Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar

The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.

I see what you did there. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Imaging me fresh from USSR asking someone how do I get to ... and getting blank stare

This is a monstrous crime against language.

If the game is wearing a $20k watch or understanding the covert signs of status that you might find in a particular community, that's something different.

Yet I'm on Twitter reading "Prison for attempted murderer enablers like this clown" by the world's richest man. My guess is that it has just become a way of status signalling more than anything else.

The founders said it was very 'senior' of him and laughed about it. But it's also kind of indicative of seniority because senior people aren't wasting time looking up the correct spelling of a company name - they get the email out with the salient details with the right amount of time invested into it. You want to be dialed in but also if you're doing lots of stuff at scale it doesn't really matter what the name of the startup is. Ideally you did the right diligence before the decision to invest was made but then at that point only a few key things matter and are worth keeping in hot memory any more - things like where the founders went to college (in case it helps with a future connection), what the market is (in case it helps with a future connection), what they need help with (in case it can be brought up with a connection), etc...

but spelling and grammar still isn't a good indicator for expertise, intelligence or anything like that even in an academic context

Mainly:

1. Dyslexia doesn't make you dump, just likely to misspell and a less likely to notice your misspelling.

2. When speaking about neurodivergence people mainly think about Autism or ADHD but sometimes just mean that your brain thinks in very different patters, this can make grammar hard. Especially if it's not your native language.

3. Sometimes people had shitty situations earlier in their live, leading to incorrectly learning parts of languages. This is hard to fix. But isn't really representative in any way for their expertise in any topic which isn't the given languages grammar.

4. English grammar and pronunciation to spelling mapping aren't exactly well designed. People not wanting to bother with it is not really related to intelligence, or excellence in other topics.

5. Some kinds of expertise are unrelated to general intelligence, expertise, education. So even if spelling and grammar where related to intelligence, it wouldn't be meaningful to judge expertise.

If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?

Or at the very least, the things we tell ourselves are meritorious are not what actually what causes people to rise to the top of our society.

By the way I'm also astonished by their lack of taste. The Epstein properties give off a sinister vibe as one would expect, but watching -- for instance -- Architectural Digest videos you get the impression that either the property has been professionally staged with pottery barn/cb2 esthetic or it was decorated with painting-of-dogs-playing-poker levels of sophistication.

Not surprising I guess but you'd think someone with essentially unlimited budget who has complete dominion over their own time wouldn't end up living in an enormous, expensive, alienating ugg boot.

And corruption of power is the cause, I suspect. It has poisoned human minds in all places and times; none of us are immune (which is why we design governments that limit individual power). An early lesson in being in charge was that, having nobody to whom I reported, who would see my work and compel me to a high standard, I let things slip.

Reportees rarely help you: Often they don't know what you do; when they do see it, they assume it's acceptable - you know what you want, and you set the standard of quality and establish the norms. Generally they have obvious disincentives against disapproving of you, and not just as some political tactic but for personal comfort: days are much more pleasant if your boss is friendly. They will give positive or at least non-negative responses to most substandard boss work.

I had to learn to think of it in two ways: First, would I accept this work from someone reporting to me? Second, I internalized the medium- and long-term consequences of substandard leadership and management: once your organization has caught that disease, once that's your reputation, it's very hard to change.

Reminds me how I double and triple check the emails I sent out to the higher ups in the company to make sure spelling and language tone was good, while in his emails Epstein was like "wazzup retards, kiddie fiddling party at my place" and getting replies from 3 world leaders and 5 CEOs. Then him and Israel's' former PM were both struggling to spell PALANTIR over the phone. It's a big club and you're not in it.

people love talking to them

IRC was a literate culture, owing to its roots in the physical medium of the typewriter. It imposed technical barriers to entry selecting for a minimum of intelligence.

After kneecapping the literate media by destroying this input mechanism with touch screens, the audiovisual media flooded in to fill the vacuum - and brought with it the illiterate masses who now all see themselves as amateur videographers, unencumbered from the previous burdens of needing to "read the fucking manual."

I use a bluetooth keyboard for typing on my phone unless I'm out in the world. The number of people who want to have long-form conversations through a phone interface is shocking to me since it's such an awful experience and there are so, so many available alternatives.

Not sure I agree. I remember e-mails being capitalized and punctuated.

It's not so much typos and laziness as much as incomplete thoughts and distraction. Communication as a whole has devolved from an e-mail with a complete thought and some details to a text or chat message without capitalization, punctuation or context.

The lack of capitalization and punctuation are just a tell to me that the sender didn't put thought into it.

I can't tell you how many times I get a chat message asking a question. I in return ask questions about context, and explain why I'm asking. Then the original sender gets annoyed and provides context. Then I ask more questions. Then the original sender gets quiet. Then I get an invite to a meeting to discuss with a wider audience.

I make an effort to use correct spelling and grammar in everything I write that's longer than "ok i'll check when at office", but sometimes it slips past. People still seem to understand what I'm telling them, though, and that's the ultimate goal.

Ima call bullshit on this. Read the published letters of some historical figures.

There is a time pressure to communicate this way, but I think it's generally a management mistake:

Managment includes leadership (usually). Your messages are most of what most people in the organization see of you. You set the high bar; nobody will prioritize quality and attention to detail more than you. And that standard is global IME - you can't very effectively set the example that messages can be sloppy but nothing else.

For messages to my social inner circle, for example, I am much less careful - misspellings, abbreviations, etc. For messages to people I manage or lead, I make sure it's perfect every time.

Lmao. If you think these people are busy, I have news for you.

Capitalization makes it easy for the reader to know where a concept ends and a new one begins. Without capitalization, your comment reads like a run-on sentence - a period in my display is 2px tall while a comma is 3.5px tall, the lack of capitalization makes my brain read them all as commas, and therefore your text is harder for me to parse. So I'd say yes, removing capitals did change the landing of your ideas for the worse.

Ignorance of why something exists is not a good enough reason to destroy it.

IT IS THE WAY OF OUR FOUNCERS