Betteridge's Law of Headlines | Hacker News Reader

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

en.wikipedia.org

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For a laugh, I've made a userscript[1] that highlights (lowlights really) HN headlines that conform to this law.

The result looks like this: http://testing321.netau.net/betteridge-sample.png

Improvements welcome, especially if instructive. :)

[1] https://gist.github.com/2908570/

[Chrome: drag 'raw' link to omnibox to install]

[Based on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934937]

Will this userscript stop people from posting linkbait articles?

Sounds like a great title for a new blog entry. Does Betteridge's Law apply all of the time?

Obviously this is true about factual reporting -- the real law seems to be making a judgment on the supportability of the facts, which is only important when you are doing factual reporting. If you are doing analysis, many times the entire purpose is to answer some tough question, so having a head with a question mark makes sense.

Also note that if you couldn't answer the question with a "no" then there wouldn't be much point in doing the analysis in the first place. Many times the nature of these stories are such that you could call it either way, and what the editor wants is for you to go research it and make the best guess you can. That's a fair type of analysis article Note the I believe analysis and commentary articles should be clearly-marked and set aside from normal reporting.

What I see a lot of -- in major media outlets -- is analysis pieces masquerading as news stories. From bloggers I see a lot of half-baked opinion pieces with question mark heads where the blogger basically just throws a couple of facts out and waves his hands around some, hoping to stir up a fight. It's true that question marks in headlines are a warning sign, but it's a heuristic, not a law.

"The maxim trends towards being universally true"

I realize it is a little pedantic but I think it is reasonable when an encyclopedia article contains a line like that. After three or four minutes on the terrible NYT and Washington Post advanced article search I found the following:

Who Will Be Next to Call Nuclear Energy Indispensable? http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/who-will-be-n...

Who Made Those Fingerprints? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/magazine/who-made-those-fi...

When Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences? http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/when-should-juv...

Who Should Teach Our Children? http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/who-should-t...

What is IPv6 and Why Does It Matter? http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/what-is-ip...

In light of a comment about NYT / Washington Post being off topic to HN and or scoped to assertions only:

Is It Worth It Being Wise? http://www.paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

Could VC Be a Casualty of the Recession? http://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html

He should have said any headline that is a yes or no question.

That wouldn't have been as good a headline.

That's implied in the law: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

If it wasn't a yes/no question, you couldn't reasonably answer "no".

Given how often these light and frothy publications appear on HN you would think that they have their fingers on the pulse of the "hacker community."

I am not sure what you are talking about?

I'm using this as an opportunity to complain about seeing the NYT and friends on here so often. This is somewhat related to the fact that they also have vote-bait headlines.

That is what I was guessing you meant, but I have never heard anyone say the NYT or Washington Post were frothy examples of newspapers. And it did not seem relevant because the wikipedia page that pg submitted is not expressly about HN culture.

However in order to cover all my bases I added two of pg's own essay titles/headlines to the list to make sure it meets your HN notability requirements.

I intended that to mean "light and frothy general technology news." As I understand it they're respected for the journalism they do but I don't think half of it belongs here.

Yes, that is quite pedantic. It is clear from the article that Betteridge meant headlines that could be phrased assertively but are not (i.e. yes-or-no questions).

And the word "universal" is generally scoped to some domain — if we say "living human brings universally have some cardiac organ, whether natural or man-made", that does not extend to dead human beings or to rocks. In this case, the domain is, as noted above, newspaper newspaper headlines that question an assertion.

Your domain was scoped by the "living human brings(sic)," that is why it is clear that dead people or rocks where irrelevant. I have always taken universally to mean as wide of a scope as possible.

I was not sure where you where referring to when you said "as noted above?"

The two pg essays I linked to could have been an assertion but the answer did not seem to be no, but I could be wrong. From the quick essays of pg's that I read he seemed to use the question mark for pieces that required a much more nuanced answer than yes or no.

In many countries, the question "When Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences?" is in fact simply "no".

I don't like the links you posted. It would be much better to find headlines which can be answered "NO" but, according to the text are answered "yes".

The usual phrasing of the law is nice and snappy, but I think one of the examples in the Wikipedia article -- "Can the middle class be saved?" -- demonstrates that the right formulation is something like this: If a headline is in the form of a question, the right answer is almost certainly whatever answer is least surprising. If you see a headline along the lines of "Did we really evolve from apes?", "Does the earth still go round the sun?", "Can humanity survive?", etc., it probably means that some crackpottish idea has come up that would make the answer "no", and that the headline writer knows that actually endorsing it would be a step too far.

My favorite joke about this adage is that the following headline goes with it perfectly.

A news editor prints a story about the adage, with the headline: Betteridge's Law of Headlines, is it true?

That reminds me of a similar story about double positives that I can never remember the details of. Fortunately wikipedia came to the rescue:

"During a lecture the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. To which Morgenbesser responded in a dismissive tone, "Yeah, yeah." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser

Stay up to date on this pressing issue by following my pet robot, @questionheds. https://twitter.com/#!/questionheds

This is especially true of British tabloids, in particular the Daily Mail.

I often find it interesting to read the headline and then the final paragraph of the article text.

For example headline: "X causes Y" Final paragraph: "No links were found between X and Y"

As an American I was wondering about non EN-US language headlines. Can anyone comment on non-english language publications?

I can't remember seeing any headlines phrased as questions in any credible German news paper (there's one on 'Sun' level named 'Bild' which I refuse to read, so no comment on that).

There are also some weekly news papers which sometimes contain longer opinion pieces; those might have question marks in their headlines, but usually they aren't too sensationalist.

It would be interesting to analyze a large body of headlines to see whether exist many pairings of similarly worded headlines with and without question marks.

It seems most fear-mongering in the media is phrased this way.

"Coming up at 11. Are children being killed by breastfeeding?!"

upvote for humour.

Obligatory Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075.

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