On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
Informal or conversational tone has always been the gold-standard for most communications. People just piss on it because they like to feel smart.
But, most writing has purpose. And usually fulfilling that purpose requires readers to comprehend what you're writing. Conversational tone is easy to comprehend, and shockingly less ambiguous than you'd think, especially when tailored to the target audience.
Over the years, I've become an odd fan of documents that start with a "purpose of this document" section.
Sure, it seems weirdly bureaucratic at first, but as time goes on, you start seeing documents that don't really know what their focus is anymore, because different authors decided it was the least-bad place to dump their own guide, checklist, or opinions.
L for example, imagine four documents about an API: A how-to guide; fine implementation details; a diagnostic checklist; a primer for executives or salespeople considering it as a product.
I've gotten in the writing habit of BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front:
"Hey boss,
I think we should use this vendor.
[4 paragraphs with charts and formulas explaining why that's the only rational choice]"
The way readers parse this is "the sender thinks we should do this thing, and oh, now that I have that idea implanted in my brain, wow, they sure have a lot of supporting evidence! OK, fine, let's do it."
>Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?
I'd say, not "people in general" but people form other socioeconomic strata. This guy is not talking like us, suspicious. He talks in an elaborate and thought-through manner, not simply, so, he's not candid, double suspicious!
Not necessarily but it carries less weight than pre-LLMS. Obviously it's just a heuristic and not the whole story and telltale AI signs are not purely about good spelling and grammar. But I just appreciate some natural, human texture in my correspondence these days.
> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human
Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style.
There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now.
But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.
Yeah, I'd argue a large portion of what LLMs are being used for can be characterized as "counterfeiting" traditionally-useful signals. Signals that told us there was another human on the other side of the conversation, that they were attentive, invested, smart, empathizing, etc.
Counterfeiting was possible before, but it had a higher bar because you had to hire a ghostwriter.
>research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
Obviously no errors Vs no obvious errors, in a nutshell.
> On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
I often find that to be true. Another important factor is that research skill is correlated with writing skill. Someone who's at the top of their field is likely to be talented in other ways, too, and one such talented is making complex topics easier to understand.
> It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
But... you know that this moment will be so fleeting as one can trivially generate mistakes to look human.
If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.
A friend of mine (non-native English speaker) said she's been talking to a guy (also non-native) on a dating app. She said he was very articulate and showed me some screenshots.
One sentence he sent was "Family is paramount for you.". I told her "I bet you he's using ChatGPT"..
They are FILLED with jargon (that just as easily could be an ordinary English word instead) ... and giant paragraphs made up of ten sentences all combined into one with semi-colons ... and with all sorts of other butchering of the English language.
Scientific research papers follow their own grammar, which is specific to the research community ... and that grammar is atrocious!
Alternative hypothesis—-efficiency. Executives are very, very busy. As long as you can figure out what they mean, polish doesn’t add much. (Unless it does because it’s an earnings call, board meeting, etc.)
I’m quite convinced in most cases they are not spending time or energy consciously choosing to signal anything about status. They’re just not willing to pay the opportunity cost of keeping their attention on an internal communication any longer than the minimum required. They’re certainly capable of polished communication, but deploy that skill selectively when the return on investment is high.
It’s a classic rookie pitfall to over-index on form instead of content (guilty myself many times). It’s more instructive to pay attention to which questions and ideas powerful people focus on than the forms they use to deliver them (which are not as important, turns out).
The examples in the article are conspicuously unpolished. Autocorrect catches all of this stuff nowadays. Somebody had to make an effort to write that badly.
Signaling happens whether you choose to do it on purpose or bo not. The people who are best at it don't do intentionally.
The busy CEO is signaling status with this form of writing, they're so important and so many people demand their time that they have to skip on polish. That's the definition of status.
> I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
I live in a wealthy town. It’s less sinister than explicit counter signaling. More that I’ll wear comfortable clothes until they wear out because I have better things to do with my time than shop, and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling. An honest signal doesn't always take effort. In fact it's the tryhard imitators that have to expend effort emulating this. The real deal is effortless and comes naturally.
The silverback gorilla can come across as scary and formidable even when its just lazing around not trying to look intimidating. It's just big, without spending thought cycles on having to appear big, but the others still recognize it.
> Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling
If it’s used to signal, yes. The absence of a signal can be a signal. Or it can blend into the background. My point is wealthy folks wearing ordinary, loved clothes can be either, and in many cases it’s honestly just not giving a fuck and blending in with everyone else by happenstance.
That's called projecting. If someone doesn't send a signal, but you believe you received it, that's on you, not them. You may _think_ the color of their skin or hair or the way they talk or dress or whatever "means/says something" (and, in some cases, it might) but it might just as well say something about you, not them.
You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences. Also there is no bright line between intentional and unintentional signaling. The brain is capable of hiding plenty of stuff from its own other parts. See the book "The elephant in the brain".
> You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences
This is an incorrect definition of a signal.
I agree that intention is irrelevant. But a powerful person blending in with their dress isn’t actually sending a signal. There is nothing to perceive because they look like everyone else.
The signal is only in if they’re recognized. Your definition of signal is congruous with any trait someone thinks a powerful person has whether it’s real or imagined.
If you dress down in a context where formal attire is expected, it's a signal. What it signals depends on what happens. If you're shunned and avoided, then you're just a loser or a hobo. If you're clearly valued, listened to with interest etc, despite that mismatch, it is a countersignal. You could only afford to do this by having high status and importance in the community that outweighs such expectations. It doesn't matter if you simply don't care and never think about how you dress and this just comes naturally. The signal is still picked. The person to whom general expectations and rules don't quite apply the same way as to the average person is the one of higher status.
In other words, it's not enough to flaunt the rules, you also have to get away with it for it to count.
Reminds me of how Nassim Taleb (famous for Black Swan among other books) says that he wants his surgeon to look like a butcher. The thinking goes that if despite all that roughness and sticking out, he’s a surgeon, he must be a pretty damned good surgeon.
> You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences.
This isn't about what it's called, it's about who's doing it. If people make inferences, that's something being done by the people making the inference, not by the people they are making the inferences about.
This is a pretty fundamental point, and grasping it is essential to having healthy interactions with others.
There is the "I don't (have to) give a fuck" counter-signaling. But also what about people that really don't care too much, out of ignorance even, or just fatigue.
Sure there is intentionality in there, but do we really call that _counter-signaling_?
They can try it and sometimes it works, but generally it's hard to imitate well. You have to not give a fuck about the right things. The imitators who just don't give a fuck about anything will stumble on something genuinely important.
Like the cool guy at school who doesn't give a fuck about what the teachers say will have to give a fuck about his friends and the community around him, to the skills that he gets his coolness from to preserve his status.
A boss who sends informal messages should still give a fuck about the overall state of the team, on being timely to respond to actually important matters even if just giving a quick ok sent from my iPhone.
The countersignaling is more about "I care about/provide more important things that are more valuable or impactful for you than getting caught up in bullshit insignificant superficial matters"
Well I agree and support that! Everyone cares about something. That's good and healthy.
There is a ton of value in intentionality. I realize I'm defending against this idea that if you don't do a given thing it must mean you really, really care about signaling that you'd never be caught doing that thing. You want to be caught signaling that you aren't doing it!
Of course that's true for some, many even. It's also true that someone just thought and lived and experienced and through intentionality, they come to opt-out of more and more of the fuss, in either direction.
Yes, overthinking this is also possible. I've had bosses who type correctly capitalized, with punctuation and paragraphs, and it's simply their style, not much else to read into it. But sometimes it can indicate a certain pedantic busybody personality who misses the forest for the trees and can be a pain in the ass to interact with.
I would guess that the non-effort signals instead involve risk tolerance.
It's a statement that they could easily withstand the consequences of an adverse judgement in ways regular people can't.
If I get turned away from Le Foie Heureux for failing to meet the restaurant dress-code, there's not much I can do. If the sommelier thinks that a billionaire looks like a vagrant, well, the billionaire will make a phone call...
"Signaling" is just the information that your visible choices send to those around you, including strangers. That's why it's called "signaling" -- your choices are broadcasting an information signal about you to others.
To not signal, you must make choices that carry little or no information in the context in which they exist. If you make choices in a context in which they are abnormal (e.g., dressing very casually in a context that others can't access in similar clothing), they inherently broadcast unique information about you. In some cases, that information can create a complex side effect in how people perceive you, even if you don't intend it (e.g., "this person put in the absolute bare minimum effort, because they knew we'd have to be nice to them no matter what, which feels disrespectful to me; their lack of optional effort for others signals that they only care about themselves, not us").
> "Signaling" is just the information that your visible choices send to those around you, including strangers. That's why it's called "signaling" -- your choices are broadcasting an information signal about you to others.
Where the theory falls flat re- signaling to strangers is that there are people that do dress very differently, use different cars, sometimes shave, sometimes not, on different days of the week.
And it's also very well known that many people simply do not pay attention to others. They mind their own business and that's it.
When I'm driving a random car and I'm dressed casually and not shaven, what signal am I sending to the strangers I'll see once during the day and who are anyway only minding their own business?
And the next day when I put on fancy shoes, an expensive watch, and I take out one of my Porsche and then go out and cross path with strangers, what signal am I sending? I'll only ever see them during that other day. Strangers who, also, only mind their own business.
The funny thing is: just like I don't give a flying fuck about other people, other people don't give a flying fuck about me.
But anyway how can I be signaling one thing to strangers on monday and another thing tuesday to other strangers?
Where it gets better: some days my wife prepares the clothes she wants me to wear (maybe because people shall come to the house later on or whatever), some days she doesn't and I just change underwear after my shower and put the same jeans I had the day before. Then I go to the garage: we both have several car keys. Maybe she decided to take my Porsche, maybe not.
So basically: I don't always pick the clothes I wear and my wife loves to sometimes take my Porsche.
What am I "signaling" to strangers? Not only I'm not totally in control of my outfit and my car but also simply don't care.
"Grug hungry. Grug grabs money or credit card. Grub puts whatever clothes on. Grug goes to whatever car is in the garage. Grub drives to groceries store to buy atoms to stay alive".
That's literally me.
Now maybe people in this thread meant to say: "signaling in the workplace towards people you see every day at work" but that's way different than "signaling to strangers".
To put it simply: I think a lot of people in this thread are way overestimating the level of caring other people exhibit.
I guarantee you that on the caring continuum most people by very far are on the "I couldn't care less" extreme.
There is such a thing as people who simply don't give a fuck and nobody is signaling anything to people who aren't even paying attention to you.
Grug goes to the groceries store to buy atoms to survive, not to look at other people's clothes/watch/car.
Signaling to people who aren't strangers: OK, that one I can buy. But to strangers I call horse load of shit because many people can "signal" two entire different things on two different days of the week. The only signal people see is the same as what people see reading tea leaves.
Agree, the parent comment leaves no room for nuance so people end up damned if they do and damned if they don't.
I do think thinking through the extremes and motivations and intentions of behavior is worth it. But confident conclusions less so.
When it comes to writing and fashion, definitely people over-correct to project a status, in both directions. But also there's just the aged realization that people will think what they will think, and you kinda just opt-out of the game.
You can't really opt out, just choose better suited minigames.
Generally when you don't (have to) care, you either have to back that up with some other accumulated reputation/value, or sacrifice some things. Like you can opt out of the job market game and being bossed around either by founding your own company, going self employed with clients (the hard part), or just sacrifice and downsize your life standard, become homeless or similar. But someone who needs a steady income in lieu of a big inheritance can't just opt out of caring.
This isnt perfect. Our household income is probably 500k/yr and growing in a city with an average income of ~100k+.
If I wear nice stuff to the park with the kids, I'm noticed. If I wear raggy gym clothes, I'm ignored.
My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition. New shoes or expensive outerwear that 'your wife bought'.
> My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition
I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.
If I go to Vegas I may grab a silk shirt because, yes, my service experience absolutely varies based on that, and I don’t want to have to wait until they see what I order or get to the check-in counter to start being paid attention to. (Which is annoying. And I prefer my t-shirts with cat holes in them. But I don’t like waiting in lines more than I dislike having to do my hair.)
(I do maybe counter signal in Palo Alto, where I refuse to wear a blazer or a Palo-Alto-grey hoodie. But that’s less of a power move than me inviting attention as a now outsider.)
