Comment by ruggeri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruggeri | Hacker News Reader

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I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute.

I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be.

Unreasonable people can write grammatically, and reasonable people can write ungrammatically. I think it is better to judge an argument by its reasonableness.

I think many people would consider your response impolite and unkind to the original poster. Surely you do not want to shame someone for their lack of mastery with the English language? Surely you would rather judge an argument on its merits?

May I suggest a last question: could you see yourself reading this comment to the original poster face-to-face? Does it not seem rude and condescending to imagine yourself doing that?

> It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language

This is more of a fun side note: It's more likely that they're a native speaker. People who learn English as a second language generally don't make the their/there mix up.

May also just be autocorrect? Like I have to actively battle my mobile keyboard to type "its" and not have it turn into "it's".

I use SwiftKey for this exact reason.

Other keyboards are seriously annoying by either not having prediction, putting them behind late T9s or they have predictions which seems to be made by someone who almost actively try to make me look stupid.

Half-serious take: My bet is on a deliberate attempt to throw off any attempts to match their writing style to their OG account via AI.

That is a fun side note :) Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read more about it. I assume it's because when you're actually taught this specifically, you remember it, as opposed to native speakers who "learn" the spelling via osmosis or something.

Native speakers learn the language at a time when they can't read or write, so they have to rely on their listening. Non-native speakers on the other hand usually first see the language written down, and then hear / pronounce it, and connect the writing with what they hear.

If I had a penny for every time a native speaker wrote "would of" instead of "would have" in forums, I'd be a billionaire. "Their" / "They're" / "There" is also common.

But the funny thing is, I noticed I would make similar errors after being immersed in a native environment after a few years time. Somehow I just say to myself what I wanted to write, and the slip-up happens. So native speakers are more prone to this, but it's not only there privilege!

> So native speakers are more prone to this, but it's not only there privilege!

LOL, you won't fool me.

I observed it on myself, although after some time I started doing it too.

My belief was that it's because English is not spelled the same way it sounds, so people who learn it are forced to memorize pronunciation and writing separately.

I observed that too on myself (English is my second language), and I even wrote comments like that in the past, but after 20 years I noticed that I started making those errors myself, which sucks.

I'm guessing when you read people making this mistake over and over (I even saw it done in news articles) I guess your brain starts equating them together :(

I'm thankful for those people correcting it, although I think it is a losing battle.

I'd like to see the stats on that.

English is the only language I know and my international friends take great pleasure in correcting my grammatical errors. I've learned a great deal about my mother tongue from them!

Going to reply on this comment since it's a thorough response to mine.

Look; I'm seeing a lot of reasoning across comments from non-native language, keyboard input, autocorrect, and so forth.

None of this changes the fact that the usage is just flat out wrong. Have we become so soft in society that nothing can be pointed out because of speculative reasons?

If it's a 2nd language, learn the language. If it's the keyboard, get a better keyboard. If it's autocorrect, double check what you write. Stop making excuses for everything.

All these cries for why we should accept there/ their/ they're uncontested is no doubt a reflection of the frustration Carmack must have experienced, if HN is any indicator of the FAANG workforce. John is known to be very direct and unapologetic himself, and here y'all are losing your mind on a slight criticism. It's no wonder.

I would suggest that it's not necessary to speculate too much about why they made a grammatical error. There are many possible reasons. For instance, I suggested that they may simply be less pedantic/careful about grammar. They may simply care about the form of their expression less than you or I do.

I think judging a hypothesis by its form/expression is not a great way to get at the truth. If a heuristic has to be used, then probably tone, coherence, and even-handedness are better than grammatical correctness. Those are at least closer to the substance of the argument.

I suggest that evaluating arguments on the basis of form/expression will not help you get at the truth.

It is your choice whether to be aesthetically dissatisfied by grammatically incorrect English. Many would consider that pedantic, though I might have a modicum of sympathy for you. However, I think the error you've made is to promote aesthetic displeasure into distrust for the OP's reasonableness.

I do not know about others, but I do not think I am losing my mind about anything. I suspect that most direct and unapologetic people have faith in the substance of their arguments, and would be frustrated to be judged using low-signal heuristics like grammatical correctness.

Thank you for saying everything I wanted to say.

I only add that the post above invokes some wildly spurious logic in counting the 5 instances of the same mistake as if they were 5 different mistakes. Such a basic error really makes me question his general reasoning ability.

There is also a good possibility that this person is hampered by dyslexia, a very common disability where such oversights are easily made.

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