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Headline: Women Navigate More Efficiently Than Men Intro: Women Navigate More Efficiently Than Men IN SOME CASES Real story: Women expend less energy than m

• nooneelse 16y ago
  The summary-compression method used in human group communication/cognition seems very buggy and prone to information loss. And you are absolutely right that this is a textbook case of how very bad it can be. The first step of compression maps the task description to "navigate". The word "gather" would seem more appropriate, given the past use of these terms and the distinction they are supposed to encode. The second step of compression is really, really terrible. It just drops the qualifier altogether without any marker that it was ever there, which encourages over-generalization of the alleged fact. A simple "can" would have been all that is needed to communicate the existence of some qualification. It is shorter, simpler, and still gives a lower word count than the Intro we got. Better Headline: Women Can Gather More Efficiently Than Men. Notice how this one also invites the reader to ask a "how?" question and perhaps want to read the story. Whereas the one we got sounds like a closed fact. It only has provocativeness/argument-starter appeal.