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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

The article title is certainly provocative, yes, and that’s the problem. Do you want clickbait titles? The article’s title is a combination of a platitude, an inaccurate and/or irrelevant statement, and an implied inflammatory accusation. Swapping the title for the more accurate more informational less provocative first line is much better for me, but maybe true that not flinging around the word “lies” could result in fewer clicks.

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the word "clickbait" is flung around way too readily these days. a good title is supposed to make you want to read the article, and at its best it is an artistic flourish that enhances the overall piece. and personally, i love that. i enjoy seeing how writers (or editors) come up with good titles, and the fun and interesting ways they relate to the text of the piece. i enjoy when the title is clearly an allusion or reference to something, and chasing it down leads me to learn something new. and i even enjoy when the title is just a pun or play on words, because writers live for moments like that :)

in this case i definitely felt "wow, that's an interesting quote, and i can see what they are getting at. let's read the article to see how it's substantiated or used as a springboard".

clickbait is more "we have some amazing!!!!! information to tell you but to find out what you will have to read the article", e.g. the classic listicle format "10 things we imagined a beowulf cluster of - number 4 will shock you!", the spammy "one weird trick doctors don't want you to know" or the tabloid "john brown's shocking affair!". and yes, that sort of thing is a plague on the internet and i would not like to see more of it, but also that is not what is going on here.

I agree with everything you said in general, and I also enjoy good titles. Do you feel like the article substantiated the quote? I don’t think it even came close. Where does it link a “lust” for certainty with lying?

This is admittedly a subtle point, but I’d be perfectly fine with starting the article with the same quote, attributed to someone, as a decorative introduction. That’s a pretty common writing device. (And importantly in that case, the quote doesn’t need to be substantiated.) It’s just using it for the title in this case that rubs me the wrong way.

Using the word “lies” is almost never good, especially when you are explicitly criticizing someone or something. IMO using “lies” is more or less equivalent to your example “number 4 will shock you”, use of that word is designed to invoke the same response. They stopped a hair short of literally stating Google is lying, but the implication combined with the first line of the article is very strong. One real problem with such an implication is that it may itself be wrong. It’s presuming active dishonesty when the problem could easily be a mistake. When putting these things together with the article’s misuse of the Y axis to again make emotional but not necessarily accurate points, I still think “clickbait” is warranted here - this writing is being a tiny bit manipulative.

To me the title reads very differently - it's saying that if you demand certainty you'll wind up treating something uncertain as certain, and hence believing something untrue.

For reference incidentally, the title is a callback to the last line of a previous post[1] by the same author, on an unrelated topic. So it's presumably meant to be less a statement about Ngrams, and more a recurring theme in the author's views on language.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/test

yes, i thought the article substantiated the quote pretty well, though i get the feeling that i did not interpret the "lies" in the title the same way you did. i read it more as "something incorrect" than as a necessarily deliberate falsehood, and what the title was saying as "if you want 'certainty' then you need to be simplistic and reductive enough that you are discarding any hope of an actually correct answer".

Just to be clear you are saying that this title isn't clickbait?

yes, it absolutely isn't. it's a regular well-crafted title that conveys the flavour of the article and doesn't hint at must-see secret knowledge within.

This depends on your interpretation, so it is not absolute in any sense. I can see your interpretation of a cute quote as long as you take it out of context, but I came to a different conclusion because I think context matters and that this title, whether intentional or not, and whether deserved or not, is easily interpreted as a direct criticism of Google Ngrams, in this context.

I don't think "Ngrams are wrong" is what TFA is about. The author isn't an expert on Ngrams and he's not sharing any new information about them; what he's really talking about is how data about language is unreliable, and why Ngram images are on his site even though he knows they're flawed. Personally, I found the original title truer to the article than the current one.

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