I think Poly is describing the case where a poster purports to have evidence of an uncommon, or unknown fact or phenomenon, and claims to have professional credentials, while simultaneously misspelling the terms generally used even by lay people when discussing that field.
If Dr. Fidelius posts a heavily technological report on some matter in biology, and has a single misspelling, that doesn’t change the fact that he has a long history here, and generally has had excellent knowledge and understanding of biology. I am likely to consider his information as reliable. But if a relatively unknown poster gives me the same information, claiming it to be the results of his own academic research, while frequently using words like ellele and jeans in his description, I am likely not to consider it reliable. I am, in fact quite likely to reject the information if I have any prior knowledge that contradicts it, even though I am not a professional.
Is it possible that a PHD in molecular genetics might consistently misspell allele, and gene? Yeah, it’s barely possible. But I bet the guy is not widely respected in his own field, unless he has his research papers typed up at the clerical pool, where folks use spell checkers. Me, I am waiting for a source which can spell its own jargon, at least.
I see. Now, for kicks, here is how I would write that sentence:
If Dr. Fidelius posts a heavily technological report on some matter in biology, and has any number of misspellings, that doesn’t change the fact that he has a long history here, and generally has had excellent knowledge and understanding of biology.
For, you see, in order to determine he has knowledge, I actually have to read his posts, whether he finds it amusing to spell “gene” as “jean”, or genuinely misspells the word but is so used to it in papers that he does a find-and-replace search all the time for professional documents. I can honestly think of a million reasons, none of which have to do with a background of knowledge, that one would intentionally or unintentionally misspell words.
It is very possible. That’s why we proofread each other’s work here all the time (quite a few pHDs here where I work). One of our scientists can never remember how to spell flurbiprofin. Works with the compound all the time. Another can’t say it properly without concentration. I talk with master and pHD level chemists all the time. Their emails are terrible, their spoken sentences are littered with “um” (and I mean each sentence is littered with them), and I often see typographical errors on posters they make for display around the office.
But, anyway, I’m not trying to make a point here, other than: this is how I look at it. Some people can’t tolerate it. Their loss, I figure.
Why are you ignoring the fact that I’ve previously drawn a distinction between gross misspellings and insignificant misspellings? Also, why are you ignoring the fact that I use spelling as a criterion for somebody’s claim to authority from written sources? “Mispelling” is not as significant an error as “kemotherapy” or “sikology” or “kwantum” (since I’m still perfectly capable of referencing the term in an index or dictionary or whatever, any spellchecker worth its salt would catch the error while it might not be so successful with the latter three errors, and “mispelling” has all of the relevant roots within it while “kemotherapy,” “sikology” and “kwantum” do not), nor have I ever claimed to have read oodles of articles on misspellings. The situation of my misspelling “mispelling” is not analogous to the situation of somebody claiming authority from written sources misspelling “kemotherapy.”
Why would somebody intentionally misspell a word? Sure, they might be making a play on words, but that’s a different scenario (or rather, it’s adding something to the scenario that ought to have been explicitly noted before). They might also be making a point about (mis)spellings, but that’s also a different scenario – the word in question is “kemotherapy,” not “mispelling” or “grammer” or whatever.
As for the link between unintentional misspelling and uninformed misspelling, it depends on how severe the misspelling was. I’d attribute “chemotherepy” or “chemotherapey” or whatever to a typo that the person didn’t happen to catch during proofreading (hence I wouldn’t question the person’s credibility, since they’d made an insignificant error) or perhaps an honest-to-god mistake in how to spell the word (which doesn’t really speak out against the person’s credibility, but only their spelling ability), while “kemotherapy” (especially in repeated use) screams “uninformed” since the error is so glaring that even the most cursory proofreading (including the act of looking at the screen while typing) would have caught the error.
“Intuitive” does not automatically mean “Dead wrong” or “Unreasonable.”
Because I don’t find the distinction all that clear.
Sez you. To me, I understand what both words are supposed to be, so I don’t care. You might see why this distinction can be considered not obvious, or—perhaps—not existent, depending on the person and interpretation.
