3 ms·

Well that is definitely not the title I submitted.

• dang 7y ago
  The site guidelines call for using the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Judging by the first couple of comments that appeared here, the title is baity, because it was generating shallow reactions—to the top-level dramatic claim, rather than to the rich content in the article, such as its final paragraph. When the comments in a thread are generated from the most-obvious, already-familiar information in an article—which often shows up in the title—than we get a discussion of people reciting things they already know or believe (not interesting!), instead of a learning process (much more interesting). I changed the title to "There are strong arguments against falsificationism", which is a phrase from the article body. (When we change titles, we always look for representative language in the article itself.) A couple minutes later, I wasn't sure, so reverted it. This is a bit of an edge case. To some extent, what to do with the title depends on which direction the thread takes: shallow "I know better" dismissals? or thoughtful responses to the less obvious?