Hacker News Reader

Comment by motyar | Hacker News Reader

I read it 'Paris'. I need some coffee.

Same here.

I believe the effect is similar to that of a garden path sentence[1] except instead of discovering a grammatical inconsistency and having to backtrack to re-parse, the grammatical context misleads the lexical level so much so that we "see" 'Paris' where 'Pairs' actually exists. I suspect that the 'P' being capitalized further supports the 'Paris' misinterpretation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

Also, the weird English custom to capitalize most words in titles, but not in normal sentences, adds to the confusion here.

US-English, I think. British-English headlines are less caps-heavy.

So semantic analysis of born in provides hints to the lexer, turning Pairs into Paris?

I can tell you it gets even more bizarre: I once misread "bluetooth is dead" as "IrDA is dead" and was like, "duh, no shit, Sherlock, how is this even a news?".

So, apparently, everything gets lexed right initially, then it goes to semantic analysis which figures out that some comms standard is dead, obviously IrDA is a comms standard which is virtually dead nowadays, this tidbit is fed back into the parser, which stabilizes on its final output: IrDA is dead. Kill me.

I just asked a friend of mine beside me to read it, and she read the same thing, "Paris" instead of Pairs. I also made the same mistake.

Hah!

I was just going to say the same thing. I need some beer.

I read it as 'Paris' too.

Actually I expect this is a very common error. "Born in $place_name" has a much higher base frequency than "Born in Pairs", so our System 1 brain screams "Paris!" until System 2 kicks in.

For me it was the casing. We aren't used to seeing "Pairs" capitalized, especially so since it is not the first word in the sentence. Paris however, will always be capitalized, so the brain autocorrects to the wrong word. Even though the title is in headline-case, it still fools you.

Yep, you hit the nail -- it's the casing, indeed. Much like other humans here, I read it 4 times, and still got stumped until I saw the comments section. (While coffee is next to me, and Paris is almost a stone's throw (3 hr train) from where I live.)

As you could imagine, clicked it purely because of my brain going: "What is that non sequitur at the end of the title?"

Most other news/social media sites have a small picture and/or a blurb to set the context beyond the headline. Since this is not possible here, I'd suggest tags like "Astronomy", "Science" etc. to help alleviate the problem of confusing headlines (pretty sure this has been discussed before, but anyway...)

Me too.. even after 4 rereadings of the title, and then still clicking because wat..

* pours tea

Same. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that in is lowercase and Pairs is capitalized and our mind tried to parse Pairs as a proper noun.

Yes! God damnit brain.

Once AI gets as smart as us, it will likely start to make similar mistakes.

And they will ask for more coffee too.

same here! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com