Rather, it is noting that if one is purely looking at spelling and grammar, one does not have enough information to make any judgment whatsover about it. It is simply: a misspelling is before me. Various things might be said, or might occur to me from this, as in…
I know. As I understand it, intuitive indicates a type of thought or analysis that is characterized by the immediacy of interpretation (that is, it comes naturally to say such things). It comes naturally for many people to reject or otherwise scorn misspellings. When asked, they can give various reasons for this, though none of them probably occur when the actual judgment is made.
The question to me isn’t “Does a misspelled word provide enough information to fully assess a post(er)” – I’ve already answered that question in a negative by saying that I wouldn’t dismiss what somebody had to say based solely on one (or more) misspelled words. The question is “Does a misspelled word provide any information that can be used to assess a post(er),” and I’ve answered that in the positive – the phrase “I have read a lot on chemotherapy and…” is not the same as “I have read a lot on kemotherapy and…” which in turn is not the same as “I have read a lot on chemotherapey and…”. The remainder of the post gives additional (and hopefully more relevant) information on the post(er), which is why I won’t simply dismiss the “kemotherapy” or “chemotherapey” posters. For all we know the statements could end “I have read a lot on chemotherapy and I have concluded that it is delicious” and “I have read a lot on kemotherapy and I have concluded that radiation treatment is more reliable because (cites data),” or vice-versa. But if two posters were making identical appeals to their authority from written sources, and one used a gross misspelling of the relevant term while the other did not, then my judgment would be slightly favorable towards the one who was the better speller based on my intuition that a gross misspelling (to the point where one couldn’t even index the term) would not be possible were one to have any kind of familiarity with the term. If I truly cared enough about the subject then I’d ask them both to cite their sources or whatever have you.
And I didn’t ask that. I noted that the spelling and grammar of a sentence [that otherwise makes contextual sense where I can intuitively understand the sentence, let’s not lose or forget this important tidbit] reveals no information other than: there are some irregularities in the spelling and grammar of this sentence. You disagree.
The only information you seem to get from it is that you now know that you doubt this person has had a very technical background. This says something about you.
If the sentence was, “I know how to spell the word ‘kemotherapy’” then I would agree we should probably raise our eyebrows.
Interesting.
You know, a young woman used to live next door to me (unfortunately her parents divorced and she moved last month). Very pretty young woman, 17. Not extremely intelligent, but fun to talk to. Did I mention she was pretty? Ah, yes. Well, a young buy, about 13, down the street had a crush on her. He wrote her a note, detailing this in a short paragraph, and then by transcribing the lyrics to a love song.
The errors in this note were atrocious. “Your” for “You’re”, “they’re” for “their”, and others that I’m sure you can imagine. I seem to recall “sweat” for “sweet” as well (good for a laugh). As is common to some groups of kids, “love” was spelled “luv”, and there was some non-English scribble at the bottom of the note—you know, the “true love always” one? TLA, where lines that form the characters are shared?
Why do you, loinburger, suppose that it never occured to me to wonder if this kid liked her or not? In fact it never occured to me to question his assertion that he thought of her “offen”, nor did his “luv” strike me as artificial (well, I would probably call it infatuation, but whatever—he thought it was something like love). And though the lyrics to the song were perfectly copied without errors, I did not think he wrote it; it was, literally, incredible, and I didn’t believe it.
Do you find this situation, or my response here described, strange? What additional information would you intuitively gather from these misspellings?
Perhaps if I said it like this: my criteria for determining whether a post is accurate, or a poster is credible, or even believable, are not based on them spelling correctly (I never tell myself: this post is grammatically correct, and the spelling is correct, thus the content must be worthwhile/correct). Thus, my disbelief, incredulity, or assessment of a falsehood is not based on them spelling incorrectly.
