“Loose” instead of “lose” is all over this site like a bad rash. I’m fascinated by it, because in general, the writing here tends to be of a higher quality that I find on many other sites. This mistake, and the use of incorrect prepositions, seems to be more prevalent among higher than average quality writers than other similar mistakes. I’d love to know why!

A big chunk of this website is ESL. Unless you are listening closely, "loose" and "lose" sound almost exactly the same (especially in regards to the length of pronunciation of the "o"), which for ESL speakers like me can make it hard to derive the spelling from the phonetics.

In the end, it's also just a typo.

close, hose, pose, froze.

noose, goose, smooth, tooth,

I was going to say the same! I've seen it frequently enough on here that I started to think I was going crazy. For a site that generally has few typos + relatively in depth technical writing, it's definitely intriguing.

Former colleagues and I have noticed that we each have a muscle-memory type of typo that we would make repeatedly "just because". For me some of those stem from being bilingual. One of these was my phd advisor, arguably the smartest person i've met. Lose is too close to hose which makes no sense from a pronunciation perspective. So it should be loose which sounds more snooze or smooth.

It's a typo. Get over it.

Is it a typo or a hidden signal that I am not a bot... we will never know.