4 ms·
What an egregiously misleading title. The actual underlying facts are that South Koreans' resposes to a survey about what makes life meaningful were different
by lisper 5y ago
What an egregiously misleading title. The actual underlying facts are that South Koreans' resposes to a survey about what makes life meaningful were different (when placed in rank order) from all of the other countries in the survey. Not absent, just different. And also, if you actually look at the numbers, not all that much different.
- politician 5y agoMaybe? The final two paragraphs: “What the Pew survey shows isn's that Koreans are far more materialistic than their counterparts in other developed economies. It's that Korea suffers from an absence of existential purpose. Many of its people say they have nothing to live for, and that's the country's biggest problem.”
- lisper 5y agoBut the data don't support that conclusion at all. It's a value judgement that materialism is somehow invalid as an existential purpose.
- politician 5y agoThat’s a good point. Historically, groups religious and otherwise have looked unfavorably on the idea that one’s purpose in life is to concentrate material wealth for one’s self. Acceptable beneficiaries are usually the government or family or religion, depending on the period.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoYep. I've replaced the title with something more neutral now. Unfortunately I actually had to write something new (this is almost never necessary— https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=representative%20article%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
- debo_ 5y agoAh, I didn't realise I was supposed to rewrite headlines under certain conditions. I understood the rule to be "use the headline as written, even if you can think of a better summary." I'll try that next time.
- dang 5y agoThanks! The rule is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html There's sort of a subrule, which is below the detail line that makes sense to include in the guidelines, but which is a good practice: when changing a misleading or linkbait title, try to use representative, neutral language from the article itself. You can usually find that somewhere, whether in a subtitle, the HTML doc title, a photo caption, the first paragraph, or even a 'thesis statement', as high school English teachers used to call them, buried somewhere in the middle of the piece. That way the article still gets to speak for itself; more so, in fact, because media headlines are usually written by someone other than the author. It's almost never necessary to make up language to replace a baity title with. I did so in this case, but that's rare.
- lazyant 5y agoYes, actually one of the biggest outliers is the importance of "faith" in the US.