What you’re forgetting is that I’m going to doubt the poster regardless of his/her spelling mistakes, until given a credible reason as to why I shouldn’t doubt them. If the entirety of somebody’s post were “I have read a lot of information about kemotherapy so I am an expert,” and I had no previous knowledge of the poster’s activities (say for the sake of argument that they’re a new poster), then I would be slightly less hopeful of their providing anything meaningful than I would of the poster whose entire post was “I have read a lot of information about chemotherapy so I am an expert.” I’m not going to say to myself “I do not have enough information to judge this poster’s credibility, therefore I will make no judgment on this poster’s credibility” I’m going to say “I do not have enough information to fully judge this poster’s credibility, but I’m going to make a tentative judgment with the full realization that the judgment may prove inaccurate.” This is the same thing that I’ll say regardless of how much information I have on the poster (since there is always the possibility that I have misjudged the poster), so I hardly think that I’m a terrible human being for taking the poster’s misspellings into account in my initial assessment – I’m being judgmental, yes, but this is no better or worse than any other time that I’m being judgmental (which is all of the time). Maybe the poster misspelled the word as a joke, or maybe they misspelled the word because they really haven’t read any material on the subject – the same doubt does not exist for the poster who used “chemotherapy,” therefore that tiny amount of doubt is not compounded with the rest of the default doubt that I have of the poster’s credibility.
[aside]
The other day I met with a professor (with whom I had no prior contact) who was interested in hiring a research assistant in artificial intelligence. Now, basically there are two extreme ways to go about researching AI (plus an entire continuum of ways in between) that I’ll call the Psychological/Philosophical (or PP) method, and the Engineering method – basically, PP’s use the “Let’s do groundbreaking research and discover the basis of the Human Will and the Psyche yada yada, and oh yeah, maybe make a coupla neat programs along the way that we can sell for cash money to fund more research” philosophy, while Engineers use the “Let’s make some neat programs that we can sell for a ton of money and become rich, and oh yeah, if we discover the Secret of Life along the way that would be neat, but unfortunately we probably won’t be able to market it” philosophy.
I walk into the professor’s office and greet him, and notice that he has a large earring in his left ear. Based on this observation (which I realized had dubious value) I assumed that this professor was quite possibly more in the PP camp than in the Engineering camp (this assumption being based primarily on past experience, since I’ve met far more Humanities professors with large earrings and similar pieces of jewelry than I have Science professors), and so I added greater emphasis to the philosophical portion of my C.V. than I would have had the professor been wearing, say, a pocket protector. The thing is that I recognized that my initial assessment was just that – an initial assessment – so I didn’t lock myself firmly into the PP camp (“Engineers are such wankers, Truth is all that matters, etc.”) (not to mention that I’d have had to lie in order to lock myself into one camp or the other, since I’m not firmly in the PP camp or the Engineering camp, but that’s irrelevant to the aside).
So am I a terrible human being for having used this piece of information (the professor’s large earring) in such a way that it could very well benefit me while having little or no chance of harming me (or him)? I would say “no,” but perhaps you have a different opinion on the matter – after all, I was coming to a preliminary assessment of the professor based on a piece of information that had dubious merit…
[/aside]
Intuitively, I’d gather that he’s a 13-year-old kid (approximately, my guess might be more somewhat lower), and that he’s not a very good speller (which is somewhat accounted for in the fact that he’s a 13-year-old kid). This situation would be (somewhat) analogous if the kid wrote to me (or whoever) “I have read a lot about luv, so I am an expert on the subject of luv.” (This is not an ideal analogy, because even had the kid written “I have read a lot about love, so I am an expert on the subject of love” I would doubt his word based my (intuitive) belief that one must actually experience love in order to understand it, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Oh of course not! If my tone is short it is only because I think my point is simple. Again, I think this is a natural response (intuitive response). I can’t even begin to list all the little superficial things that affect my responses here and in other normal situations, and in fact there are no doubt more than I realize. I just want to say: this isn’t one of them, and here’s why etc.
And this assessment of credibility… has something to do with spelling errors?
Then we say the same things. Their misspellings or grammatical mistakes, however, do not enter into my mind unless they affect the sense of their post, in which case I seek clarification.
