7 ms·

Are these titles getting worse everyday or is it just me? This is such a blatant clickbait that it makes me not want to click.

jimhefferon 5y ago
I've been a Math teacher for forty years now. If you think this title is pumping out the clicks, making big bucks for the ad networks, then I must say that your experience and mine are very, very different. :-)
- entropi 5y ago
  I understand that math -in general- don't have much public appeal. But I don't think that exempts math-related articles from having titles which actually reflect their content. "Mathematicians Make Sense of Chaos" is, in my opinion, the same as "Cancer Cured". Which cancer, at which stage, what method, on how many people, how, etc. etc. No matter how interesting the article (don't get me wrong, this IS a very interesting article) you are misdirecting the readers and that's not cool I think.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    >Which cancer, at which stage, what method, on how many people, how, etc. etc Presumably that would be in the article body, which can't all fit in the title.
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      A better title is "New treatment improve survival rate of cancer patients". It's not a lie. If they have a few extra characters they can add the type of cancer (that is a very important detail) (perhaps the part of the body instead of the technical name), the name of the drug (it's nice to search info) or where the research was done (people love the human touch). The stage is very important, but perhaps it's too technical. I'd like to see if it's it was tested in humans/mice/vitro, many articles with a title that says "cure" are actually articles about a promising in vitro experiment. Also if they had a control group[1], because there are a lot of cures that are just an optimistic view of bad methodology. I think most of the times it's not on purpose, they just skip a few steps to make the research faster, but the steps are there to avoid repeating error detected in previos studies. [1] Preregistered double blind randomized controlled clinical trials that are good enough to be published in a serious peer review journal, or it didn't happen.
  - jonsen 5y ago
    May I suggest you consult a dictionary for 'make sense of'.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    It's not like this is Buzzfeed. Quanta's target audience is very much NOT people who would normally be interested in clickbait titles.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I am no mathematician (I’m the OP), but to take this title literally is absurd. If not, we’d have discovered a way to have perfect knowledge of all events, past and future, and proved the whole universe is deterministic, and that it can be entirely represented by a tractable number of values.
- Syzygies 5y ago
  The Simons Foundation spends money; the money has already been made. Quanta Magazine wants readers, but not for ad revenue. Their metric for success is relative to their intended audience, which is interested in science.
civilized 5y ago
What exactly did you want instead?
- dahart 5y ago
  I don’t speak for parent, and I don’t care if math article titles are sensationalized or not. But FWIW my experience just now was reading the title and thinking “Oh, cool, there’s news! Maybe a new paper that found insights into these problems nobody has solved yet.” -Click- Ah, this is a blog post about Poincare, there’s no news here, bummer. The title on the page starts with the word “How”, and is different from the HN title. “How mathematicians make sense of Chaos” suddenly no longer implies there’s news. This seems like a problem with the HN title and not the article, since best practice here is to submit the title from the article unedited.
  - civilized 5y ago
    I think a lot of people submit to HN from some kind of automated tool that strips out the "how" from headlines that begin with it
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I used the bookmarklet. It grabs the html title element from the page, not the visible title.
    - dahart 5y ago
      Oh, I see. My apologies to you for suggesting it was a conscious choice! I didn’t realize this was a publishing thing, so it could be something even the author didn’t do. Maybe the html element does get worded by the publisher to try to ‘increase engagement’.
dahart 5y ago
Which title are you commenting on? The HN title, or the article title?
veganhouseDJ 5y ago
IMO it is because we need to retire the word "chaos" in this context. To me, that James Gleick book had massive negative value. It branded the important fields of dynamics and complex systems as "chaos" and fractals. We have probably lost a whole generation of research in these fields from not being taken seriously because no one wants a PhD in "chaos".

jimhefferon 5y ago

I've been a Math teacher for forty years now. If you think this title is pumping out the clicks, making big bucks for the ad networks, then I must say that your experience and mine are very, very different. :-)

entropi 5y ago
I understand that math -in general- don't have much public appeal. But I don't think that exempts math-related articles from having titles which actually reflect their content. "Mathematicians Make Sense of Chaos" is, in my opinion, the same as "Cancer Cured". Which cancer, at which stage, what method, on how many people, how, etc. etc. No matter how interesting the article (don't get me wrong, this IS a very interesting article) you are misdirecting the readers and that's not cool I think.
- thfuran 5y ago
  >Which cancer, at which stage, what method, on how many people, how, etc. etc Presumably that would be in the article body, which can't all fit in the title.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    A better title is "New treatment improve survival rate of cancer patients". It's not a lie. If they have a few extra characters they can add the type of cancer (that is a very important detail) (perhaps the part of the body instead of the technical name), the name of the drug (it's nice to search info) or where the research was done (people love the human touch). The stage is very important, but perhaps it's too technical. I'd like to see if it's it was tested in humans/mice/vitro, many articles with a title that says "cure" are actually articles about a promising in vitro experiment. Also if they had a control group[1], because there are a lot of cures that are just an optimistic view of bad methodology. I think most of the times it's not on purpose, they just skip a few steps to make the research faster, but the steps are there to avoid repeating error detected in previos studies. [1] Preregistered double blind randomized controlled clinical trials that are good enough to be published in a serious peer review journal, or it didn't happen.
- jonsen 5y ago
  May I suggest you consult a dictionary for 'make sense of'.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  It's not like this is Buzzfeed. Quanta's target audience is very much NOT people who would normally be interested in clickbait titles.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I am no mathematician (I’m the OP), but to take this title literally is absurd. If not, we’d have discovered a way to have perfect knowledge of all events, past and future, and proved the whole universe is deterministic, and that it can be entirely represented by a tractable number of values.
Syzygies 5y ago
The Simons Foundation spends money; the money has already been made. Quanta Magazine wants readers, but not for ad revenue. Their metric for success is relative to their intended audience, which is interested in science.

civilized 5y ago

What exactly did you want instead?

dahart 5y ago
I don’t speak for parent, and I don’t care if math article titles are sensationalized or not. But FWIW my experience just now was reading the title and thinking “Oh, cool, there’s news! Maybe a new paper that found insights into these problems nobody has solved yet.” -Click- Ah, this is a blog post about Poincare, there’s no news here, bummer. The title on the page starts with the word “How”, and is different from the HN title. “How mathematicians make sense of Chaos” suddenly no longer implies there’s news. This seems like a problem with the HN title and not the article, since best practice here is to submit the title from the article unedited.
- civilized 5y ago
  I think a lot of people submit to HN from some kind of automated tool that strips out the "how" from headlines that begin with it
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I used the bookmarklet. It grabs the html title element from the page, not the visible title.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Oh, I see. My apologies to you for suggesting it was a conscious choice! I didn’t realize this was a publishing thing, so it could be something even the author didn’t do. Maybe the html element does get worded by the publisher to try to ‘increase engagement’.

dahart 5y ago

Which title are you commenting on? The HN title, or the article title?

veganhouseDJ 5y ago

IMO it is because we need to retire the word "chaos" in this context. To me, that James Gleick book had massive negative value. It branded the important fields of dynamics and complex systems as "chaos" and fractals. We have probably lost a whole generation of research in these fields from not being taken seriously because no one wants a PhD in "chaos".