Hacker News Reader

Comment by caddybox | Hacker News Reader

Brown (university) physicist. No reference to his race.

I can't help but wonder if this headline was A/B tested and was found to be more 'engaging' specifically because of the same sort of reaction GP demonstrated.

Edit: Interesting that the headline was changed from the original to no longer refer to Brown university at all. I genuinely wonder what prompted that.

Absolutely not. Americans don't call people 'brown.' We generally have white, black, and hispanic/latino. Anyone else we refer to by nationality, even incorrectly at times. If he were say, Indian, it would say Indian, not Brown.

If you are not familiar with Brown University, the first part of the headline is easily parsed differently. In English, adjectives tend to come in a certain order, with color generally being precedent to origin or qualifier. Therefore it would read as 'Brown' being an adjective describing Manfred Steiner, because the color 'Brown' generally comes before the qualifier 'Physics Student'.

I am not suggesting that Brown University actually A/B tested this. As a university press site, they seem less likely to pursue that. But it would be naive to think that in the current media and political climate in the US, the mistaken interpretation of the headline would not be more surprising, and therefore more likely to grab attention. That's what A/B testing the headlines is for.

All adjectives precede nouns in English. Brown the university is still an adjective in this sense.

There's really nothing to A/B test here. We, especially the media, don't refer to people as Brown the color.

'Attorneys General' and 'Majors General' would indicate otherwise.

Also: president elect, poet laureate, devil incarnate, court martial, etc.

Fair examples. Every rule does have exceptions. But none that would make Brown in the title make one think it was a skin color because of English rules.

Pretty much any university in the country would have written the headline in exactly the same manner substituting their institution's name. And, yes, anyone who interprets it differently is doing so in bad faith or just is pretty unaware of US university names generally.

What is your point? People interpret things in bad faith all the time, but that doesn't detract from my point about the A/B testing. The test wouldn't care why someone arrived at a given interpretation, its only measuring how many people arrived at which one as a proxy for engagement. The motivations people have are somewhat irrelevant.

And we know this sort of thing happens all the time with less scrupulous media outlets. Media outlets surely test specific headlines with the intention of attracting a certain bias depending on the outlets own leanings.

> And, yes, anyone who interprets it differently is doing so in bad faith or just is pretty unaware of US university names generally.

I think most people outside of the US are unaware of US university names. I could name 5 to 10, and that's because I spend a lot of time reading american media and american-centric websites like HN.

Americans absolutely call people brown. It's all over social media, sociology papers, and common conversation. Just search twitter for "black and brown".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com