> I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.
it might not be on purpose, but you are signalling that you have status such that you dont need to play by whatever rules other people do to get said table.
to signal like a regular person, you would be doing all the same stuff other people do to get the table
> it might not be on purpose, but you are signalling that you have status
Not really. I’m relying on another signal, the recognizance of my person in a small town. If a tourist walked in wearing what I’m wearing they wouldn’t get that treatment. The signal is my face. Not the dress. (I could dress up for the evening and the same thing would happen.)
> to signal like a regular person, you would be doing all the same stuff other people do to get the table
Sure. That’s the point. I’m not signaling “like a regular person.” I’m just not sending a signal with dress. I’m dressing ordinarily.
If I were actually trying to camouflage I’d do other things. And that would constitute false signaling. (And sure, with my friends, I am signaling something. But it’s still not a counter signal unless we expand the terms signal and counter signal to mean literally anything, information and noise alike.)
I used to dress down at work because that's how everyone else dressed and I just wanted to fit in. But at some point I stopped doing that because I was caring way too much about what other people were thinking.
I dress nice because I like it. It makes me feel good about myself, but has nothing to do with compensating.
And the best way to take advantage may be by unmasking the people that are incompetent enough to not assess others competence by looking at their work, and instead just look at their clothes.
Yes, I hear that a lot. Might as well push on a rope, though.
In my early career years, a fellow employee came to work in track shorts and flip flops. He was a very, very good programmer. But he never got raises, and never got promoted, and complained to me about it. I suggested it was the way he dressed. He said the same things you wrote.
A couple decades later, I ran into him again at a conference. He ran his own quite successful company. He also was dressed sharply.
Personally, I stopped dressing nicely at work after way too many people assumed I'd throw ethics at the trash and do what they say for the hint of a small promotion. Weirdly, that never stopped the people that actually wanted to do things from talking with me.
But if you are talking to (potential) customers, the calculation is completely different.
You can't control others, you can only control your response to them. How people perceive you is a comprehensive and isn't always based in logic. You can use this to your advantage and take control of your own narrative or not. But you'll be worse off for it if you don't.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised about what kinds of things people look favorably on.
Everybody is signalling, especially the people who think they aren't. We could sit here all day and game out all the possible interpretations that could be made from anyone's appearance, with respect to who they actually are, and it won't change much.
My take on it all: Programmers and other hot shot types often eschew formalities and conventions for dress and such, as a way of asserting status. "I'm professional and important enough to assert that my preferences supersede the ordinary" is what they want to signal. Of course, some are just childish enough to insist that dress codes don't matter in the slightest, and everyone must put up with their goofy graphic t-shirts. Others are willing to tolerate that stuff because most programmers are not customer-facing. But they still look like adult children when they insist on that crap.
The author does not actually know why people write with poor spelling/grammar nor truly how others would interpret them writing with with poor spelling/grammar.
They have a guess, but there are any number of alternate reasons why someone might write poorly. They could be technologically illiterate, fat fingered, easily frustrated, mirroring their children, need glasses, careless or any other number of reasons. The only way to find out is to ask.
Engaging in mind reading is fraught with danger. You're more likely to project your own own mood, stereotypes, behavior or beliefs on to others than actually guess what someone's thinking.
I think it's less mind-reading than looking for a sociological explanation.
That said, I think a big underlying cause is that Business Idiots [1] are, in fact, idiots. Even so, it's worth looking for a sociological explanation of why Being An Idiot doesn't hurt Business Idiots like it would hurt the rest of us.
- No signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else because that's been my style since forever and I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.
People don't get to decide if they're signalling or not.
They only get to decide if they'll consciously signal or subconsciously signal. They (or their clothes as per the example) sends signals in either case.
Yeah similarly we can make a few distinctions here:
1) Intended signal, true
2) Unintended signal, but true
3) Unintended signal, but false
(Sure, 1' intended but false; though not really important here)
When (1) obtains we can describe this situation as one where sender and received coordinate on a message.
When (2) obtains we can say the sender acted in a way that indicative of some fact or other and the received is recognizes this; (2) can obtain when one obtains as a separate signal or when the sender hasn't intended to send a signal.
(3) obtains when the receiver attributes to the sender some expressive behavior or information that is inaccurate, say, because an interpretive schema has characterized the sender and the coding system incorrectly producing an interpretation that is false.
Also remember that each recipient of the signal will have their own reaction to it. What signals professional competence to one person can signal lickspittle corporate toadying to another.
> They (or their clothes as per the example) sends signals in either case.
Unless you're Sherlock Holmes, or know the person and their wardrobe intimately, you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
Reddit and quora are littered with stories about car salesmen misreading what they thought were signals, and missing out on big sales. The whole Julia Roberts trope resonates exactly because it happens in real life.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes, as George Carlin pointed out, it's a big fat brown dick.
>Unless you're Sherlock Holmes, or know the person and their wardrobe intimately, you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
You'd be surprised. People discern things of value from a one-time viewing of another person constantly. It's evolutionary wiring. From a glance, people can tell whether they others are rich or poor or middle class, their power status within a situation (e.g. a social gathering), their sexual orientation (studies show the gaydar exists), whether they're a threat or crazy or rapey or neurodiverse or meek and many other things, whether they're lazy or dilligent, and lots of other things.
>Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes, as George Carlin pointed out, it's a big fat brown dick.
What black and white thinkers miss is this doesn't have to be accurate all the time to exist and be usable. Just a lot more often than random chance.
And it has nothing to do with the comical Holmes "he had a scratch mark on his phone, so he must be alcoholic" level inferences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKQOk5UlQSc
> You'd be surprised. People discern things of value from a one-time viewing of another person constantly.
True. I overstated my case a bit. Of course, no matter what they are wearing, it is something that exists in their wardrobe, but that may or may not matter.
> studies show the gaydar exists
This, I know from experience. I had a gay roommate once, and he taught he how to spot them, way back when they were still trying to be a bit unobvious. But, even though gay people usually dress better and in certain ways, that's not the usual tell. It's really not about the clothes.
> doesn't have to be accurate all the time to exist and be usable
This is paradigmatic "system 1" thinking. We all use it, but sometimes the failures are catastrophic.
> you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
You're conflating actual value with perceived value. It's well established that perceptions matter and people make decisions based on this all the time.
> The whole Julia Roberts trope resonates exactly because it happens in real life.
No, it resonates because it's a feel good story. I'm sure it happens, but most of the time signaling is perfectly accurate. If you don't believe me, exchange clothes with a homeless person and try to go shopping on Rodeo Drive.
I remember wandering into Cartier's in NYC dressed in my shaggy jeans and t-shirt. They didn't throw me out, but a security guard followed me around, definitely edging into my personal space to make me uncomfortable. I laughed, said I get it, looked a bit more, and left.
I remember the days when you were expected to wear a suit on a jet, even the kids. These days, even the first class travelers wear track shorts. I kinda wish the airlines would have a dress code.
There's been pressure on the D Language Foundation to have a CoC. I've consistently refused one. The only thing I demand is "professional conduct". Sometimes people ask me what professional conduct is. I reply with:
1. ask your mother
2. failing that, I recommend Emily Post's book on Business Etiquette.
And an amazing thing happened. Everyone in the D forums behaves professionally. Every once in a while someone new will test this, their posts get deleted, and then they leave or behave professionally.
> I kinda wish the airlines would have a dress code
What? Why? Are you really that bothered by other people wearing stuff that you wouldn't personally want to wear? I can't even imagine going through life with strong feelings about how other people should dress; it legitimately sounds exhausting.
Would you go to a wedding dressed like a slob? Would you go to an elegant restaurant in sweats? If you go to pick up your date, and she opens the door wearing track shorts and a worn t-shirt, how would you feel?
When I'd pick up my date, and she had obviously spent a lot of time on her appearance, it'd make me feel like a million bucks.
When I got married, my spouse and I told people to wear whatever they wanted because we didn't really care. I also never cared at all about what we were wearing on our dates because what I enjoy about spending time with people is not seeing them present themselves in a way that I tell them to. I would go to a restaurant in sweats if I were allowed to.
I fundamentally do not understand what reason everyone else should have to dress to please you compared to themselves. Seeing everyone else as props to fit your preferred aesthetic rather than people who's desires about their own appearances are more important than what you want them to look like just seems selfish to me.
It's a free country and you can dress as you please.
But people will judge you by how you dress, and you will miss opportunities as a result, and you'll never know that this is happening.
As I mentioned earlier, people do react to me differently depending on how I dress. And I've known many people who align with your views on this, and they've all wondered why opportunity passed them by (or they realized they needed to change).
Can I ask: suppose you were charged with a crime. Your lawyer showed up in track shorts. Would you get another lawyer? I sure would.
I still don't get how you start with "people will judge you by how you dress" and arrive at "airlines should refuse customers who don't dress the way I expect someone would at a trial, wedding, or real estate sale".
A wedding is a social event with friends and family. I am going there to see the people. A flight is a functional form of transport which is shared out of necessity. I am going there to pay as little mind to the other people as possible
> you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
The goal is not to discern anything about a particular person from a one-time viewing of them, the goal is to discern something about a person a sufficiently high percentage of the time. Hence the evolutionary utility of using prior probabilities.
As history, and probably many people’s personal experiences, have shown, this trait also has drawbacks.
I find this kind of funny, since you say your not signalling anything, and then in the second half of the sentence describe for us a very signal you claim you aren't sending:
> I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.
Whether you like it or not, whether you meant to or not, you are communicating something here. You don't get to opt out.
"No signaling" would be: "I dress like I always do since forever." Any reference to opinions of others would mean that the person cares for them, even in the form of "I don't care", and thus the dress is also a signal to them.
At least for me, the signal I'm sending is "I care more about how comfortable I am in my clothes than I do about what other people are inferring about them". The point isn't that people aren't receiving some sort of signal about me based on that, it's that the signal that they might receive is entirely irrelevant to my motivations. That itself might be a signal, but it's incidental to the actual choice I'm making, which is entirely personal.
Using this logic, all of the homeless people are counter signaling then. And there are plenty of executives who wear suits. Also signaling has one l, so thus you are signaling your importance.
Or maybe you just can't assume you know what's going on inside someone else's head.
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways
- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else
- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
In old-money settings all three of these things can be true simultaneously, dressing more formally than people outside, just like everyone else inside (in fact expected, to indicate familiarity with the standards of class, and often worn, ratty, old, and comfortable.
I told this story about the old man in his 70s walking through a plant, giving his multi-decades expertise in how to solve our foam problems.
Everyone else wore a polo... This guy genuinely didn't care. He was making $500/hr and didn't really want to be there. He was begged. He did some weird stuff with sticky notes on $100k molds... (and he didn't solve our problem).
I don’t think it’s counter-signaling- I think it’s just millenialism, even if it’s done by people in other generations just mimicking them. As a gen-X, I’d never send a bunch of crying emojis, and agree it’s unprofessional, but my millenial co-workers would do it.
It's not counter signalling. It's just the complete death of high culture. Hoodies aren't some statement about how you're too cool to care, it's just that no one cares to look good.
“Ratty old” and “formal” are not
the only options. I dress mostly in techwear brands like Veilance, Outlier, and ACRNM, which is not ratty and old but is also very much not formal or uncomfortable.
This is an accurate analysis, as in “I’m the boss here and while you have to abide by whatever social norms or internal policies, I don’t because I’m better than all of you”.
There was an episode of Orphan Black where they were going to impersonate a billionaire. The guy turns up in a suit and gets told, 'A billionaire, not a millionaire, go and put some shorts on'
I’ve seen an fascinating paper (sorry, lost the url) that expanded on this using game theory: it’s common for “economic stratification” to have on the order of ten to fifteen levels, from abject poverty up to hundred-billionaires.
Look at it this way: there are five orders of magnitude between a “mere” ten-millionaire and the likes of Elon or Bezos!
To most people that’s the “same” level of rich, but each factor of ten is dramatically richer!
However, signals like “purposefully disheveled” and “well manicured” are essentially binary, so… they’re alternated. Each strata layer of factor of ten indicates this by flipping whatever the layer is doing below them. They won’t be confused with “two layers down” because that’s such a gulf that nobody will misunderstand.
