> It's 2019. EVERYONE does this to get attention from people.
I don't. Nobody I respect does. None of the scientific papers they cite do. Nobody in my friends list on Fecebutt does. Nobody I follow on Twitter does, to my knowledge. Slatestarcodex doesn't. HN doesn't. Wikipedia doesn't. Library Genesis doesn't. The Pirate Bay doesn't. JSTOR doesn't. Sam Zeloof doesn't. Ken Shirriff doesn't. The only sites I've visited in the last couple of days that pull that kind of bullshit are the Daily Beast, Vice, and Bloomberg, neither of which is to the trustworthiness standards of the sites and people listed above, and examine.com.
It seems that you have imprisoned yourself in a sort of filter bubble of dishonest hustlers. You might want to rethink your life decisions.
I am not on Twitter, I am not on Facebook. I am not on Instagram. And I am in academia. Thanks for your concern for me.
The filter bubble based on headlines is your own, where you might actually be missing out on useful content, just because they used a particular headline to grab eyeballs.
What was the title of your last paper? And the last paper you read?
I don't think I have sufficient reason to engage this line of questioning. Have a good day, Kragen.
Well, okay, maybe you haven't published anything yet. That's okay, we all have to start somewhere. But, when you do, here's a tip: your paper is overwhelmingly likely to get rejected if you title it something like “The top 19 myths of 2019 about efficient rank-order filtering.” :)
Context is essential in headline writing. You must consider your audience and the goal. Here, the title of paper plays a very different role to the title of a blog post.
The blog post example is designed to attract a specific audience. Clearly, you are not a member of that audience. However, that does not prevent them from writing articles which would be of interest to you. It also does not mean that the audience doesn't exist, however small you believe it to be.
It seems that you agree with me, and disagree with sachdevap, that not EVERYONE writes dishonest clickbait headlines in order to get attention. The truth of that proposition is not dependent on what audiences I may or may not be a member of.
I do think "everyone" was hyperbole, yes.
However, I'm unsure why clickbait has to be dishonest. In the example the headline was clearly written to attract people with (or susceptible to) a preconceived belief (which the article argues against). Those people are probably more susceptible to the clickbait.
Could you elaborate on the dishonesty?
What, you mean “The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019”? Well, declaring a belief a “myth” is a pretty nasty rhetorical move—it implicitly claims that those who believe it are merely ignorant pagans whose beliefs are absurd, a claim that is only rarely justifiable, and certainly not in this case. And in what sense are these myths “top”? Did they take a poll? Because I don't see any evidence of that in the article. It looks like they just took 19 popular beliefs and made a list. (Why 19? Because odd numbers tested better in A/B clickbait tests over the last several years.) They don't even seem to be in any kind of rank order, with the #1 and #19 items being relatively minor beliefs.
I say “beliefs” rather than “misconceptions” because in fact many of them are true under some circumstances, or still under active scientific debate.
Belief #1, that protein is bad for your kidneys and bones, is true of kidneys in people who are prone to certain kinds of kidney stones https://kidneystones.uchicago.edu/does-too-much-protein-incr... and the debate about bones seems to still be open. Also, excess protein is definitely very bad for you if you have kidney dysfunction, but the danger isn't always specifically to your kidneys in that case. Probably these should have been mentioned in the article, as similar caveats are in items #4 and #6.
Beliefs #2 and #3 are broadly false but an important caveat is that a diet that contains high levels of macronutrients necessarily contains a lot of calories, which are bad for you. There's still a scientific consensus that high-caloric-density foods—things like bread, mayonnaise, butter, and ice cream, as opposed to lean meat and cabbage, increase your risk of obesity and cardiovascular diseases. (Presumably this is because their lower sensation of satiety per calorie results in overeating, but such explanations are still not scientifically solid.)
Belief #6 is correct for people with salt-sensitive hypertension, as the article notes.
And so on. Most of the “myths” are more accurately “oversimplifications” or “overgeneralizations” or just “debatable”, although a few are really without foundation. But telling that truth in the headline wouldn't attract as many readers, so they packed two or three lies into a seven-word headline. They should get some kind of prize for data compression algorithms or something!
You should try reading the full article (the myths article links to an article that expounds on each myth) before accusing us of being oversimplified.
As for the myths themselves - we've received over 50,000 emails from our users over the past 8 years. I'm pretty confident we can state those as myths that remain persistent in the nutrition space.
As I think I said, the article body is fairly decent despite the occasional missed caveat; my thesis was merely that the headline is false, and intentionally so. I haven't read the whole article, but as you can see from my comment above, I did read a substantial fraction of it. That's how I know the falsehoods in the headline are not mere errors.
I did not accuse you of being oversimplified, and I'm sorry that wasn't clear. I said that beliefs like “salt is bad for you” are not so much myths as they are oversimplified, since indeed there is (for example) a very significant population with salt-sensitive hypertension. The thing that is oversimplified is the (broadly incorrect) belief held by many people, the belief you are arguing against. Since it contains an important element of truth, it is dishonest to simply call it a “myth”.
I have little doubt that these beliefs remain persistent. My thesis there is not that they aren't persistent; it is that they probably aren't the “top 19”, as the headline claims, presumably falsely.
I don't expect you to change your headline-writing practices, since clearly the dishonest strategy that produced that headline was chosen intentionally, but I do want to make sure that you don't misunderstand my critique. I think it's kind of a shame that you're throwing away credibility with dishonest headlines, intrusive interstitial newsletter ads, and so on, when the articles themselves are so valuable. But I'm fighting my own battles, not yours.
