"Quora once encapsulated a central premise of the internet, that connecting people with questions and people with answers across the globe would create..."

"... an exchange of information unlike anything before it; that rather than seeking answers from a friend or in a library, you could put your query to … everyone. Today, the website spams my inbox with questions such as 'Has your husband ever shared you with another woman?' Fourteen years into its run, Quora now provides an answer to one fundamental question: How has the internet evolved? From idealism to opportunism, from knowledge-seeking to attention-grabbing, from asking questions to shouting answers."

Writes Jacob Stern, in "If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora? The tragedy of Q&A sites is the story of the internet" (The Atlantic).

"My kitten is purring so loudly that it hurts my ears, and the neighbors are already complaining. What should I do?"

A Quora question I love.

Who needs answers when there are questions like that? (Stop! Don't answer!)

Quora's qwazy notion of what counts as a related question.

"How did the bathhouse in Spirited Away..."



"... have electricity when they're in the Spirit Realm?" is presented as related to "Does it count as rape if you have sex with your spouse while they're asleep?"


(Click to enlarge.)

ADDED: What's genuinely eerie is that I'm in the middle reading a novel — by a Japanese writer — where there's a very important theme of whether it is a sort of rape to have sex with a person inside of your dream (≈ in the spirit world). The book is "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" by Haruki Murakami (and the next paragraph contains a major spoiler):

As he listened to the rain drum against the window, with these thoughts swirling around in his head, his room began to feel like an alien space. As if the room itself had developed its own will. Just being in there steadily drained away any ability to distinguish the real from the unreal. On one plane of reality, he’d never even touched Shiro’s hand. Yet on another, he’d brutally raped her. Which reality had he stepped into now? The more he thought about it, the less certain he became.

AND: When the Murakami book came out, in 2014, it was reviewed in the NYT by Patti Smith:

This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted, either by design or flawed in translation. Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another. “One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone,” Tsukuru comes to understand. “They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.” The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin. It is not “Blonde on Blonde,” it is “Blood on the Tracks.”

Who the hell does Quora think I am... and why?!

In the email this morning, I see Quora has ideas about what I might want to read. You can enlarge these 2 images by clicking on them:



If I didn't know this was selected for me and you showed me those selections and asked me what sort of person do you think this list was made for, I'd say a white supremacist!

This is obviously based Google searches I've done in the process of writing this blog. Here's the March 6th post musing about the mysteries of IQ, notably the IQ of Jesus. And I brought up Hitler yesterday to say: "If those who think Trump is dangerously destructive are really right and they spend their time consuming Trump-mocking entertainment, they're more like the audience in 'Caberet,' making light of the rise of Hitler."

That is, the wrongness of Quora's picture of me is obvious. But it's not as though Quora is defaming me. It's just computeristically processing data that I created. This is just one glimpse into what computers are "learning" about me, based on my input, the context of which they cannot understand.

What method does Quora use? Wikipedia says: "Quora requires users to register with their real names rather than an Internet pseudonym (screen name)...." So I must have registered at some point because I wanted to ask or answer a question and it didn't seem like such a big deal. And: "Users may also log in with their Google or Facebook accounts by using the OpenID protocol..." I don't know if I logged in with Facebook, and I didn't think Facebook leaked data when you used it to log in at other places, but I can tell by Quora's suggestions that it is getting its data from Google.

I don't know if I care that this data flows around and companies attempt to use it with sophisticated analysis that I can't see and couldn't understand anyway (not without my mental e-bike). But I am a little afraid that the internet is forming significant important political ideas about us, and that this could be used in some terrible way. But in this case the idea is obviously wrong.

Obvious to me. Maybe not to you. Maybe you think I'm a white supremacist. And it's at this point that I worry that what people are doing all the time is more harmful and unfair than what these computers seem to be doing. People take minimal data, out of context, and think all sorts of things about you and carry those thoughts forward, spreading them among other people, beyond your view — distorted, emotional, self-serving.