In my line of work we have professionals and lay people in contact with each other often, and I have found I get the best reaction (from all audiences) when I square myself away. Untidy dress isn't immediately disqualifying, but if it's enough to be noticeable it's enough to deserve an explanation.
I'm just glad ties are gone. I used to have it in my consulting contract that I would wear a tie for a maximum of x hours for the duration of the project, so choose them well. It used to be a point of negotiation, now nobody cares anymore.
What is sad is that these people from the start think of good grammar as an effort to "look professional" (which they can then discard), and not as an effort to be clear, an effort which fits into the basic respect one gives other people.
People are always impressed by how formal and informal tone and relative status is encoded in East Asian languages and how English doesn't have this and is supposedly egalitarian. Here's an example to show how it does exist also in English! Social relations are going to be expressed somehow. It's just how human culture works. The lower status person typically uses longer, more elaborate phrasing, while the higher status person blurts shorter ones. I wouldn't be surprised if equivalents exist in animals too.
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
The hardcore anti-prescriptivism among linguists does drive me a bit nuts as well.
Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas. They're not just arbitrary rivers of sound changes that people cannot control. English is still full of Inkwell terms, for example. And in my own lifetime I have seen a lot of linguistic changes basically proscribed that everyone falls into line with (a less controversial/political one: no one in NZ called association football "football" at the turn of the century. We all called it "soccer". Then the sporting bodies and media changed what they called it and everyone around me changed it too. "football" used to unambiguously mean "rugby football").
> Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas.
You are right, but that comes also from a descriptivist perspective. And a linguist would study what sort of prescriptions stick and what sort don't.
When linguists say they aren't prescriptivists, they don't say prescriptivism doesn't work, they just say their job is not about deciding whether to say football or soccer.
Right I am probably being sloppy with my terminology. It's more notions that there is no such thing as "good grammar" is just tiresome. We can argue the rules are somewhat arbitrary, but that does not change how people might perceive you.
It’s because the higher you are in the chain of corporate command, the less time you have to dedicate to each task. You end up with shorter answers to every note because you wouldn’t have time to reply to all notes and do the strategic things you need to do, otherwise.
As an individual contributor on a team, you may have to interface at most with 30 people on a weekly basis. As a second line leader you may have 150 people under your purview, and another 50 outsiders you have to talk to. You can’t scale the amount of time you have, so you scale the amount of time you spend on replies.
Using the example from the article: "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks"
I'm not buying your argument. The amount of additional time that it would have taken to write that same message with proper grammar and spelling is minuscule.
Shorter answers don't necessitate terrible grammar. Maybe it's because my mom was a teacher and I had good grammar drilled into me, but I feel like it shows respect for the people you're communicating with.
What I've seen is that leaders often communicate brusquely downward, but formally upward - and the higher the rank, the greater the magnitude (in each direction).
I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
Bad grammar is disrespect.
Underlings have to swallow that disrespect. It is just a power game.
The next level is simply to insult everyone, and everyone will still remain submissive.
And if you insult people, and get rewarded by submission, one reaction is to amp up the insults.
After all, you don't know the limits of your power until someone quits. So abuse people, exhibit outlandish public behavior, say racist or otherwise objectionable things...every person who remains on your payroll is a sign of how powerful you are.
This is not a common tactic, but it's a highly visible tactic, and it's not hard to find some notable examples out there right now.
This was a, tongue in cheek, distinction between the language used by the posh and by the aspiring-posh. It's seems analogous to the OP's sense of boss vs non-boss language and diction, which I believe exists.
Informality and bad grammar but otherwise sound decision making is fine, I think everyone's arguments for it here make sense.
But let's not pretend that, at least in the US, that's what it's limited to. Our current and immediate past president are both elderly men with potentially compromised mental states who regularly say crazy nonsense stuff.
I think this isn't quite what "privilege" means, at least these days. People talk about "white privilege" for example, meaning that people who are white can do XYZ or avoid ABC, unlike other people.
In the example the author writes about, the privilege is not "being a bag grammar person", it's being a high-ranking person. The bad grammar is the thing that those people are able to get away with.
IMO, he's confusing the disease with the symptom, so to speak.
Separately, I would say that high-ranking people can definitely get away with short emails, and to some extent brusque emails. Bad grammar is perhaps just the next domino to topple.
That fits witj my experiences. And i want to add an otjer layer. In ai times its somtimes even nice to see some typos. You Casn be pretty sure it was not written by ai.
I just assumed that was from people who aren't technologically literate enough to remove the default signature. It never occurred to me it might be intentional.
At least for now, there remain lots of signals that are clear to those with sufficient exposure; from the piece linked in the Oxide LLM doc that was recently discussed here:
"... to anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore. Bluntly, your intellectual fly is open: lots of people notice — but no one is pointing it out."
> but grammar privilege? That's certainly a first.
Here is what I don't understand, and what is not addressed in the post.
After you get a response from your boss that reads, "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks", doesn't this free you up to relax your style to your comfort level? If you see that your addressee doesn't seem to care for meticulous style, is there much point in stressing over it (and thus, in continuing with the privilege narrative)?
Unfortunately there is a double standard at play. When people see a sloppy email from a powerful person, they think “they must be so busy that they don’t have time to check grammar”. But when it comes from a low-level employee they think “oh they must be careless or uneducated”.
except it's sort of true and a reasonable assumption to make? Just as when a master painter makes something that looks "sloppy" to the layman, one immediately assumes there is some deep artistry behind it as opposed to poor technique, whereas when a child does it, one does not extend the same charitable attitude.
Sure I think there's some truth the that. You've gotta learn the rules first to know when it's ok break the rules. Somebody with a lot of experience should be able to judge how their message will be received, and what amount of effort is "good enough". Whereas someone with less workspace experience may lack such judgement, and is probably better off erring on the side of "too good" rather than "not good enough".
But it's definitely also very much tied to status, power, and privilege. The same people who have no qualms about firing off a sloppy email to their subordinates often spend a lot more effort on emails to their bosses. But even this discrepancy is justified, I think, given that a manager represents their subordinates to the higher ups. And the potential consequences of a bad impression or misunderstanding are more severe when communicating up the chain of command.
No, I read that they know they have the power so they don't care, and I'm not powerful enough to not. It's like listening to your boss's boss talking about his heli-skiing adventures.
This is so yawn. Do young professionals starting out have to impress their bosses? Yes. Do bosses have to impress them? Usually not. Who cares? Power dynamics exist, it’s easy to play the grammar game, so just do it and stop pretending it’s some form of oppression.
TBH, a junior dev pointed at an urgent issue who replies simply, “on it” vs. one who takes the time to write a short book report on their initial analysis and plans is—all else being equal—not a close call when it comes to promotion time.
I don’t want to be impressed, I want problems to be solved.
if i sent an email to my ceo and they replied with typos and bad grammar, i wouldn't think "wow, they are flexing their privilege to be able to do that".
i would be excited that i'm being treated as a member of the inner circle and they can speak freely and casually with me.
Some people think texts are for quick one-off messages and emails are for longer more thoughtful missives.
But (a) most corporate communication isn't by text, and (b) the CEO is probably from a time when there weren't any texts, so emails themselves were often used casually, in lieu of sticky notes.
In any case, I'm with you. The trope of microaggressions is way overused, and applying it to someone who is usefully communicating with you is rubbish.
I can kinda see your point, especially if the meaning is still obvious and the tone is inviting you to participate, but I think you're misunderstanding what "privilege" means here.
It isn't a superior "flexing their privilege" over their subordinates. The superior doesn't care. They don't even think about it. Because they have power over you, they can just speak gibberish and you have to figure it out. In my opinion, a good boss should have enough respect for me to not waste my time by forcing me to decipher a thought they didn't even read before sending.
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
At one of my previous jobs some of my coworkers and I had an in-joke about how it was possible to tell which of the emails from the CEO were written directly by him or not based on whether it used the spelling "pls" for "please" because of how often he liked to use it. It hadn't occurred to me to view this phenomenon in the way that the article does, but at least in my experience it certainly seems to be accurate.
Yea, one of them is called "actually doing their jobs." In my company they spend far more time mediating problems than they do thinking up clever ways to fire someone without just cause.
At first i was about to disagree, because i thought, "ah hell nah man I'm sending emojis and shit at work all day" and then i realized, i send emojis and shit to my peers all day (well, and to my dumbass boss who i don't respect).
I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
What does it have to do with privilege? This person's need for grammar seems to be self-imposed. I don't see where anyone judged him for bad grammar while a privileged person was given a get-out-of-jail-free card for the grammar police.
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
I don't know their life, and they may be right, but I think they may well just be imagining it. I also went from excessive formality to short conversational tone as I became more experienced. But it wasn't due to any promotions, but because I realized nobody had ever cared
I mean this is a standard cliché even in fictional works: the young new worker who keeps falling over themselves to perform what they think is necessary formality, only to be shown that they can just chill out and act like a human
It's not intelligence, respect, signaling or status.
It's saving time, the thing we can't bank or stretch or keep. Doing that reflects value priorities that are likely to lead to success and happiness.
We would all be this brief if we weren't constrained otherwise. People who care deeply about their time are this brief even if they shouldn't be. You can even say nothing in ways that influence others in the ways you want (from spiritual teachers and parents to politicians and mafia dons).
(Wealth and power trashing is all too easy these days. Pick a hard target?)
It's both. Saving time is a form of status signaling. Professionalism usually entails spending longer on something than is optimal for effective communication, which is a way of signaling "my time is less valuable than yours". Writing short messages with grammatical errors is a way of signaling "my time is more valuable than your comprehension".
The title of the article cites bad grammar, but the example doesn't have any grammatical problems. It has clear typos and questionable abbreviations but it doesn't have any of the bad grammar signs that grate on me, like comprise vs. compose or over utilization of "utilize" where "use" would do just fine.
You might say that "let's circle back" is annoying business jargon, but it is a very common phrase and aside from the typos correctly applied in this example.
Grammar privilege feels 90% understanding the audience and timing vs something like 10% power dynamics. As with most things where there can be a power imbalance, that does not mean those with power (e.g. managers) should not help set expectations on an even field with each of their employees anyways. Nor does it mean the other 10% of cases don't exist, just "don't ignore that 90% of this is probably one being too worried about sounding professional in every possible scenario".
Before going into the workforce, we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.
That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly) and may actually consider THAT disrespectful. Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
I kinda went through this when I joined my current employer. My boss's emails were (are) at worst unintelligible and best hard to follow, weirdly formatted and generally hard to grok. Usually they are just blocks of text that are one big garden path sentance. But it all magically goes away in client communications
Not sure why this is, but it never really bothered me. It took me a while to learn my boss's interpretation of the English language. I don't think its a case of being in a position where it doesn't matter, other department heads don't do this, I reckon its just down to necessity.
You aren't trying to portray an image of yourself to your team, you don't need to come across as a poet laureate for internal discussions.
If you are trying to craft an image of yourself to your team instead of doing your job well and letting your work build your image you are doing something wrong
Spend your time wisely, put effort into your emails where it matters, format everything nicely, double/triple check your grammar, but among colleagues you don't need to pretend
I don't think the author realizes the time*attention triage that happens when your sole corporate responsibility is to manage others. I've noticed a distinct personal trend in "email succinctness" the more people I need to manage.
That said, using good grammar is never a bad thing and depending on the subject matter and relationships between the respective communicators, short-hand can be both a deliberate obfuscation practice and social coding of the intimacy of the respective relationships.
Many people point to the bad spelling and grammar of these powerful, abusive people and they say wow, that's a flex.
My own reaction is more like these people are stupid. It's not power that makes them write poorly. They're not capable of getting it right.
Look at what Noam Chomsky wrote to Epstein as a contrast. Multiple paragraphs and usually coherent. He makes Epstein look dumb. (Which he was.) I don't support what and to whom Chomsky was writing, but he is better at writing.
Exactly. Remember this is a guy who was "best friends" with Donald Trump. It's just a group of idiots who became rich and powerful through a combination of luck and criminality.
I am more appalled that all those emails have that footer that says - if you’re not intended recipient you should delete immediately. Yet people see it and just copy those emails. No respect for the legal disclaimer. Now they can all be sued for ignoring that legal disclaimer, I suppose they will face justice sooner than all those people in emails.
I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
I agree. Or at least to the extent that the complaint is that bad grammar signifies dispensing with formality, dispensing with formality is often a courtesy.
