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Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

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Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#91

Post by corin_ »

raganwald wrote: post #78
corin_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people smarter than the vast majority of HN users (how can this really be judged, sure, but I'd place money on it, certainly far, far smarter than me) who wouldn't know those, and I know many, many people who are damn smart (just not fitting them into the "smarter than most people here", but definitely smart enough to belong here if they wanted to) who also wouldn't know them.

I beg your pardon, I was trying to crack a funny. It seems it is impossible to parody an extremist belief without somebody mistaking it for the general article. I was attempting to parody the fundamentalist debating pedant point of view. Poe’s Law strikes again: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law

The depressing thing is I can imagine people genuinely making the exact suggestion you made, with no humour at all. Sorry!

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#93

Post by Terretta »

cromulent wrote: post #47
ianterrell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no excuse not to know common homonyms and misspellings. A smart person who has trouble with them knows they have trouble with them, knows what they are, and knows to double check himself. If you don't do at least that, you probably aren't that bright. We'll forgive the less common words like your "grammer".

>There's no excuse not to know common homonyms and misspellings. Would you consider dyslexia an excuse, or English as a second language? Or even semi-illiteracy? I think it's definitely possible to be very clever and still not a good speller, and not bother to double-check on an Internet forum. Einstein was notorious as a poor speller, which suggests he didn't double-check himself.

English as a second language is not an explanation for the "your/you're" errors which are generally sheer ignorance.

Ignorance and IQ are certainly different. But IQ is generally measuring "problem solving ability", and when to use a contraction is a problem. If one is very clever, one tends to have that particular problem solved. But, whether the misuse is from inability to solve the problem, or a choice to not solve the problem ("can't be bothered"), either of those is a reasonable predictor of job performance, health, and various other life outcomes.

On "Einstein was notorious as a poor speller" – after moving to the US, Einstein became completely bilingual but could never recall how to spell words correctly in both German and English. This is not the same issue as when to use a contraction, and isn't the same as "not bothering".

The ESL student learns, understands the theory of, and tends to be careful with contractions. ESL errors look and sound quite different than most of these errors encountered online.

The illiterate "I'm too cool for your TL;DR grammar-nazi wall-of-text" types have failed to prime they're Baysian neural networks by reading or doing homework, and generally have no idea their "doing it wrong".

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#94

Post by derleth »

Symmetry wrote: post #77
markokocic wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are probably an idiot. Did you mean "He is probably an idiot." or "They are probably idiots."?

I didn't downvote you myself, but the use of the singular 'they' to denote someone of unknown gender has been in use in English since at least the time of Shakespeare (he used it in places). There was a movement a long time ago to try to make English more like Latin, removing things like the plural they, the split infinitive and so on. Nowadays, with Latin no longer regarded as the highest form of language we really…

Except the people who create those captchas will, by Murphy's Law or similar, be precisely the people most opposed to split infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and other matters of usage that are objectively correct grammatically but are historically declasse (and is leaving out the acute accents in that word a misspelling in English?).

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#95

Post by darklajid »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #84
darklajid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is not appropriate, but it made me laugh so hard. I'm trying to write as correct as I can, but the GP just proved that these mistakes happen to everyone, even the people that think that it might make sense. What about non-native speakers? Their point might be valuable, the participation in a discussion really help- and meaningful, but still - these now/know, there/their, you're/your mistakes are common. A…

FYI, you write "correctly". The only thing, grammatically, that you can do "correct" is "come correct", but that's an idiom.

Thanks for the correction. I should've caught that..

You just triggered an image of my first english teacher. 'To be plus adjective, adjective plus noun, verb plus adverb' was her favorite. ;)

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#96

Post by kilburn »

I am a non-native speaker, and to me it looks like the second captcha is wrong.

According to what they've taught me, it should be "Do you know _____ are we going?" instead of the proposed "Do you know _____ we are going?", shouldn't it (notice the "we are/are we" swapping)?

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#97

Post by [deleted] »

silverbax88 wrote: post #32
raganwald wrote: post #9

Am I to understand from the title that we are equating “poor spelling/grammar in English” with “idiot”? Or is there some more subtle mechanism at work, such as equating “can’t be bothered to stare at hard-to-read-text just to post lulz, wat?” with “idiot”?

We are equating that after years of education, with the subject of English (albeit American English) being a core class for EVERY YEAR of attendance, and with spell checkers on most forum communities, that if someone still goes out of their way to transpose "lose" with "loose", then, yes, they are probably an idiot.

[deleted]

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#98

Post by mirkules »

corin_ wrote: post #75
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #42

So people who are detail-oriented grammarians are necessarily good commenters? Since when? The assumption here is that you can tell a comment is going to be stupid by testing whether or not the person understands homonyms. The only thing you check with that is language ability. I'd argue you'd be better off searching for common internet memes and cliches instead of original thinking -- since that's a sign of a lazy o…

They are homophones not homonyms - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems suitible.

Don't you think it's ironic then that you misspelled "suitable"?

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#99

Post by Bud »

corin_ wrote: post #91
raganwald wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg your pardon, I was trying to crack a funny. It seems it is impossible to parody an extremist belief without somebody mistaking it for the general article. I was attempting to parody the fundamentalist debating pedant point of view. Poe’s Law strikes again: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law

The depressing thing is I can imagine people genuinely making the exact suggestion you made, with no humour at all. Sorry!

Er, HN already does limit access via arbitrarily-chosen tests of user quality. They just chose different tests. :)

I don't think it'd be a 100% bad idea to implement some sort of knowledge-based testing, wire it up to varying levels of initial access/privs on a site, and see what happens, as an experiment. User privs could then evolve once the user had actually posted or commented or rated things.

Re: Captchas To Keep Idiots Out Of Comment Threads

#100

Post by moss »

corin_ wrote: post #75
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #42

So people who are detail-oriented grammarians are necessarily good commenters? Since when? The assumption here is that you can tell a comment is going to be stupid by testing whether or not the person understands homonyms. The only thing you check with that is language ability. I'd argue you'd be better off searching for common internet memes and cliches instead of original thinking -- since that's a sign of a lazy o…

They are homophones not homonyms - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems suitible.

It's suitable, not suitible - normally I wouldn't be so pedantic, but in a thread around the idea of people having to prove they know meanings/spellings/etc, it seems apropriate.
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