A Clash of Cultures?

[quantyst]

I thought it was ..., well, fascinating to see the critical and unhelpful responses to Dream Chazer's post in the careers section, dated 06-10-2008, 10:52 AM. It's fair to say most every responder did understand what he (all singular third person pronouns refer to both sexes equally) said in his post. Then the question is: Why the acrimonious reaction?

A first approximate answer is that at some visceral level the average Quantnet member can not accept the new manner of penning the words. So be it. But isn't it better to give Dream Chazer a chance to acclimate himself to our way of penning the words; i.e., our way of spelling, before we shoo him away? I mean the responders could have nicely informed him that it is more appropriate to correctly spell the words in our forum. And if after this he would not budge, then we could just as well ignore him. What do you think?

And I wonder about myself: why am I so deeply conditioned, even committed, to a particular way of penning words that I would rather antagonize another person only because of his strange way of writing? Interesting!

 

[woody]

The content of the first post did not get the thread closed or the author banned. The content of his second post did. (Also, the thread wasn't heading in a good direction.)

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

Well I for one did read it over and had to read it over 3 times to try and understand what he meant, so my response of "if I have to put so much effort into understanding a post, how will a trader understand your work?"

I believe that people with expertise that nobody else has are absolutely worthless if they can't get their ideas across with absolute clarity--and the higher the level they work, and the more arcane their field, the more this clarity is required from them. An associate can bridge a simple excel analysis without clear cut explanations by looking at the spreadsheet labels, but a C++ program to predict options and derivatives markets?

Hell, I have trouble making heads or tails of my own simple java programs even after commenting them!

 

[charlesdwright]

a class of cultures

a marketplace of ideas.

 

[alain]

Let me give you my side of the story. I really didn't know what "M" meant, at least not until I got home at night and my wife explained it to me (I'm not a native english speaker).

Also, I'm not familiar with a lot of acronyms and abbreviations people use since I don't use Text Messaging either. Maybe I'm too old school or plain too old. If I offended anybody, I apologize.

However, it would be really good if the original poster would've written complete words since posts like that one just show immaturity and they are not very professional (or polite for that matter).

If you are asking for help, at least have the courtesy to write complete words.

 

[bigbadwolf]

A first approximate answer is that at some visceral level the average Quantnet member can not accept the new manner of penning the words.

There are reasons for this. The manner of the query suggested sloppiness of thought and expression. That's one thing that can't be condoned in a quant. If the person penning such gibberish can't even summon the discipline and courtesy to use proper spelling and complete sentences, does he really deserve the courtesy of a reasoned and relevant response? Like many (if not most) of the other people here, English is a second language for me. But we all take pains with it, continuously aiming to improve our diction. The people we deal with -- associates, subordinates, employers, and interviewers -- expect us to be precise and careful in our expression, if not eloquent.

 

[woody]

Let me add that this is not cultural, and not a clash of cultures. There are many fine posters who make common grammatical mistakes and this is okay. This field is very international and we are used to this.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

There are reasons for this. The manner of the query suggested sloppiness of thought and expression. That's one thing that can't be condoned in a quant. If the person penning such gibberish can't even summon the discipline and courtesy to use proper spelling and complete sentences, does he really derserve the courtesy of a reasoned and relevant response? Like many (if not most) of the other people here, English is a second language for me. But we all take pains with it, continuously aiming to improve our diction. The people we deal with -- associates, subordinates, employers, and interviewers -- expect us to be precise and careful in our expression, if not eloquent.

For English being a second language for you, sir, I would not have been able to tell.

 

[charlesdwright]

Maybe I'm too old school or plain too old.

yeah, maybe.

 

[Uncle Max]

At the beginning I was about to post something negative on that topic as well, then I decided not to waste time.

In general, people use acronyms to save time while chatting with friends. If original poster didn't want to "waste" time typing whole words, why someone would spend time to answer those questions?

All in all, if poster really looked for help it would be reasonable just to retype the post after a few negative replies. If this didn't happen, that means that getting answers for the questions was not an original purpose of the post.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

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We seldom ban/delete someone's account or posts because of grammatical errors, spelling, abuse of text-messaging notation, smilies. I usually politely remind them to use standard good old English as much as possible. The last thing we want is to let Quantnet infested with teen lingo or vulgar.
If people can't read Quantnet posts at work comfortably, it's not good.

Everyone here contributes out of their own time so some courtesy, politeness would go a long way. And before anyone protests, I think Quantnet is one of the friendliest, most helpful communities out there.

 

[charlesdwright]

...I think Quantnet is one of the friendliest, most helpful communities out there.

Agreed, Andy.

 

[DominiConnor]

In my experience, people who cannot articulate their thoughts rarely are having good ones.

Someone famous once said if you can't explain what you're doing to a child, you are a charlatan.
As you might be able to tell from the volume of my posts I am a rapid typer

I didn't see the posts, so can't comment directly.

But each forum has a different "culture" in terms of whether it is polite to use acronyms, so I'm not judgemental of a newcomer who hasn't adjusted yet. But of course you ought to read before writing, so I would not expect it to take long for a polite person to adjust.

I've been using variants on text speak longer than the average QNer has been alive. My early computing experience was in a domain where you could not use >6 characters to name or describe things...

But QN is international, and text-speak is actually not easily understood even by different groups of native English speakers. I was in France recently and was exposed to some and was quite smug that it only took me 15 minutes to puzzle out the meaning of French textspeak that a French teenager would have read in <10 seconds