Too many people have it drilled into them that "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" when in reality if a job is worth doing, it is often worth doing very badly indeed, because it really, really just needs to be done.
It takes a large amount of very unproductive navel-gazing to assume that a message that unequivocally gives you the information you need, yet that doesn't measure up to your own perceptions of how much effort should have gone into the crafting of the email, is an insult directed at you, rather than a focus on the message rather than the medium.
Even if Marshall McLuhan's dictum is correctly applied to this scenario, the message conveyed by the medium could well be "Stop wasting so much time agonizing over phrasing! Just spit it out!" rather than "I'm better than you so I can get away with sloppy shit that I would excoriate you for."
One anecdote about Bill Gates is he was in the Bahamas perhaps to purchase some real estate and he was dressed very down to the point where he looked like a bum. He went into a local real estate office where the lady was dressed in a suit and to the 9's despite it being 40 degrees outside. And she went and told him that real estate was expensive in the Bahamas and he needed a lot of money to buy to which he replied "I might be able to work something out you never know". So ya the super rich don't need to sound good or look good they simply have money.
I think this is just more how the real world varies from academia.
In the working world, few people really care about grammar, but we spend out life growing up in classrooms where teachers critique and be rate us on our grammar.
In the United states, at least in my business, we prize congeniality and sincerity. I think part of the trend the author discovered might be that experienced professionals unconsciously use informal language structures to avoid seeming pretentious.
In the country where I grew up, physicians have immense clout and are notorious for writing unintelligibly. I once pointed this out as a kid and was told by the secretary something like: the doctor is too busy to write legible prescriptions.
It is my feeling that some of the conspicuous behaviors of people in positions of influence and monetary wealth do, in fact, rob the practitioner of the small joys of life won through small sacrifice. I do not envy the man who gains hedonic leisure at the expense of the opportunity to elevate a mundane message into a medium for a modicum of joy, and potential human connection. I love tending my garden, and trimming the weeds in our sidewalk.
I latch on to some of these trends by lowercasing everything, in this case I mostly just don’t correct it if I missed a case
its more like insulation, the people that criticize it seem less connected and less compensated than me while understanding exactly what was conveyed, and the people like me are the same
like “look at this try hard middle manager that doesn’t focus on anything relevant”
one thing I do consciously correct is punctuation, I remove periods after consciously typing them, since an entire generation of people considers it a harsh statement, while the lack of period doesn’t confuse anyone else
I think its probably just having to respond to lots of messages from your phone in the middle of meetings is the job, and you'll quickly decide that getting the point across is the most important thing.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
> Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
Eh? I've been working in tech for over 20 years. For all of that time, most people wore casual clothes.
It's funny she mentions the horrible grammar in the leaked sony emails because that's what I remember most from it too. This one always gets a laugh from me.
I think it's just that grammar is independent of getting results; so bosses who might get results might also have bad grammar. Having good grammar doesn't make you any more able to get things done - in other words, someone with bad grammar might be more able to get things fone than someone with good grammar
I used to be super keen about grammar and typos in texts as well, recently, I have been intentionally keeping some mistakes to prove that a human actually wrote that text and wasn’t AI generated, from my personal observation, I found that people now assume any perfectly written text is an AI generated and ended up not reading it all.
I've noticed this too when dealing with people with power. If you want to be seen as a peer, you have to stop caring. It's weird but it's definitely in the culture. As someone who learned English as a second language, it's especially weird since I worked hard to speak and write good English.
This is not my experience at all. I have never received an informal email like this from a manager; even chat threads at my job are generally correctly spelled, grammatical, and fully professional. Maybe I'm not talking to sufficiently exalted leadership?
I've seen messages like that from junior employees up to CEOs. I think it's mainly because most people simply can't type and think quickly enough (150-200wpm) that their thoughts naturally become words with next to no effort.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
Just a random comment but: what a delightful blog. Even though I disagree on the virtues of cats (they really aren't all monsters. Ours is only occasionally evil).
People who try to flex by using shitty grammar are just exposing themselves as base philistines who can't do it using obscure words and erudite references.
As a poor kid I was deeply insecure about my falling apart shoes, however the wealthier kids would relish taping up their talking shoes like it was a running joke.
Man, everything is privilege these days. You’re privileged to get full score on SAT, Steph Curry has 3 point privilege, Taylor Swift has singer privilege. I have nice warm blanket privilege and am currently experiencing President’s Day privilege. I remember when I had just started in engineering and experiencing new grad privilege and then receiving promotion privilege every year.
I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.
It's not "privileged BY using bad grammar", it's "privilege TO use bad grammar". But yes, we know, the privilege boogeymen kicked your dog and made you take a CRT class.
What else should you call something that is only socially acceptable for a certain group of people to do? I understand word fatigue, but it feels very adequately used here.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
It’s relative to the power level difference between the two parties.
We’re talking about someone (your boss) who doesn’t really need to present an appearance of professionalism to their proverbial lowly underlings.
As slapdash as their response to you might appear - if you were to observe that same person composing a reply to the CEO, I'd wager that all the hallmarks of grammatical precision and professionalism would be back in spades.
there is also the matter that, at one point, people stop differentiating between communication media, the boundaries between email and texting disappear.
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
Maybe someone can clarify this but I was also pretty appalled by the grammar in the Epstein emails until someone pointed out it could be an artifact of OCR or decoding issues.
Not sure why they would have to do OCR on emails. Were they printed out? On PDF for some reason? The decoding thing I kinda get but that you can easily point out because of all the equal signs.
The conspiracy theories about power signalling in the other comments are all well and good, but I have a simpler theory: U.S.-ians don’t know their own language, plain and simple. There’s a reason that American English is referred to as “English, Simplified”. The U.S. is a culture of barbarism, and language is one of the more conspicuous areas where it shows. I’d suggest that those who still know grammar and orthography are less victims of a power imbalance than just better educated. Or maybe their tastes aren’t as badly ruined yet.
This is a bit in the same direction as Epstein’s horrible tech higiene- using computers with outdated software, little or no cryptography, and so on. Another person summarised it quite well: “too rich to care”.
I don't know where this guy has worked, but I've never worked for anyone who communicates like an ignorant, lazy ass.
Also, while I find his criticism valid for having had indeed seen it, this is ironic: "how sloppy and unprofessional emails from executives looked like."
There's no high culture anymore. Rich people don't go to operas or read poetry or literature. They drink too much and they can't spell. They're just plebs with money.
I wonder if this has implications for AI alignment? Maybe prompting with poor spelling and grammar will make the AI eager to please the privileged, high-power user. (/s)
This is almost textbook countersignalling. The same as:
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways
- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else
- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
Informal or conversational tone has always been the gold-standard for most communications. People just piss on it because they like to feel smart.
But, most writing has purpose. And usually fulfilling that purpose requires readers to comprehend what you're writing. Conversational tone is easy to comprehend, and shockingly less ambiguous than you'd think, especially when tailored to the target audience.
> But, most writing has purpose.
Over the years, I've become an odd fan of documents that start with a "purpose of this document" section.
Sure, it seems weirdly bureaucratic at first, but as time goes on, you start seeing documents that don't really know what their focus is anymore, because different authors decided it was the least-bad place to dump their own guide, checklist, or opinions.
L for example, imagine four documents about an API: A how-to guide; fine implementation details; a diagnostic checklist; a primer for executives or salespeople considering it as a product.
I've gotten in the writing habit of BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front:
"Hey boss,
I think we should use this vendor.
[4 paragraphs with charts and formulas explaining why that's the only rational choice]"
The way readers parse this is "the sender thinks we should do this thing, and oh, now that I have that idea implanted in my brain, wow, they sure have a lot of supporting evidence! OK, fine, let's do it."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
>Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?
>Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?
Yes, people, in general, do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_gjWlW0kRs
I'd say, not "people in general" but people form other socioeconomic strata. This guy is not talking like us, suspicious. He talks in an elaborate and thought-through manner, not simply, so, he's not candid, double suspicious!
I'm personally suspicious of anyone using the word candid.
Not necessarily but it carries less weight than pre-LLMS. Obviously it's just a heuristic and not the whole story and telltale AI signs are not purely about good spelling and grammar. But I just appreciate some natural, human texture in my correspondence these days.
a vocabulary of certain width raises a question "does this creature understand the words it is using?". So yeah I mistrust them more
> Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?
I don't trust anyone who doesn't use swear words, does that count?
> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human
Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style.
There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now.
But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.
Yeah, I'd argue a large portion of what LLMs are being used for can be characterized as "counterfeiting" traditionally-useful signals. Signals that told us there was another human on the other side of the conversation, that they were attentive, invested, smart, empathizing, etc.
Counterfeiting was possible before, but it had a higher bar because you had to hire a ghostwriter.
>research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
Obviously no errors Vs no obvious errors, in a nutshell.
> On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
I often find that to be true. Another important factor is that research skill is correlated with writing skill. Someone who's at the top of their field is likely to be talented in other ways, too, and one such talented is making complex topics easier to understand.
> It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
But... you know that this moment will be so fleeting as one can trivially generate mistakes to look human.
If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.
A friend of mine (non-native English speaker) said she's been talking to a guy (also non-native) on a dating app. She said he was very articulate and showed me some screenshots.
One sentence he sent was "Family is paramount for you.". I told her "I bet you he's using ChatGPT"..
Muddying the water to make it seem deep.
Have you actually read a research paper, ever?
They are FILLED with jargon (that just as easily could be an ordinary English word instead) ... and giant paragraphs made up of ten sentences all combined into one with semi-colons ... and with all sorts of other butchering of the English language.
Scientific research papers follow their own grammar, which is specific to the research community ... and that grammar is atrocious!
Most papers are badly written. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
>On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences
That's because it's their PhDs that did the actual work...
Alternative hypothesis—-efficiency. Executives are very, very busy. As long as you can figure out what they mean, polish doesn’t add much. (Unless it does because it’s an earnings call, board meeting, etc.)
I’m quite convinced in most cases they are not spending time or energy consciously choosing to signal anything about status. They’re just not willing to pay the opportunity cost of keeping their attention on an internal communication any longer than the minimum required. They’re certainly capable of polished communication, but deploy that skill selectively when the return on investment is high.
It’s a classic rookie pitfall to over-index on form instead of content (guilty myself many times). It’s more instructive to pay attention to which questions and ideas powerful people focus on than the forms they use to deliver them (which are not as important, turns out).
The examples in the article are conspicuously unpolished. Autocorrect catches all of this stuff nowadays. Somebody had to make an effort to write that badly.
Signaling happens whether you choose to do it on purpose or bo not. The people who are best at it don't do intentionally.
The busy CEO is signaling status with this form of writing, they're so important and so many people demand their time that they have to skip on polish. That's the definition of status.
> I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
I live in a wealthy town. It’s less sinister than explicit counter signaling. More that I’ll wear comfortable clothes until they wear out because I have better things to do with my time than shop, and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling. An honest signal doesn't always take effort. In fact it's the tryhard imitators that have to expend effort emulating this. The real deal is effortless and comes naturally.
The silverback gorilla can come across as scary and formidable even when its just lazing around not trying to look intimidating. It's just big, without spending thought cycles on having to appear big, but the others still recognize it.
> Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling
If it’s used to signal, yes. The absence of a signal can be a signal. Or it can blend into the background. My point is wealthy folks wearing ordinary, loved clothes can be either, and in many cases it’s honestly just not giving a fuck and blending in with everyone else by happenstance.
A signal is a two way street. It remains a signal even if the signaler is oblivious to it but the observers still draw conclusions.
That's called projecting. If someone doesn't send a signal, but you believe you received it, that's on you, not them. You may _think_ the color of their skin or hair or the way they talk or dress or whatever "means/says something" (and, in some cases, it might) but it might just as well say something about you, not them.
You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences. Also there is no bright line between intentional and unintentional signaling. The brain is capable of hiding plenty of stuff from its own other parts. See the book "The elephant in the brain".
> You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences
This is an incorrect definition of a signal.
I agree that intention is irrelevant. But a powerful person blending in with their dress isn’t actually sending a signal. There is nothing to perceive because they look like everyone else.
The signal is only in if they’re recognized. Your definition of signal is congruous with any trait someone thinks a powerful person has whether it’s real or imagined.
