Hacker News Reader

Comment by sideshowb | Hacker News Reader

I read that as Paris. On the plus side it makes more sense now. Should probably go to sleep...

I also read Paris, and thought "stars" referred to celebrities. Oops

That is literally the exact thing that I thought too. Its interesting that a sentence like this can be so easily misinterpreted by multiple people in the same way.

The brain has multiple indicators for this misinterpretation. Stars early on in this sentence, narrows down context, Born in makes us even further think of a human star aka celeb, Pairs is capitlized, making us think it is a proper noun, the brain also doesnt read the middle letters of words if you remember that word jumbled experiment where you can still read it. All of this combines together to make the brain on first glance say Paris and not pairs

Isn't it the capitalization of the first characters of each word which causes the confusion?

New evidence that all stars are born in pairs

versus

New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

I've never understood the rationale of capitalizing headlines this way anyway (is it the American way?)

Yes, titles of things (including but not limited to visual art, written works, songs) are generally all capitalized except for small words

Yes, me too.

Me too.

Me too, and i think we discovered a new phenomenon.

OK i ll rationalize it, stars aren't "Born" , humans are. "A star is born" is a common phrase, and doesn't usually refer to stellar objects. Since i was tricked to believe it was talking about humans, it;s easier to understand how i might have confused pairs for Paris (which was also capitalized). Plus i dont wear my glasses.

Good analysis. I was disgusted at myself for taking the Parisian celebrity interpretation, then somewhat consoled but at the same time disturbed that on Hacker News of all places so many people did the very same. But I think you've hit the nail on the head with the title-case Pairs factor. The All Stars expression probably introduced some anchoring too.

Exercise to the reader - use the observed principals to concoct an equally misinterpretable headline.

"All Stars"

I also read it as Paris, but correctly interpreted "stars" as celestial. It was a very confusing two seconds.

Same here. Paris did some amazing marketing if this is how so many people will read.

I recall the first time I made that mistake: "Must be installed in Paris? Why are these 72-pin SIMMs geo-restricted?"

I read that as All Stars, as in some type of entertainment or sports people.

Maybe not all of them. But quite a few: http://www.imdb.com/search/name?birth_place=Paris,%20France

EDIT: I'm also not sure about baseball all-stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_All-Star...

But there have been a number of baseball players from Paris, Texas and Paris, France:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/birthplace.php?loc=T...

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/birthplace.php?loc=F...

It's because the title capitalized "Pairs" which is not a proper noun, so both of our brains assumed it must mean "Paris".

Last Tango in Pairs

We'll Always Have Pairs

Pairs exist to remind you dreams are real

Damn you. Until the last line I consistently read Paris. Which was the point of course but I wish I'd have paid more attention after misreading the title :D

I want to add another data point to this discussion. I also read that as Paris. return0 has a great hypothesis on this.

the city of light

Even after reading your comment it took me an embarrassing number of tries to read it correctly.

I thought this and made a quick assumption that we found a way to link decoded DNA down to the city level!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com