alt Hacker NewsI agree.
I'm all for Graham's pyramid of disagreement: we should focus on the core argument, rather than superfluous things like tone, or character, or capitalisation.
But this is too much for me personally. I just realised I consider the complete lack of capitalisation on a piece of public intellectual work to be obnoxious. Sorry, it's impractical, distracting and generates unnecessary cognitive load for everyone else.
You're the top comment right now, and it's not about the content of the article at all, which is a real shame. All the wasted thought cycles across so many people :(
Replies
Capitalization and punctuation are to written language what pronunciation and stress are to spoken language. If someone was mispronouncing every word, using incorrect vowels, stressing the wrong syllables, etc., you'd have a really hard time understanding anything they're saying. Writing with incorrect punctuation and capitalization impedes comprehension in the same way.
It's a fad associated with AI, popularised by Sam Altman especially.
It's the new black turtleneck that everyone is wearing, but will swear upon their mother's life isn't because they're copying Steve Jobs.
Graham's Hierarchy, in "How to Disagree": https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html