I've met a few celebrities. When they wear worn, ordinary street clothes, they often go unrecognized. That may be a strong reason why they do that.
> When they wear worn, ordinary street clothes, they often go unrecognized. That may be a strong reason why they do that
Yup. Camouflage isn’t a signal.
If you dress down in a context where formal attire is expected, it's a signal. What it signals depends on what happens. If you're shunned and avoided, then you're just a loser or a hobo. If you're clearly valued, listened to with interest etc, despite that mismatch, it is a countersignal. You could only afford to do this by having high status and importance in the community that outweighs such expectations. It doesn't matter if you simply don't care and never think about how you dress and this just comes naturally. The signal is still picked. The person to whom general expectations and rules don't quite apply the same way as to the average person is the one of higher status.
In other words, it's not enough to flaunt the rules, you also have to get away with it for it to count.
Reminds me of how Nassim Taleb (famous for Black Swan among other books) says that he wants his surgeon to look like a butcher. The thinking goes that if despite all that roughness and sticking out, he’s a surgeon, he must be a pretty damned good surgeon.
> You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences.
This isn't about what it's called, it's about who's doing it. If people make inferences, that's something being done by the people making the inference, not by the people they are making the inferences about.
This is a pretty fundamental point, and grasping it is essential to having healthy interactions with others.
There is the "I don't (have to) give a fuck" counter-signaling. But also what about people that really don't care too much, out of ignorance even, or just fatigue.
Sure there is intentionality in there, but do we really call that _counter-signaling_?
They can try it and sometimes it works, but generally it's hard to imitate well. You have to not give a fuck about the right things. The imitators who just don't give a fuck about anything will stumble on something genuinely important.
Like the cool guy at school who doesn't give a fuck about what the teachers say will have to give a fuck about his friends and the community around him, to the skills that he gets his coolness from to preserve his status.
A boss who sends informal messages should still give a fuck about the overall state of the team, on being timely to respond to actually important matters even if just giving a quick ok sent from my iPhone.
The countersignaling is more about "I care about/provide more important things that are more valuable or impactful for you than getting caught up in bullshit insignificant superficial matters"
Well I agree and support that! Everyone cares about something. That's good and healthy.
There is a ton of value in intentionality. I realize I'm defending against this idea that if you don't do a given thing it must mean you really, really care about signaling that you'd never be caught doing that thing. You want to be caught signaling that you aren't doing it!
Of course that's true for some, many even. It's also true that someone just thought and lived and experienced and through intentionality, they come to opt-out of more and more of the fuss, in either direction.
Yes, overthinking this is also possible. I've had bosses who type correctly capitalized, with punctuation and paragraphs, and it's simply their style, not much else to read into it. But sometimes it can indicate a certain pedantic busybody personality who misses the forest for the trees and can be a pain in the ass to interact with.
That’s why there are entire books based on the joke that you can’t tell a homeless guy from a hippie with a trust fund.
And of course you can, at latest after one or two sentences.
100%. The homeless guy will sound way more coherent and less sociopathic.
> An honest signal doesn't always take effort.
I would guess that the non-effort signals instead involve risk tolerance.
It's a statement that they could easily withstand the consequences of an adverse judgement in ways regular people can't.
If I get turned away from Le Foie Heureux for failing to meet the restaurant dress-code, there's not much I can do. If the sommelier thinks that a billionaire looks like a vagrant, well, the billionaire will make a phone call...
"Signaling" is just the information that your visible choices send to those around you, including strangers. That's why it's called "signaling" -- your choices are broadcasting an information signal about you to others.
To not signal, you must make choices that carry little or no information in the context in which they exist. If you make choices in a context in which they are abnormal (e.g., dressing very casually in a context that others can't access in similar clothing), they inherently broadcast unique information about you. In some cases, that information can create a complex side effect in how people perceive you, even if you don't intend it (e.g., "this person put in the absolute bare minimum effort, because they knew we'd have to be nice to them no matter what, which feels disrespectful to me; their lack of optional effort for others signals that they only care about themselves, not us").
> "Signaling" is just the information that your visible choices send to those around you, including strangers. That's why it's called "signaling" -- your choices are broadcasting an information signal about you to others.
Where the theory falls flat re- signaling to strangers is that there are people that do dress very differently, use different cars, sometimes shave, sometimes not, on different days of the week.
And it's also very well known that many people simply do not pay attention to others. They mind their own business and that's it.
When I'm driving a random car and I'm dressed casually and not shaven, what signal am I sending to the strangers I'll see once during the day and who are anyway only minding their own business?
And the next day when I put on fancy shoes, an expensive watch, and I take out one of my Porsche and then go out and cross path with strangers, what signal am I sending? I'll only ever see them during that other day. Strangers who, also, only mind their own business.
The funny thing is: just like I don't give a flying fuck about other people, other people don't give a flying fuck about me.
But anyway how can I be signaling one thing to strangers on monday and another thing tuesday to other strangers?
Where it gets better: some days my wife prepares the clothes she wants me to wear (maybe because people shall come to the house later on or whatever), some days she doesn't and I just change underwear after my shower and put the same jeans I had the day before. Then I go to the garage: we both have several car keys. Maybe she decided to take my Porsche, maybe not.
So basically: I don't always pick the clothes I wear and my wife loves to sometimes take my Porsche.
What am I "signaling" to strangers? Not only I'm not totally in control of my outfit and my car but also simply don't care.
"Grug hungry. Grug grabs money or credit card. Grub puts whatever clothes on. Grug goes to whatever car is in the garage. Grub drives to groceries store to buy atoms to stay alive".
That's literally me.
Now maybe people in this thread meant to say: "signaling in the workplace towards people you see every day at work" but that's way different than "signaling to strangers".
To put it simply: I think a lot of people in this thread are way overestimating the level of caring other people exhibit.
I guarantee you that on the caring continuum most people by very far are on the "I couldn't care less" extreme.
There is such a thing as people who simply don't give a fuck and nobody is signaling anything to people who aren't even paying attention to you.
Grug goes to the groceries store to buy atoms to survive, not to look at other people's clothes/watch/car.
Signaling to people who aren't strangers: OK, that one I can buy. But to strangers I call horse load of shit because many people can "signal" two entire different things on two different days of the week. The only signal people see is the same as what people see reading tea leaves.
>and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
The privilege in that, contrasted with the lack of privilege for those in the inverse situation, is what's sinister.
> privilege in that, contrasted with the lack of privilege for those in the inverse situation, is what's sinister
To folks who code any advantage as sinister, sure. I for one like living in a town that saves seats for locals over tourists.
Being a tourist is different to being poor or underpriveleged, in precisely that it's a privileged thing.
Agree, the parent comment leaves no room for nuance so people end up damned if they do and damned if they don't.
I do think thinking through the extremes and motivations and intentions of behavior is worth it. But confident conclusions less so.
When it comes to writing and fashion, definitely people over-correct to project a status, in both directions. But also there's just the aged realization that people will think what they will think, and you kinda just opt-out of the game.
You can't really opt out, just choose better suited minigames.
Generally when you don't (have to) care, you either have to back that up with some other accumulated reputation/value, or sacrifice some things. Like you can opt out of the job market game and being bossed around either by founding your own company, going self employed with clients (the hard part), or just sacrifice and downsize your life standard, become homeless or similar. But someone who needs a steady income in lieu of a big inheritance can't just opt out of caring.
This isnt perfect. Our household income is probably 500k/yr and growing in a city with an average income of ~100k+.
If I wear nice stuff to the park with the kids, I'm noticed. If I wear raggy gym clothes, I'm ignored.
My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition. New shoes or expensive outerwear that 'your wife bought'.
> My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition
I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.
If I go to Vegas I may grab a silk shirt because, yes, my service experience absolutely varies based on that, and I don’t want to have to wait until they see what I order or get to the check-in counter to start being paid attention to. (Which is annoying. And I prefer my t-shirts with cat holes in them. But I don’t like waiting in lines more than I dislike having to do my hair.)
(I do maybe counter signal in Palo Alto, where I refuse to wear a blazer or a Palo-Alto-grey hoodie. But that’s less of a power move than me inviting attention as a now outsider.)
> I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.
it might not be on purpose, but you are signalling that you have status such that you dont need to play by whatever rules other people do to get said table.
to signal like a regular person, you would be doing all the same stuff other people do to get the table
> it might not be on purpose, but you are signalling that you have status
Not really. I’m relying on another signal, the recognizance of my person in a small town. If a tourist walked in wearing what I’m wearing they wouldn’t get that treatment. The signal is my face. Not the dress. (I could dress up for the evening and the same thing would happen.)
> to signal like a regular person, you would be doing all the same stuff other people do to get the table
Sure. That’s the point. I’m not signaling “like a regular person.” I’m just not sending a signal with dress. I’m dressing ordinarily.
If I were actually trying to camouflage I’d do other things. And that would constitute false signaling. (And sure, with my friends, I am signaling something. But it’s still not a counter signal unless we expand the terms signal and counter signal to mean literally anything, information and noise alike.)
I used to dress down at work because that's how everyone else dressed and I just wanted to fit in. But at some point I stopped doing that because I was caring way too much about what other people were thinking.
I dress nice because I like it. It makes me feel good about myself, but has nothing to do with compensating.
People react differently towards me depending on how I dress. It's quite noticeable. The sensible thing to do is take advantage of it.
And the best way to take advantage may be by unmasking the people that are incompetent enough to not assess others competence by looking at their work, and instead just look at their clothes.
But well, it's context sensitive.
Yes, I hear that a lot. Might as well push on a rope, though.
In my early career years, a fellow employee came to work in track shorts and flip flops. He was a very, very good programmer. But he never got raises, and never got promoted, and complained to me about it. I suggested it was the way he dressed. He said the same things you wrote.
A couple decades later, I ran into him again at a conference. He ran his own quite successful company. He also was dressed sharply.
Things that make you go hmmm....
> He also was dressed sharply.
As I said, it's context sensitive.
Personally, I stopped dressing nicely at work after way too many people assumed I'd throw ethics at the trash and do what they say for the hint of a small promotion. Weirdly, that never stopped the people that actually wanted to do things from talking with me.
But if you are talking to (potential) customers, the calculation is completely different.
In order to fit in with your peers, it's best to dress like them. But on the higher end of the range.
For example, when Obama would talk to union workers, he'd wear jeans. But a pretty nice pair of them.
You can't control others, you can only control your response to them. How people perceive you is a comprehensive and isn't always based in logic. You can use this to your advantage and take control of your own narrative or not. But you'll be worse off for it if you don't.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised about what kinds of things people look favorably on.
What a tease. Please pleasantly surprise me! :)
Everybody is signalling, especially the people who think they aren't. We could sit here all day and game out all the possible interpretations that could be made from anyone's appearance, with respect to who they actually are, and it won't change much.
My take on it all: Programmers and other hot shot types often eschew formalities and conventions for dress and such, as a way of asserting status. "I'm professional and important enough to assert that my preferences supersede the ordinary" is what they want to signal. Of course, some are just childish enough to insist that dress codes don't matter in the slightest, and everyone must put up with their goofy graphic t-shirts. Others are willing to tolerate that stuff because most programmers are not customer-facing. But they still look like adult children when they insist on that crap.
It reads like textbook mind reading to me.
The author does not actually know why people write with poor spelling/grammar nor truly how others would interpret them writing with with poor spelling/grammar.
They have a guess, but there are any number of alternate reasons why someone might write poorly. They could be technologically illiterate, fat fingered, easily frustrated, mirroring their children, need glasses, careless or any other number of reasons. The only way to find out is to ask.
Engaging in mind reading is fraught with danger. You're more likely to project your own own mood, stereotypes, behavior or beliefs on to others than actually guess what someone's thinking.
I think it's less mind-reading than looking for a sociological explanation.
That said, I think a big underlying cause is that Business Idiots [1] are, in fact, idiots. Even so, it's worth looking for a sociological explanation of why Being An Idiot doesn't hurt Business Idiots like it would hurt the rest of us.
[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
There's also:
- No signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else because that's been my style since forever and I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.
Still signalling.
People don't get to decide if they're signalling or not.
They only get to decide if they'll consciously signal or subconsciously signal. They (or their clothes as per the example) sends signals in either case.
I feel like this is actually that people don't get to decide if others will perceive signals.