AhmedF has posted a truly remarkable response to this post, one I think is very relevant to assessing the integrity and trustworthiness of his web site, a response that has unfortunately been flagged into oblivion. It's quoted here in full for the benefit of those without showdead turned on:
Just wow.
> since clearly the dishonest strategy that produced that headline was chosen intentionally, but I do want to make sure that you don't misunderstand my critique.
It's people like you that put a bad name on engineers.
> The thing that is oversimplified is the (broadly incorrect) belief held by many people, the belief you are arguing against. Since it contains an important element of truth, it is dishonest to simply call it a “myth”.
It's a myth if it's preached when it does not apply to a majority.
Yikes. I wonder how fresh and clear the air is up there on your high horse.
I actually write zero of the content on Examine.com because I'm not qualified to do so. Which you would know if you actually looked at the site instead of arguing in bad-faith with a dash of superiority complex.
Unlike you, I try to separate my opinions from facts.
What's your role?
> Fecebutt
Seriously? This is worse than people still including $ in Microsoft.
I have no idea how you could think I intended that joke seriously. Do you work for Micro$oft or something?
Are you trying to joke now about Microsoft to seem like you were joking? There’s no way your original comment makes it sound like you were not being serious. Your comment continues on naming unknown random people you follow and ends with:
> It seems that you have imprisoned yourself in a sort of filter bubble of dishonest hustlers. You might want to rethink your life decisions.
I’d think someone writing that to end their comment would be writing fecebutt [semi]-seriously. Especially when you don’t do that with any other site. And Facebook is a commonly uber hated company by certain people on the web.
Well, I never said it was a good sense of humor, Mongo.
Okay buddy. I guess it’s time for me to rethink my life decisions.
Always a solid plan, my friend.
I'd be interested in hearing your internal thought process on why you spelled it that way. I took it to be a private joke that you had forgotten about your "cloud-to-butt" plugin again. That is, an intentional aside to amuse yourself and some small subset of readers, but irrelevant to the public point you were making.
On the other hand, 'skinnymuch' is right that there are a lot of people who unconsciously subvert their own messages by using similar childish insults based creative spellings. You are obviously aware of this likely misreading, but chose to make the bad joke anyway. I quite likely would have done the same, but why did you do it this time?
@skinnymuch: Accept that it was a joke. You are right that it was indistinguishable from a non-joke, but this is part of the joke. It's hard to account for people's taste in humor.
I appreciate any opportunity to childishly make fun of Fecebutt. It improves the quality of any discourse! It didn't occur to me that someone might think I meant it seriously—that is, that I honestly think the company is called that by, for example, its employees. As I said the other day, there's a sort of Rule 34 of epistemological malpractice, too. It's not just for porn anymore!
It's true that there are people out there who aren't capable of understanding a serious point if it has jokes in it, but I'm not interested in taking responsibility for their cognitive limitations. I'm more interested in amusing other people who would like to childishly ridicule Fecebutt!
The truth of the (non-Fecebutt-related) point I was making is adequately clear to anyone who stops to think about it a moment. It's not some kind of abstruse theorem about linear-time sorting algorithms, or advocacy of some kind of controversial economic policy or something.
> that is, that I honestly think the company is called that by, for example, its employees.
> I'm not interested in taking responsibility for their cognitive limitations.
Great jokes!
I never said any of the second paragraph. I merely pointed out the spelling. Alongside the overly angry and judgemental tone of the comment especially the end.
But seeing the next reply. Continuously merging supposedly serious content with jokes in a format like digital text on a forum. There are numerous issues with that.
> that is, that I honestly think the company is called that by, for example, its employees
So this is a joke too? Or the bit of not being interested in people’s cognitive limitations?
@skinnymuch: Sorry if I guessed wrongly at the reason for your question. I probably was substituting my own reasoning.
@kragen: I think there's an interesting parallel between "jokes" of this form and intentional errors in Nigerian spam. Both serve to focus on the small portion of the audience most likely to be receptive, at the cost of eliminating some larger percentage who would otherwise be receptive. Whether this is a win depends on your goals.
I can't wait to see how you react when you find out where the name “Unix” comes from, or that this site runs on a language named after a speech impediment, or that most of its users use Apple computers (whose first product sold for $666) where the most common shell is the “Bourne-Again Shell”, or what the Google headquarters is called, or where Google’s IPO valuation came from.
You may be confused about what site you're on. This is “Hacker News”, not “Insecure Banker Desperate To Appear Respectable News”. Hacking is the playful application of ingenuity.
"Meditations on Moloch" is pretty clickbaity.
It's “clickbaity” in the sense that calling that novel Independence Day was “clickbaity”—it doesn't tell you much about what is contained in the article, or the novel (especially if you’ve seen the movie). You could plausibly argue that it's somewhat misleading, since it isn't about the ancient Semitic god Moloch at all, but rather about the metaphorical Moloch of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
It is, however, clearly not the same A/B-tested genre as This one weird trick will put an end to your perverse-incentive problems! and Top 7 myths of socialist politics, which are designed to offer a quick, tempting info-snack that you must click through to consume, or be consumed by. In fact, if we were arranging titles by literary quality, I think a more explicit title like How coordination problems result in profoundly suboptimal but very stable Nash equilibria would be closer to the revolting filth above than to the more lapidary title Meditations on Moloch.
Perhaps, though, there is the occasional archæologist specializing in Semitic prehistory who does click on that title and experience a profound disappointment.
>How coordination problems result in profoundly suboptimal but very stable Nash equilibria
That's a great title, actually.
Funny you mention Slatestarcodex as lots of people there are big fans of Examine.com