alt Hacker News> If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.
And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
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Just like in speech, people also have accents in writing. For example, despite having used English on daily basis for years, I can't tell when to use "a" and "the" even if my life depended on it. Native speakers pretty much never make this mistake, but they're likely to make other mistakes, like confuse "there", "they're" and "their", which never happens to me.
Not to mention the overall sentence structure even if my text is grammatically correct. I'm likely to build sentences in a way that mirrors my native language. Sure, after being exposed to tons of text in English I got rather good at it, but if you ask me to speak Spanish, I'll produce sentences that are grammatically correct, but a native would never say them because they prefer other structures to express the same ideas.
I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go “this is probably written by a non native speaker” when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.