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I disagree. The title implies a state of affairs which is not true; a reader is likely to take a solid understanding away from it, but that understanding is wro
by scott_s 12y ago
I disagree. The title implies a state of affairs which is not true; a reader is likely to take a solid understanding away from it, but that understanding is wrong.
chton's description will leave such a reader with a greater degree of confusion, but a higher overall level of correct understanding.
- dragonwriter 12y agoSure, but that means that the title is more misleading, while the other explanation is more confusing. Confusing and misleading aren't the same thing.
- scott_s 12y agoI agree. I think, however, we can forgive chton for not parsing out the best word for "kind of badness" prior to our semantic discussion. (If we are to be charitable in understanding his/her comment, then we should assume "kind of badness" was the intent.) For the record, I greatly prefer confusing to misleading. I would rather people have an incomplete understanding than an incorrect one.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> For the record, I greatly prefer confusing to misleading. On this much, we agree -- in general at least. OTOH, often, there are good reasons for prefering particular misleading descriptions over more confusing but less misleading ones (pedagogically, for instance, sequences of progressively-less-misleading explanations are often used, each of which is designed to limit how confusing it is to the target audience, to develop progressively better understanding.)
- scott_s 12y agoAgreed again. I often quote my intro to computer engineering professor who said, "Education is a series of small lies" when told us some circuits have ternary logic, not just binary. But I feel that this headline is not in that group.
- hderms 12y agoI think that's true most of the time, but in this particular case, it probably isn't doing anyone much good (aside from the beneficiaries of that clickbait admoney)