I am not terribly learned in any subject; if anything, my profession enables me to answer authoritatively on logic chips, simple digital circuits, extremely narrow chemistry issues, and the operation of simple motor applications. But I am not an extremely skeptical person, either; it is true that I will put forward skeptical responses (more or less) in direct proportion to how incredible the claim is, but otherwise I more or less expect people to say what they mean, or think, or believe, and I work from there. Someone needs to give me a reason to doubt them, which usually happens when
my own prejudices tell me they are wrong
their claim is strong or incredible
I feel I can understand the issue, even if I don’t already (and this is the one that burns me again and again, but if I’m ever to learn anything I think I have to grin and bear the embarrassment :)), and so I approach it from the perspective of seeking clarification (which, sometimes, they can’t provide further fueling my doubts)
what little knowledge I have tells me they are wrong
Apart from that, everyone has a blank check on credibility with me.
…
Oh, and… were you right?
I grant that somebody’s ability to spell “chemotherapy” has extremely little bearing on my initial assessment of their credibility, and has no bearing on my long-term assessment. But, if they leave me little else to work with (f’rinstance, with a post consisting entirely of “I am an expert on kemotherapy because I’ve read a lot on kemotherapy”) then their misspelling is going to have a more significant impact (since there is little else to assess).
And I agree that there are hundreds of possibilities as to why they spelled the term “kemotherapy,” but one of those possibilities (one that I consider to have at least a moderate probability of being true, based on intuition and past experience etc.) is that they haven’t actually read anything on chemotherapy. The guy saying that he’s an expert on “chemotherapy” doesn’t cause this small piece of doubt to creep into my mind (maybe he hasn’t read anything on the subject either, but his spelling, while it does not refute the possibility, does nothing to add to the possibility). It’s far from being a certainty that the guy misspelled the term because he hasn’t read anything on the subject, but it is nevertheless a possibility, and it does create that extra little bit of doubt to enter into my mind that would otherwise not be there (or be quite so prevalent). It’s quite simple for the poster to ease or even eliminate my doubt (if they give citations, or a reasonable argument, etc.), but if they leave me nothing else to work with then the doubt stays – there are better pieces of information with which to assess somebody’s credibility, but I’ll use what I can get. (A much more relevant piece of information in this case is the fact that the poster has claimed expertise without offering a shred of evidence to back up their claim, which does more to indicate possible faults in the poster than any number of misspellings.)
Sure, what I’d consider (in my ever so subjective opinion ) to be gross spelling errors that probably shouldn’t be made by somebody who has read a great deal on the subject (based on the assumption that they’re trying to spell correctly – maybe they’re making a play on words that I’m just not understanding). And again, this is only if they’re claiming authority from written sources – “my brother had kemotherapy” (or whatever) wouldn’t cause me to be any more doubtful of the person’s credibility.
I see people mistake accept/except, whose/who’s, it’s/its, to/too, then/than, etc. all of the time (and I recognize that I probably still misuse these and similar terms from time to time), and it doesn’t reduce their credibility at all in my mind (unless they’re claiming to be grammaticists or whatever). It’s only when the mistakes are in technical/semi-technical terms (i.e. something for which you’d probably run a subject search), and only when they’re so severe that I’d doubt the person’s ability to effectively find sources on the term (I doubt that any amount of searching for “kwantum fizzix” would yield any relevant articles/books on quantum physics, though admittedly I haven’t tried), and only when they’re claiming to have extensively read up on the subject in question, and only when the term is both fundamental (somebody could easily be an expert in chemistry without being able to correctly spell “technetium,” because honestly, who really cares how “technetium” is spelled?) and relatively simple (I’d be willing to accept almost any spelling of “onomatopoeia,” especially at the ending) that they create just a bit of doubt in my mind when they misspell the term, because there is a possibility that they’re bullshtting me and that possibility is brought more to the front of my mind when I’m given evidence that I may be being bullshtted. Hopefully they’ll prove my tentative assessment wrong, but this has unfortunately not always been the case.
This is also fairly true of my dealings with people in real life, but I tend to be more dubious of somebody’s qualifications if they’re just another anonymous non-face on a message board – with time they become less anonymous, but their default level of anonymity is higher than it would be for somebody I met IRL. (F’rinstance, I start out not knowing a poster’s age, profession, gender, etc. etc., while IRL I could at least make an educated guess at most of somebody’s vital stats.)
Yup, the guy’s about 3/4 of the way into the Psychological/Philosophical camp – I wound up getting the assistantship, since none of the other candidates had had any background in philosophy.