This is a distinction without a difference; a signal was received, whether you meant to send it or not.
It’s quite a difference…
The expected or assumed signal can differ radically from the perceived signal, often in surprising ways.
People spend so much energy doing things based on untrue assumptions about what others are thinking.
And this is before we even get into how much one should adjust their behavior based on someone else’s perception.
Yeah similarly we can make a few distinctions here: 1) Intended signal, true 2) Unintended signal, but true 3) Unintended signal, but false (Sure, 1' intended but false; though not really important here)
When (1) obtains we can describe this situation as one where sender and received coordinate on a message.
When (2) obtains we can say the sender acted in a way that indicative of some fact or other and the received is recognizes this; (2) can obtain when one obtains as a separate signal or when the sender hasn't intended to send a signal.
(3) obtains when the receiver attributes to the sender some expressive behavior or information that is inaccurate, say, because an interpretive schema has characterized the sender and the coding system incorrectly producing an interpretation that is false.
Also remember that each recipient of the signal will have their own reaction to it. What signals professional competence to one person can signal lickspittle corporate toadying to another.
Yes, but in aggregate, most people (or most groups of people) will arrive at the same conclusion for the same signal.
Else signals and signalling wouldn't be a thing and people wouldn't care for them, their reception would be a random scatter plot.
> They (or their clothes as per the example) sends signals in either case.
Unless you're Sherlock Holmes, or know the person and their wardrobe intimately, you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
Reddit and quora are littered with stories about car salesmen misreading what they thought were signals, and missing out on big sales. The whole Julia Roberts trope resonates exactly because it happens in real life.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes, as George Carlin pointed out, it's a big fat brown dick.
>Unless you're Sherlock Holmes, or know the person and their wardrobe intimately, you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
You'd be surprised. People discern things of value from a one-time viewing of another person constantly. It's evolutionary wiring. From a glance, people can tell whether they others are rich or poor or middle class, their power status within a situation (e.g. a social gathering), their sexual orientation (studies show the gaydar exists), whether they're a threat or crazy or rapey or neurodiverse or meek and many other things, whether they're lazy or dilligent, and lots of other things.
>Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes, as George Carlin pointed out, it's a big fat brown dick.
What black and white thinkers miss is this doesn't have to be accurate all the time to exist and be usable. Just a lot more often than random chance.
And it has nothing to do with the comical Holmes "he had a scratch mark on his phone, so he must be alcoholic" level inferences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKQOk5UlQSc
> You'd be surprised. People discern things of value from a one-time viewing of another person constantly.
True. I overstated my case a bit. Of course, no matter what they are wearing, it is something that exists in their wardrobe, but that may or may not matter.
> studies show the gaydar exists
This, I know from experience. I had a gay roommate once, and he taught he how to spot them, way back when they were still trying to be a bit unobvious. But, even though gay people usually dress better and in certain ways, that's not the usual tell. It's really not about the clothes.
> doesn't have to be accurate all the time to exist and be usable
This is paradigmatic "system 1" thinking. We all use it, but sometimes the failures are catastrophic.
> you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
You're conflating actual value with perceived value. It's well established that perceptions matter and people make decisions based on this all the time.
> The whole Julia Roberts trope resonates exactly because it happens in real life.
No, it resonates because it's a feel good story. I'm sure it happens, but most of the time signaling is perfectly accurate. If you don't believe me, exchange clothes with a homeless person and try to go shopping on Rodeo Drive.
I remember wandering into Cartier's in NYC dressed in my shaggy jeans and t-shirt. They didn't throw me out, but a security guard followed me around, definitely edging into my personal space to make me uncomfortable. I laughed, said I get it, looked a bit more, and left.
I remember the days when you were expected to wear a suit on a jet, even the kids. These days, even the first class travelers wear track shorts. I kinda wish the airlines would have a dress code.
> I kinda wish the airlines would have a dress code
I'd take a code of conduct before the dress code. Though, appropriately enough, I suppose the latter signals the former
Decent people don't need a code of conduct.
There's been pressure on the D Language Foundation to have a CoC. I've consistently refused one. The only thing I demand is "professional conduct". Sometimes people ask me what professional conduct is. I reply with:
1. ask your mother
2. failing that, I recommend Emily Post's book on Business Etiquette.
And an amazing thing happened. Everyone in the D forums behaves professionally. Every once in a while someone new will test this, their posts get deleted, and then they leave or behave professionally.
I meant for flights (edited accordingly). In both cases I think "don't be a dick" probably would go most of the way
You'll get treated better by the staff if you dress better.
I'm less concerned with the behavior of the staff than the behavior of the other passengers
The staff can be more inclined to help you if you've got a problem.
> I kinda wish the airlines would have a dress code
What? Why? Are you really that bothered by other people wearing stuff that you wouldn't personally want to wear? I can't even imagine going through life with strong feelings about how other people should dress; it legitimately sounds exhausting.
Would you go to a wedding dressed like a slob? Would you go to an elegant restaurant in sweats? If you go to pick up your date, and she opens the door wearing track shorts and a worn t-shirt, how would you feel?
When I'd pick up my date, and she had obviously spent a lot of time on her appearance, it'd make me feel like a million bucks.
When I got married, my spouse and I told people to wear whatever they wanted because we didn't really care. I also never cared at all about what we were wearing on our dates because what I enjoy about spending time with people is not seeing them present themselves in a way that I tell them to. I would go to a restaurant in sweats if I were allowed to.
I fundamentally do not understand what reason everyone else should have to dress to please you compared to themselves. Seeing everyone else as props to fit your preferred aesthetic rather than people who's desires about their own appearances are more important than what you want them to look like just seems selfish to me.
It's a free country and you can dress as you please.
But people will judge you by how you dress, and you will miss opportunities as a result, and you'll never know that this is happening.
As I mentioned earlier, people do react to me differently depending on how I dress. And I've known many people who align with your views on this, and they've all wondered why opportunity passed them by (or they realized they needed to change).
Can I ask: suppose you were charged with a crime. Your lawyer showed up in track shorts. Would you get another lawyer? I sure would.
I still don't get how you start with "people will judge you by how you dress" and arrive at "airlines should refuse customers who don't dress the way I expect someone would at a trial, wedding, or real estate sale".
An airliner is an exquisitely designed work of engineering, staffed by highly trained professionals.
It's not a bus.
A wedding is a social event with friends and family. I am going there to see the people. A flight is a functional form of transport which is shared out of necessity. I am going there to pay as little mind to the other people as possible
P.S. If you're a real estate agent, and you drive to a customer in a shoddy car, you aren't going to make a sale.
> you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.
The goal is not to discern anything about a particular person from a one-time viewing of them, the goal is to discern something about a person a sufficiently high percentage of the time. Hence the evolutionary utility of using prior probabilities.
As history, and probably many people’s personal experiences, have shown, this trait also has drawbacks.
I find this kind of funny, since you say your not signalling anything, and then in the second half of the sentence describe for us a very signal you claim you aren't sending:
> I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.
Whether you like it or not, whether you meant to or not, you are communicating something here. You don't get to opt out.
"No signaling" would be: "I dress like I always do since forever." Any reference to opinions of others would mean that the person cares for them, even in the form of "I don't care", and thus the dress is also a signal to them.
At least for me, the signal I'm sending is "I care more about how comfortable I am in my clothes than I do about what other people are inferring about them". The point isn't that people aren't receiving some sort of signal about me based on that, it's that the signal that they might receive is entirely irrelevant to my motivations. That itself might be a signal, but it's incidental to the actual choice I'm making, which is entirely personal.
Honest signalling is still a thing. In fact it's rather common, it's one of the reasons most poisonous animals actually look poisonous.
Using this logic, all of the homeless people are counter signaling then. And there are plenty of executives who wear suits. Also signaling has one l, so thus you are signaling your importance.
Or maybe you just can't assume you know what's going on inside someone else's head.
there is a good saying in Slavic culture bubble - "to stretch an owl onto globe" (натянуть сову на глобус) - which means "to overly extrapolate".
congratulations, so far it's the biggest globe I saw a poor owl stretched onto :)
No... you have to actually be important to countersignal with your clothing.
And yes, those plenty of executives are precisely in the "no signaling" category.
Mere executives don't get to countersignal with their clothing in such a visible way. Majority owners do.
just to note, signaling has two L's in UK spelling
I don't think it counts as counter-signaling if can call him out.
What illogical speling.
That's uh, not how this works. That's not how any of this works
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways
- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else
- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
In old-money settings all three of these things can be true simultaneously, dressing more formally than people outside, just like everyone else inside (in fact expected, to indicate familiarity with the standards of class, and often worn, ratty, old, and comfortable.
I told this story about the old man in his 70s walking through a plant, giving his multi-decades expertise in how to solve our foam problems.
Everyone else wore a polo... This guy genuinely didn't care. He was making $500/hr and didn't really want to be there. He was begged. He did some weird stuff with sticky notes on $100k molds... (and he didn't solve our problem).
But you knew this guy was an expert.
I don’t think it’s counter-signaling- I think it’s just millenialism, even if it’s done by people in other generations just mimicking them. As a gen-X, I’d never send a bunch of crying emojis, and agree it’s unprofessional, but my millenial co-workers would do it.
It's not counter signalling. It's just the complete death of high culture. Hoodies aren't some statement about how you're too cool to care, it's just that no one cares to look good.
The newspaper ran an article about some high school kids who were on strike (!) because they didn't like the dress code.
The article include a picture.
They all dressed like complete slobs. I couldn't understand why they cared about the dress code.
Hoodies are very comfortable.
So are pyjamas, or a muumuu, or underwear.
It's just the complete death of high culture.
Good riddance.
“Ratty old” and “formal” are not the only options. I dress mostly in techwear brands like Veilance, Outlier, and ACRNM, which is not ratty and old but is also very much not formal or uncomfortable.
I don’t think parent implied that that are the only options, they just gave examples that can fit into categories.
Did you mean to add where your expensive polyester blend clothing lands on the spectrum they were illustrating?
This is an accurate analysis, as in “I’m the boss here and while you have to abide by whatever social norms or internal policies, I don’t because I’m better than all of you”.
There was an episode of Orphan Black where they were going to impersonate a billionaire. The guy turns up in a suit and gets told, 'A billionaire, not a millionaire, go and put some shorts on'
I’ve seen an fascinating paper (sorry, lost the url) that expanded on this using game theory: it’s common for “economic stratification” to have on the order of ten to fifteen levels, from abject poverty up to hundred-billionaires.
Look at it this way: there are five orders of magnitude between a “mere” ten-millionaire and the likes of Elon or Bezos!
To most people that’s the “same” level of rich, but each factor of ten is dramatically richer!
However, signals like “purposefully disheveled” and “well manicured” are essentially binary, so… they’re alternated. Each strata layer of factor of ten indicates this by flipping whatever the layer is doing below them. They won’t be confused with “two layers down” because that’s such a gulf that nobody will misunderstand.
I believe this is touched upon in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
In my line of work we have professionals and lay people in contact with each other often, and I have found I get the best reaction (from all audiences) when I square myself away. Untidy dress isn't immediately disqualifying, but if it's enough to be noticeable it's enough to deserve an explanation.
I'm just glad ties are gone. I used to have it in my consulting contract that I would wear a tie for a maximum of x hours for the duration of the project, so choose them well. It used to be a point of negotiation, now nobody cares anymore.
If a tie is uncomfortable, the problem isn't the tie, it's that your shirt doesn't fit.
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What is sad is that these people from the start think of good grammar as an effort to "look professional" (which they can then discard), and not as an effort to be clear, an effort which fits into the basic respect one gives other people.
People are always impressed by how formal and informal tone and relative status is encoded in East Asian languages and how English doesn't have this and is supposedly egalitarian. Here's an example to show how it does exist also in English! Social relations are going to be expressed somehow. It's just how human culture works. The lower status person typically uses longer, more elaborate phrasing, while the higher status person blurts shorter ones. I wouldn't be surprised if equivalents exist in animals too.
Or the respect one has for oneself.
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-matters-podcast/episode...
The hardcore anti-prescriptivism among linguists does drive me a bit nuts as well.
Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas. They're not just arbitrary rivers of sound changes that people cannot control. English is still full of Inkwell terms, for example. And in my own lifetime I have seen a lot of linguistic changes basically proscribed that everyone falls into line with (a less controversial/political one: no one in NZ called association football "football" at the turn of the century. We all called it "soccer". Then the sporting bodies and media changed what they called it and everyone around me changed it too. "football" used to unambiguously mean "rugby football").
> Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas.
You are right, but that comes also from a descriptivist perspective. And a linguist would study what sort of prescriptions stick and what sort don't.
When linguists say they aren't prescriptivists, they don't say prescriptivism doesn't work, they just say their job is not about deciding whether to say football or soccer.
Right I am probably being sloppy with my terminology. It's more notions that there is no such thing as "good grammar" is just tiresome. We can argue the rules are somewhat arbitrary, but that does not change how people might perceive you.
This is a good point. Perhaps the poor attempt at grammar indicates a lack of empathy, which is a trait the Epstein-adjacent share.
who is "these people"
the ones writing those emails with bad grammar
That was not clear to me either. But, given that clarification, I agree!
The psychopaths who rise to the top of capitalism.[0][1]
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma... 1. https://www.newsweek.com/ceo-dark-personality-success-machia...
It’s because the higher you are in the chain of corporate command, the less time you have to dedicate to each task. You end up with shorter answers to every note because you wouldn’t have time to reply to all notes and do the strategic things you need to do, otherwise.
As an individual contributor on a team, you may have to interface at most with 30 people on a weekly basis. As a second line leader you may have 150 people under your purview, and another 50 outsiders you have to talk to. You can’t scale the amount of time you have, so you scale the amount of time you spend on replies.
Using the example from the article: "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks"
I'm not buying your argument. The amount of additional time that it would have taken to write that same message with proper grammar and spelling is minuscule.
I'm not sure that's a literal quote from their boss. It seems to be an illustrative example, probably exaggerated.
typed on a phone, so unlikely to have been at the office.
You have to deliberately turn off autocorrection on most phones
I hare auto correct. It ducks me over all the time.
That depends on your typing ability. My mother only looks up at the end of the sentence to see if she hit all the right keys.
The boss was following Strunk & White's advice to omit needless letters.
You must be referring to the abridged Strnk n Wyt
Shorter answers don't necessitate terrible grammar. Maybe it's because my mom was a teacher and I had good grammar drilled into me, but I feel like it shows respect for the people you're communicating with.
> respect for the people you're communicating with
That is exactly why executive grammar is so bad.
That doesn't explain the "punctuating with multiple cryface emojis".
What I've seen is that leaders often communicate brusquely downward, but formally upward - and the higher the rank, the greater the magnitude (in each direction).
I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
What makes you think its just "leaders"?
This response isn’t very helpful. Can you elaborate with your own experience?
Bad grammar is disrespect. Underlings have to swallow that disrespect. It is just a power game. The next level is simply to insult everyone, and everyone will still remain submissive.
And if you insult people, and get rewarded by submission, one reaction is to amp up the insults.
After all, you don't know the limits of your power until someone quits. So abuse people, exhibit outlandish public behavior, say racist or otherwise objectionable things...every person who remains on your payroll is a sign of how powerful you are.
This is not a common tactic, but it's a highly visible tactic, and it's not hard to find some notable examples out there right now.
Except they don't just talk this way with underlings but everyone including their peers.
I think the key is whether they expect their underlings to be more formal or if it actually goes both ways.
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I point you to Nancy Mitford's piece (and others) on U vs non-U.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
This was a, tongue in cheek, distinction between the language used by the posh and by the aspiring-posh. It's seems analogous to the OP's sense of boss vs non-boss language and diction, which I believe exists.
Informality and bad grammar but otherwise sound decision making is fine, I think everyone's arguments for it here make sense.
But let's not pretend that, at least in the US, that's what it's limited to. Our current and immediate past president are both elderly men with potentially compromised mental states who regularly say crazy nonsense stuff.
Try watching this (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=455169079910588) or this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZsdlULgqvA) and then watch the literal crowds of people who are saying "you just don't understand! You're not parsing it right! You're not paying enough attention to their genius!"
It's wild that we make excuses like this for people. One has to ask where the line is.
This almost certainly happens in business, too - it's just not as obvious because those folks don't have to constantly do it in public.
I think this isn't quite what "privilege" means, at least these days. People talk about "white privilege" for example, meaning that people who are white can do XYZ or avoid ABC, unlike other people.
In the example the author writes about, the privilege is not "being a bag grammar person", it's being a high-ranking person. The bad grammar is the thing that those people are able to get away with.
IMO, he's confusing the disease with the symptom, so to speak.
Separately, I would say that high-ranking people can definitely get away with short emails, and to some extent brusque emails. Bad grammar is perhaps just the next domino to topple.
Yeah, if they are using the term "privilege" in the way that its used in pop-culture this post lost me.
That fits witj my experiences. And i want to add an otjer layer. In ai times its somtimes even nice to see some typos. You Casn be pretty sure it was not written by ai.
Wow, this guy must be important.
You can prompt an LLM to add typos, though
interestingly, you can’t do the same thing with queries like “no em dashes”. it’ll agree, then proceed to use them regardless.
could be related to how so-called negative prompts fail to work when asking, say, ChatGPT to generate an image without a crocodile
My theory is that sprinkling emdashes into the output is some intentional measure to "watermark" LLM output.
"sent from my iphone"
Positive (tryhard) signaling: having a well designed email footer with all your contact info
Neutral signaling: no footer at all
-1 signaling: sent from my iPhone
-2 signaling: sent from my Samsung AI Family Hub 4-Door Flex Fridge
I think "Sent from my iPhone" is now less of a status symbol than it is an excuse for short replies / bad grammar.
Status symbol?
I just assumed that was from people who aren't technologically literate enough to remove the default signature. It never occurred to me it might be intentional.
There needs to be a new sig like "Written by Claude" or something. I'd rather somebody just openly admits it.
At least for now, there remain lots of signals that are clear to those with sufficient exposure; from the piece linked in the Oxide LLM doc that was recently discussed here:
"... to anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore. Bluntly, your intellectual fly is open: lots of people notice — but no one is pointing it out."
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/12/05/your-intellectual-fl...
*Please forgive any typos
> but grammar privilege? That's certainly a first.
Here is what I don't understand, and what is not addressed in the post.
After you get a response from your boss that reads, "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks", doesn't this free you up to relax your style to your comfort level? If you see that your addressee doesn't seem to care for meticulous style, is there much point in stressing over it (and thus, in continuing with the privilege narrative)?
Unfortunately there is a double standard at play. When people see a sloppy email from a powerful person, they think “they must be so busy that they don’t have time to check grammar”. But when it comes from a low-level employee they think “oh they must be careless or uneducated”.
100%. "Needs more attention to detail."
except it's sort of true and a reasonable assumption to make? Just as when a master painter makes something that looks "sloppy" to the layman, one immediately assumes there is some deep artistry behind it as opposed to poor technique, whereas when a child does it, one does not extend the same charitable attitude.
Sure I think there's some truth the that. You've gotta learn the rules first to know when it's ok break the rules. Somebody with a lot of experience should be able to judge how their message will be received, and what amount of effort is "good enough". Whereas someone with less workspace experience may lack such judgement, and is probably better off erring on the side of "too good" rather than "not good enough".
But it's definitely also very much tied to status, power, and privilege. The same people who have no qualms about firing off a sloppy email to their subordinates often spend a lot more effort on emails to their bosses. But even this discrepancy is justified, I think, given that a manager represents their subordinates to the higher ups. And the potential consequences of a bad impression or misunderstanding are more severe when communicating up the chain of command.
No, I read that they know they have the power so they don't care, and I'm not powerful enough to not. It's like listening to your boss's boss talking about his heli-skiing adventures.
This is so yawn. Do young professionals starting out have to impress their bosses? Yes. Do bosses have to impress them? Usually not. Who cares? Power dynamics exist, it’s easy to play the grammar game, so just do it and stop pretending it’s some form of oppression.
TBH, a junior dev pointed at an urgent issue who replies simply, “on it” vs. one who takes the time to write a short book report on their initial analysis and plans is—all else being equal—not a close call when it comes to promotion time.
I don’t want to be impressed, I want problems to be solved.
if i sent an email to my ceo and they replied with typos and bad grammar, i wouldn't think "wow, they are flexing their privilege to be able to do that".
i would be excited that i'm being treated as a member of the inner circle and they can speak freely and casually with me.
Some people think texts are for quick one-off messages and emails are for longer more thoughtful missives.
But (a) most corporate communication isn't by text, and (b) the CEO is probably from a time when there weren't any texts, so emails themselves were often used casually, in lieu of sticky notes.
In any case, I'm with you. The trope of microaggressions is way overused, and applying it to someone who is usefully communicating with you is rubbish.
I can kinda see your point, especially if the meaning is still obvious and the tone is inviting you to participate, but I think you're misunderstanding what "privilege" means here.
It isn't a superior "flexing their privilege" over their subordinates. The superior doesn't care. They don't even think about it. Because they have power over you, they can just speak gibberish and you have to figure it out. In my opinion, a good boss should have enough respect for me to not waste my time by forcing me to decipher a thought they didn't even read before sending.
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
At one of my previous jobs some of my coworkers and I had an in-joke about how it was possible to tell which of the emails from the CEO were written directly by him or not based on whether it used the spelling "pls" for "please" because of how often he liked to use it. It hadn't occurred to me to view this phenomenon in the way that the article does, but at least in my experience it certainly seems to be accurate.
A CEO saying “please”, regardless of how it’s spelt, is itself an anomaly ;)
He’s saying half the word, at least… pretty good for a CEO.
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
Who told you that?
Or maybe... what state do you work in? I cannot even imagine starting the HR process to fire someone because of bad emails.
HR has a huge bag of tricks. They can fire anyone for anything and nothing.
> HR has a huge bag of tricks.
Yea, one of them is called "actually doing their jobs." In my company they spend far more time mediating problems than they do thinking up clever ways to fire someone without just cause.
At first i was about to disagree, because i thought, "ah hell nah man I'm sending emojis and shit at work all day" and then i realized, i send emojis and shit to my peers all day (well, and to my dumbass boss who i don't respect).
I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
What does it have to do with privilege? This person's need for grammar seems to be self-imposed. I don't see where anyone judged him for bad grammar while a privileged person was given a get-out-of-jail-free card for the grammar police.
Yep
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
I don't know their life, and they may be right, but I think they may well just be imagining it. I also went from excessive formality to short conversational tone as I became more experienced. But it wasn't due to any promotions, but because I realized nobody had ever cared
I mean this is a standard cliché even in fictional works: the young new worker who keeps falling over themselves to perform what they think is necessary formality, only to be shown that they can just chill out and act like a human
This is why I like to have business with Germans and Japanese, their emails are the best.
I had a boss once who had "this is sent from my phone, please excuse any spelling or grammar" as his email signature
A more appropriate signature would be "Please excuse any auto-correct errors that my ducking phone might have added."
… 'as his Desktop Outlook signature'
(Although he could at least use proper grammar in the automated signature line...)
It's not intelligence, respect, signaling or status.
It's saving time, the thing we can't bank or stretch or keep. Doing that reflects value priorities that are likely to lead to success and happiness.
We would all be this brief if we weren't constrained otherwise. People who care deeply about their time are this brief even if they shouldn't be. You can even say nothing in ways that influence others in the ways you want (from spiritual teachers and parents to politicians and mafia dons).
(Wealth and power trashing is all too easy these days. Pick a hard target?)
It's both. Saving time is a form of status signaling. Professionalism usually entails spending longer on something than is optimal for effective communication, which is a way of signaling "my time is less valuable than yours". Writing short messages with grammatical errors is a way of signaling "my time is more valuable than your comprehension".
The title of the article cites bad grammar, but the example doesn't have any grammatical problems. It has clear typos and questionable abbreviations but it doesn't have any of the bad grammar signs that grate on me, like comprise vs. compose or over utilization of "utilize" where "use" would do just fine.
You might say that "let's circle back" is annoying business jargon, but it is a very common phrase and aside from the typos correctly applied in this example.
Grammar privilege feels 90% understanding the audience and timing vs something like 10% power dynamics. As with most things where there can be a power imbalance, that does not mean those with power (e.g. managers) should not help set expectations on an even field with each of their employees anyways. Nor does it mean the other 10% of cases don't exist, just "don't ignore that 90% of this is probably one being too worried about sounding professional in every possible scenario".
