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sfb comments on Other people's procedural knowledge gaps - Less Wrong
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English speakers ought to know that its is the possessive adjective and it's is the contraction for 'it is'. It drives me crazy when people use it's to mean its, and I do not understand why they do it. Do people not learn how to write by reading? (I certainly did, and I don't see how else you could do it, but I realise I'm somewhat abnormal.) Or is the incorrect use of it's so ubiquitous now that even if people learn to write by reading, unless they read mostly stuff more than ten years old they aren't being exposed to a data set from which they can infer the correct rule? Or is it more a question of being published on paper than of age? And incidentally, does anyone know if schools have stopped teaching this and similar rules? (And if so, why?)
ETA: At least two people downvoted this, so perhaps I should make the following two points more explicit.
My comment was not intended to be censorious in tone (and rereading it I still don't think it is). The bulk of what I wrote takes the form of wondering about the cause of this, to me particularly irritating, phenomenon. (Thanks to Vladimir M, I am a little less confused now.)
The reason why I find the phenomenon so irritating is primarily that I value my ability to effortlessly produce correct grammar, spelling, etc., and seeing the same mistake consistently a large enough fraction of the time bollixes up my machinery, tending to decrease the effortlessness with which I can perform correctly. Also, I fear that others are subject to the same effect, and that there could be a threshold of criticality, and even that that threshold may already have been reached. So it's a (fairly minor) group rationality issue.
I do it (and then correct it, but only when I notice that I've done so) because using an apostrophe to indicate possession is the common case.
Relevant apostrophe comic 1.
You might find this snippet of OKCupid's blog interesting - a correlation between being religious and being unbothered by poor spelling and grammar. It's a graphic because the blog post is long and has no way to link just to that point. Full link.
Still, downvoted because this is not a procedural knowledge gap you think should be filled, it's just ranting and possibly being in the pattern of having a subgroup of people over whom to feel superior.
For nouns, but not pronouns. Compare his, her, my, their, ...
As for comics, perhas I should not admit to liking this one.
The objection that it's not a procedural knowledge gap is probably valid. But I was not just ranting; I asked a number of questions in the answers to which I am genuinely interested. And whether I feel superior to people who use apostrophes incorrectly does not strike me as relevant--although I try not to, and understanding why they do it might help.
Although I note that the OP does not mention the 'procedural' restriction.
The negative correlation between religiosity and writing level doesn't surprise me, but I find it rather distressing that the average writing level for any of the demographics tops at the ninth grade level. This is a site where people are trying to present themselves as well as possible to sell themselves to others, and most of them write at a standard below the work of an average high school sophomore?
Subjective quality of writing, and objective quality of communication, don't correlate all that well with reading level. Pretty much all the popular readability formulas use fairly simple functions of sentence length and percentage of hard words (i.e. not on a minimal vocabulary list), so prioritizing clarity and accessibility will tend to push readability scores down.
I just ran an arbitrary selection of articles from the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle through a Dale-Chall readability metric here; the results varied between 9th grade and a college sophomore level, with a median of about 11th grade. The most recent chapter of Luminosity scores at 9th or 10th grade level, while the most recent chapter of MoR lies at 7th-8th.
The tools used to evaluate the level of writing ability or even the quality of the specific test. The very nature of the questions being answered and the format appropriate to the context would play a large part in the ratings shown.
The trend reversal regarding seriousness about beliefs for agnostics and atheists is striking. ETA: Looking at that it may be small enough to be a statistical fluke. I wish they gave more detailed data for us to crunch the numbers.