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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

> Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

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Which makes the headline quite clever in this case, since people will assume that means they aren't wrong, when in fact it means they aren't _always_ wrong.

Not sure it's so clever because I completed it as "not always wrong but often wrong", which their graph in the article seems to confirm.

Mainstream predictions are easy, usually it means predicting status-quo. It's the out-of-consensus that matters (right 2 quadrants) and it looks like they are slightly worse than 50/50 on those.

Props for publishing it though.

https://medium.com/luminasticity/does-betteridges-law-still-...

It seems it may also be used for really embarrassing things that will make powerful people mad if you just state them outright so it is necessary to state it as a question when you know the answer is yes.

Of course any yes or no question can be answered "no" but Betteridge, as we know, means a factually correct answer, and so there are these edge cases where the question mark is used for slightly different reasons than the law assumes and can be answered "yes".

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