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Comment by laserDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is wondering the answer is: No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

That's about TechCrunch articles that talk about Apple. It's not about real science and makes no sense in this context.

"Have scientists found the source of immortality?" "Have scientists invented flying shoes?" Just because it's a scientific article does not mean it's any less applicable.

The headline could easily have been "New data shows possibility of" or "New theory suggests" or countless others.

Your examples are ridiculous. The answer to the question is not "No". The question has no answer right now other than "maybe, we'll see". Not everything is so black and white.

Yes, there are other possibilities for the headline. No, the silly law about internet headlines does not extend to articles with real information about real science where real questions are posed and currently unanswered.

If the answer is "We don't know", then the article should not be posting headlines as questions they don't have an answer too. Unless they are just fishing for traffic.

The website linked here in a Scientific American blog. Their job description is probably two words: "ask questions". Questions are extremely important.

> If the answer is "We don't know", then the article should not be posting headlines as questions they don't have an answer too.

Am I feeding a troll? This is silly. Publicly asking questions that you don't have an answer to is perhaps the single most important feat humanity has ever achieved.

Just calm down about the question, yeah? It's important, and it's not "fishing for traffic". It's a real, serious question.

> Am I feeding a troll?

You just disproved Betteridge's law

You can do that far better by applying it to itself ("Can any headline which ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?") or with a question requiring a non-yes/no answer ("How many Higgs bosons has ATLAS really found?").

> "Have scientists found the source of immortality?" "Have scientists invented flying shoes?"

If the scientists in question did not have evidence to suggest those things, then those articles would not be scientific articles.

If they did, then citing Betterridge's Law would be misplaced.

It's an interesting law, I know. But it's usually applied to contentless news articles that raise a question when they have nothing to talk about.

This article is not that way, it has actual info.

So the answer isn't no? They did find two of the Higgs Bosons?

There exists a third possible answer: We don't know yet.

Which is probably the real answer and should be treated as such. I can't stand these "Did science just discover that Jesus was out to lunch with Jay Z?!?!" NO, it didn't.

I don't know if I'm just pissed off today because of the whole CT thing, or because I see more and more mass media outlets posting nonsense about science, but if you have to ask "did xyz discover blah blah blah" the answer is probably no. It's misleading, and poor form to say stuff like that.

Does posting on HN cause BRAIN CANCER?!?!?!? What you don't know about posting on the internet could kill you and your family, twice.....more after a new episode of Modern Family! [/end anger]

Don't know why people are downvoting you. The best fit value for the cmbined channels is in the 95% confidence level for both single channels, so I belive we can argue that Betteridges law is correct (at 95% CL).

People are probably downvoting him because they are sick of hearing about that stupid law on HN. If you think the answer is "no", say why you think it is "no". There is interesting discussion to be had there.

Saying the answer is "no" because the headline ended in a '?' adds nothing to the conversation.

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