Before going into the workforce, we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.
That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly) and may actually consider THAT disrespectful. Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
I kinda went through this when I joined my current employer. My boss's emails were (are) at worst unintelligible and best hard to follow, weirdly formatted and generally hard to grok. Usually they are just blocks of text that are one big garden path sentance. But it all magically goes away in client communications
Not sure why this is, but it never really bothered me. It took me a while to learn my boss's interpretation of the English language. I don't think its a case of being in a position where it doesn't matter, other department heads don't do this, I reckon its just down to necessity.
You aren't trying to portray an image of yourself to your team, you don't need to come across as a poet laureate for internal discussions.
If you are trying to craft an image of yourself to your team instead of doing your job well and letting your work build your image you are doing something wrong
Spend your time wisely, put effort into your emails where it matters, format everything nicely, double/triple check your grammar, but among colleagues you don't need to pretend
I don't think the author realizes the time*attention triage that happens when your sole corporate responsibility is to manage others. I've noticed a distinct personal trend in "email succinctness" the more people I need to manage.
That said, using good grammar is never a bad thing and depending on the subject matter and relationships between the respective communicators, short-hand can be both a deliberate obfuscation practice and social coding of the intimacy of the respective relationships.
Many people point to the bad spelling and grammar of these powerful, abusive people and they say wow, that's a flex.
My own reaction is more like these people are stupid. It's not power that makes them write poorly. They're not capable of getting it right.
Look at what Noam Chomsky wrote to Epstein as a contrast. Multiple paragraphs and usually coherent. He makes Epstein look dumb. (Which he was.) I don't support what and to whom Chomsky was writing, but he is better at writing.
The thing is that "being an idiot" would have consequences for you; it doesn't have consequences for them.
This isn't black and white. Tons of people face little or no consequences for being idiots, but don't achieve the levels that Epstein did.
Exactly. Remember this is a guy who was "best friends" with Donald Trump. It's just a group of idiots who became rich and powerful through a combination of luck and criminality.
I am more appalled that all those emails have that footer that says - if you’re not intended recipient you should delete immediately. Yet people see it and just copy those emails. No respect for the legal disclaimer. Now they can all be sued for ignoring that legal disclaimer, I suppose they will face justice sooner than all those people in emails.
That footer is legally meaningless.
And the companies adding the footer? Their attack lawyers are assholes trying to scare everybody.
Fuck them.
I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
Speed is a courtesy, sure. I think polish for the sake of polish is bad, and the AI powered polishing is worse. See also: https://x.com/ClickHole/status/2020915972979425699
> Bad Grammar is a courtesy.
I agree. Or at least to the extent that the complaint is that bad grammar signifies dispensing with formality, dispensing with formality is often a courtesy.
Too many people have it drilled into them that "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" when in reality if a job is worth doing, it is often worth doing very badly indeed, because it really, really just needs to be done.
It takes a large amount of very unproductive navel-gazing to assume that a message that unequivocally gives you the information you need, yet that doesn't measure up to your own perceptions of how much effort should have gone into the crafting of the email, is an insult directed at you, rather than a focus on the message rather than the medium.
Even if Marshall McLuhan's dictum is correctly applied to this scenario, the message conveyed by the medium could well be "Stop wasting so much time agonizing over phrasing! Just spit it out!" rather than "I'm better than you so I can get away with sloppy shit that I would excoriate you for."
One anecdote about Bill Gates is he was in the Bahamas perhaps to purchase some real estate and he was dressed very down to the point where he looked like a bum. He went into a local real estate office where the lady was dressed in a suit and to the 9's despite it being 40 degrees outside. And she went and told him that real estate was expensive in the Bahamas and he needed a lot of money to buy to which he replied "I might be able to work something out you never know". So ya the super rich don't need to sound good or look good they simply have money.
I think this is just more how the real world varies from academia.
In the working world, few people really care about grammar, but we spend out life growing up in classrooms where teachers critique and be rate us on our grammar.
In the United states, at least in my business, we prize congeniality and sincerity. I think part of the trend the author discovered might be that experienced professionals unconsciously use informal language structures to avoid seeming pretentious.
In the country where I grew up, physicians have immense clout and are notorious for writing unintelligibly. I once pointed this out as a kid and was told by the secretary something like: the doctor is too busy to write legible prescriptions.
It is my feeling that some of the conspicuous behaviors of people in positions of influence and monetary wealth do, in fact, rob the practitioner of the small joys of life won through small sacrifice. I do not envy the man who gains hedonic leisure at the expense of the opportunity to elevate a mundane message into a medium for a modicum of joy, and potential human connection. I love tending my garden, and trimming the weeds in our sidewalk.
I latch on to some of these trends by lowercasing everything, in this case I mostly just don’t correct it if I missed a case
its more like insulation, the people that criticize it seem less connected and less compensated than me while understanding exactly what was conveyed, and the people like me are the same
like “look at this try hard middle manager that doesn’t focus on anything relevant”
one thing I do consciously correct is punctuation, I remove periods after consciously typing them, since an entire generation of people considers it a harsh statement, while the lack of period doesn’t confuse anyone else
language exists to convey a shared concept
people are scared of periods? ... lmao!
They have replaced them with exclamation marks! Every sentence must end with an exclamation mark, or you aren't excited and positive enough!
Mostly men.
ba dum tiss
Great, detailed explanation of the "weird formatting": https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-th... (I knew it was "quoted printable" as soon as I saw it but there's a lot more to it).
I think its probably just having to respond to lots of messages from your phone in the middle of meetings is the job, and you'll quickly decide that getting the point across is the most important thing.
It just occurred to me that I chat with LLMs like I'm a CEO.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
> Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
Eh? I've been working in tech for over 20 years. For all of that time, most people wore casual clothes.
ppl are so sensitive. it's not impolite to be direct. why would you be wasting each other's time by "dear, sincerely etc" every single time.
y ask q u dunno answer 2?
To be fair, most questions are asked because the querent does not know the answer.
But [that's not what happened here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question)
Hobbes says that talking to someone with courtesy is honor(giving them relative power), and talking trashy is dishonor(reducing their relative power).
Its not very long, but I use this in my daily life:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207-images.html...
I also use the 12 bullet points before that on Power.
The emoji use is general is weird. It's like the flair thing from office space, like everyone tries hard to be quirky or something idk.
It's funny she mentions the horrible grammar in the leaked sony emails because that's what I remember most from it too. This one always gets a laugh from me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/33tkv6/actua...
I think it's just that grammar is independent of getting results; so bosses who might get results might also have bad grammar. Having good grammar doesn't make you any more able to get things done - in other words, someone with bad grammar might be more able to get things fone than someone with good grammar
I used to be super keen about grammar and typos in texts as well, recently, I have been intentionally keeping some mistakes to prove that a human actually wrote that text and wasn’t AI generated, from my personal observation, I found that people now assume any perfectly written text is an AI generated and ended up not reading it all.
I've noticed this too when dealing with people with power. If you want to be seen as a peer, you have to stop caring. It's weird but it's definitely in the culture. As someone who learned English as a second language, it's especially weird since I worked hard to speak and write good English.
This is not my experience at all. I have never received an informal email like this from a manager; even chat threads at my job are generally correctly spelled, grammatical, and fully professional. Maybe I'm not talking to sufficiently exalted leadership?
I've seen messages like that from junior employees up to CEOs. I think it's mainly because most people simply can't type and think quickly enough (150-200wpm) that their thoughts naturally become words with next to no effort.
?
!
Isn’t this more about the specific generation these people represent instead of their privilege?
Definitely my experience as well.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
Just a random comment but: what a delightful blog. Even though I disagree on the virtues of cats (they really aren't all monsters. Ours is only occasionally evil).
I had a boss who would respond with: "NO" or "OK"
Reminds me of the apocryphal story of Victor Hugo asking his publisher how his new novel was doing with a single “?”. The publisher replied “!”.
Do your boss could still save themselves 50% of the work.
I like to ask people what I did to make them yell at me when I get a message with all caps. It usually stops.
People who try to flex by using shitty grammar are just exposing themselves as base philistines who can't do it using obscure words and erudite references.
As a poor kid I was deeply insecure about my falling apart shoes, however the wealthier kids would relish taping up their talking shoes like it was a running joke.
Privilege or confidence?
The different relationships between those two things is something I never considered until this post.
Man, everything is privilege these days. You’re privileged to get full score on SAT, Steph Curry has 3 point privilege, Taylor Swift has singer privilege. I have nice warm blanket privilege and am currently experiencing President’s Day privilege. I remember when I had just started in engineering and experiencing new grad privilege and then receiving promotion privilege every year.
I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.
It's not "privileged BY using bad grammar", it's "privilege TO use bad grammar". But yes, we know, the privilege boogeymen kicked your dog and made you take a CRT class.
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In one ear and out the other, huh? Do you think deliberately misunderstanding words makes you clever? Are you sticking it to those got-dang SJWs?
Hearing privilege is a real thing!
What else should you call something that is only socially acceptable for a certain group of people to do? I understand word fatigue, but it feels very adequately used here.
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You aren't being nearly as clever here as you think you are.
And getting away with it despite that is certainly a kind of privilege.
https://manhattanprep.com/gre/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/20...
We are all in need of more GRE test prep privilege.
Why are you getting so irrationally angry at a word use? You are making a fool of yourself, again.
Word use privilege strikes again. Some have fool privilege, others have smart privilege. But all men have privilege.
Loved your comment, made my day. Thanks!
Why, thank you. It was my pri—<User was banned for this comment>
Congratulations on learning a new word
They’re so close to getting it!
How sad I’m missing literacy privilege but fortunately looks like I’ve got downvote privilege so that will make up for it.
Though, after thinking about it, I have illiteracy privilege so there’s that too.
From the article:
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
It’s relative to the power level difference between the two parties.
We’re talking about someone (your boss) who doesn’t really need to present an appearance of professionalism to their proverbial lowly underlings.
As slapdash as their response to you might appear - if you were to observe that same person composing a reply to the CEO, I'd wager that all the hallmarks of grammatical precision and professionalism would be back in spades.
there is also the matter that, at one point, people stop differentiating between communication media, the boundaries between email and texting disappear.
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
Maybe someone can clarify this but I was also pretty appalled by the grammar in the Epstein emails until someone pointed out it could be an artifact of OCR or decoding issues.
Not sure why they would have to do OCR on emails. Were they printed out? On PDF for some reason? The decoding thing I kinda get but that you can easily point out because of all the equal signs.
The conspiracy theories about power signalling in the other comments are all well and good, but I have a simpler theory: U.S.-ians don’t know their own language, plain and simple. There’s a reason that American English is referred to as “English, Simplified”. The U.S. is a culture of barbarism, and language is one of the more conspicuous areas where it shows. I’d suggest that those who still know grammar and orthography are less victims of a power imbalance than just better educated. Or maybe their tastes aren’t as badly ruined yet.
This is a bit in the same direction as Epstein’s horrible tech higiene- using computers with outdated software, little or no cryptography, and so on. Another person summarised it quite well: “too rich to care”.
Maybe he considered himself beyond prosecution. So he didn't care that he arranged trafficking on Gmail under his real name.
Additionally, if Gmail is a problem, Sergey Brin went to his events.
In one document drop Joi Ito is asking him about security hygiene and saying he is "worried about his emails".
Privilege is working at a startup
K much to thin bout . thnks
Sent from my iPhone
Jesus no wonder 10% of Americans are on SSRIs, if this is the kind of petty stuff people are ruminating on...
I don't know where this guy has worked, but I've never worked for anyone who communicates like an ignorant, lazy ass.
Also, while I find his criticism valid for having had indeed seen it, this is ironic: "how sloppy and unprofessional emails from executives looked like."
Never thought of it that way, very interesting insight. I always thought those "K circle back" emails were fake but nope looks like they're very real.
My eyes are bleeding from trying to read this blog. Please pick less obnoxious colors.
There's no high culture anymore. Rich people don't go to operas or read poetry or literature. They drink too much and they can't spell. They're just plebs with money.
*poor
[dead]
I wonder if this has implications for AI alignment? Maybe prompting with poor spelling and grammar will make the AI eager to please the privileged, high-power user. (/s)