is case with an extremely basic sorting method.

Mitch

for example, and I realize this may be weird but it's a conversation I've had, but consider male circumcision...

Cerberus

3:57 PM

It is really not complex.

@Mitch I'd rather not!

Consider it yourself.

Mitch

Studies have found that there is a much smaller percentage of cancer in circumcised men than uncircumsized (penile cancer in case you. weren't sure).

Is that a good reason to implement wide-spread male circumcision?

CowperKettle

Penis Dimension (Live)

►

Mitch

(it probably depends on the cost and also the prevalence of the cancers)

But I'd say no it's not a good justification.

Cerberus

Without numbers, I think the question has little meaning.

Mitch

It might be a justification for -continuing- the practice if it is an entrenched behavior (like in the US where it is just (or at least used to be just) a procedure that was just always done).

Cerberus

4:03 PM

Or maybe just abolish the mutilation of babies.

Just a thought.

Mitch

But why would you ever think of doing it in the first place. Some magical God being comes down and says "If all you guys start cutting this little piece off, you won't. get cancer so often" most would say "uh...I think I'll risk it"

@Cerberus Exactly. Many of Araucaria's points are not truths but should be investigated by data.

@Cerberus or, in this analogy, don't do complicated things with accepted answers

Yes

CowperKettle

Some tribe is forcibly removing some frontal teech in their children, after a breakout of tetanus. It was a salutory practice that allowed some patients to survive, but grew entrenched into a ritual. I heard that in some audiobook, because that has become my ritual. Listening to audiobooks.

Mitch

I'm equating pinning accepted answers with baby mutilation

I think that's my contribution to society for today

Wait ...

Nope that was it.

Hold on ....

nope

un momentito por favor...

OK got another one.

Goddammit

I forgot it just as I was about to start typing

Cerberus

@CowperKettle This was in fact quite common in prehistoric East-Asia.

I don't think they know whether there were original reasons.

Jul 30 at 20:42, by Cerberus

Mitch

Maybe the original reason was reducing various embarassing forms of cancer

Cerberus

4:11 PM

Jul 30 at 20:36, by Cerberus

> there exist several points which may suggest some relation between [China and Japan], such as the basic similarities in the age at commencement of ablation, the prevalence of extraction of under incisors from the Late Jomon period in western Japan and the existence of the same type of ablation in the peoples of nearly the same period in China.
Especially, as the abrupt increase of extraction of the upper lateral incisors in the people of the Yayoi period, such as Doigahama, who show morphological resemblances with the neolithic people of northern China, may suggest the influence of Chine…

@Mitch My professor of Ancient History always told me that we shouldn't suppose that ancient customs had a rational purpose.

Some may have, but many probably did not.

Mitch

Everything is rational

and fits into a preordained system of logic

-(A and -A) is always true

Did I get that right?

Cerberus

Even the choice of certain teeth over others for dental ablation?

But I have to run, my first visit to the Concertgebouw since 2019.

Mitch

I have been known to mistranslate "A->B" as "A and -B"