Taking the time to craft a well-formed message requires a degree of empathy. The golden rule suggests that we write messages in a way that dignifies the recipient. The Global Elite may lack these traits and sensibilities.

There's some of that but I remember 15 years ago this investor in our startup emailed the founder and misspelled the name of the startup that they had just pumped a significant amount of money into :-)

The founders said it was very 'senior' of him and laughed about it. But it's also kind of indicative of seniority because senior people aren't wasting time looking up the correct spelling of a company name - they get the email out with the salient details with the right amount of time invested into it. You want to be dialed in but also if you're doing lots of stuff at scale it doesn't really matter what the name of the startup is. Ideally you did the right diligence before the decision to invest was made but then at that point only a few key things matter and are worth keeping in hot memory any more - things like where the founders went to college (in case it helps with a future connection), what the market is (in case it helps with a future connection), what they need help with (in case it can be brought up with a connection), etc...

or efficiency is more important because you have a high load of people you need to interact with. I was a grammer nazi back in the day but stopped caring because the ROI is minimal and I've got shit to do that's more important. so maybe it's the same for them

Yeah and it's really interesting watching people try to come up with alternate explanations. The people who rule us can't be this mid, otherwise the very concept of meritocracy is bunk.

Or at the very least, the things we tell ourselves are meritorious are not what actually what causes people to rise to the top of our society.

By the way I'm also astonished by their lack of taste. The Epstein properties give off a sinister vibe as one would expect, but watching -- for instance -- Architectural Digest videos you get the impression that either the property has been professionally staged with pottery barn/cb2 esthetic or it was decorated with painting-of-dogs-playing-poker levels of sophistication.

Not surprising I guess but you'd think someone with essentially unlimited budget who has complete dominion over their own time wouldn't end up living in an enormous, expensive, alienating ugg boot.

this isn't wrong

but spelling and grammar still isn't a good indicator for expertise, intelligence or anything like that even in an academic context

Mainly:

1. Dyslexia doesn't make you dump, just likely to misspell and a less likely to notice your misspelling.

2. When speaking about neurodivergence people mainly think about Autism or ADHD but sometimes just mean that your brain thinks in very different patters, this can make grammar hard. Especially if it's not your native language.

3. Sometimes people had shitty situations earlier in their live, leading to incorrectly learning parts of languages. This is hard to fix. But isn't really representative in any way for their expertise in any topic which isn't the given languages grammar.

4. English grammar and pronunciation to spelling mapping aren't exactly well designed. People not wanting to bother with it is not really related to intelligence, or excellence in other topics.

5. Some kinds of expertise are unrelated to general intelligence, expertise, education. So even if spelling and grammar where related to intelligence, it wouldn't be meaningful to judge expertise.

That may be the case. Also, a man's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among all of his different psychological facets. One can be extremely smart in some ways and extremely incompetent in other ways. So some of the global elite might actually be extremely smart when it comes to a few key things and total morons in other ways.

If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?

I generally agree in that I don't see them as particularly brilliant, though I think the average is higher and there is a much higher minimum in some capabilities.

And corruption of power is the cause, I suspect. It has poisoned human minds in all places and times; none of us are immune (which is why we design governments that limit individual power). An early lesson in being in charge was that, having nobody to whom I reported, who would see my work and compel me to a high standard, I let things slip.

Reportees rarely help you: Often they don't know what you do; when they do see it, they assume it's acceptable - you know what you want, and you set the standard of quality and establish the norms. Generally they have obvious disincentives against disapproving of you, and not just as some political tactic but for personal comfort: days are much more pleasant if your boss is friendly. They will give positive or at least non-negative responses to most substandard boss work.

I had to learn to think of it in two ways: First, would I accept this work from someone reporting to me? Second, I internalized the medium- and long-term consequences of substandard leadership and management: once your organization has caught that disease, once that's your reputation, it's very hard to change.

>That they've gotten to where they are despite, not because of their communication skills

Reminds me how I double and triple check the emails I sent out to the higher ups in the company to make sure spelling and language tone was good, while in his emails Epstein was like "wazzup retards, kiddie fiddling party at my place" and getting replies from 3 world leaders and 5 CEOs. Then him and Israel's' former PM were both struggling to spell PALANTIR over the phone. It's a big club and you're not in it.

It's more just selection for sociopathy and backstabbing. Don't even get me started on technical ability; the engineering standards at even the highest echelons are at times apppalling.