this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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You should read the article. It's not that long, and how they figured this out is interesting.
I would but I believe journalists should be accountable to write accurate and succinct headlines, anything less would be condoning clickbait
You're right, the headline should clearly have read:
"Based on a DNA study conducted by Dr. Laura Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin and others, assumptions that most iron age Celtic societies were patrilocal have not borne out genetically, which shows that potentially there are time periods where matrilocality is more common, changing views of how women in ancient societies are viewed by modern people studying them, but this is all still early days as the paper has just been published in the science journal known as Nature and the peer review process still has to run its course. And even then, sometimes peer-reviewed science gets overturned, so we can't actually be sure any of this is true until a time machine is invented, which physicists currently think is not a practical possibility (although we haven't surveyed 100% of them on this)."
There. Accurate. Hmm... not all that succinct though.
I guess they should have gone with the title of the paper in Nature: "Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain"
Everyone would have understood it!
It's doesn't have slam in there though. Im not sure who to blame.
Lol gottem
Slammed him really.
Howsabout just putting the word "Some" at the start, to remove all ambiguity?
Is that sentence structure ambiguous?
If you said "Iron Age men fought with Iron Swords" you wouldn't say that statement is clearly false because it's not true of all iron age men.
I mean, I would. I'm sure there were at least a few flint axes still in use
You seem to have missed my point.
In common parlance you don't need to qualify generalisations when it's obvious to the audience that they are generalisations.
Consider a statement like "Australians like to eat Vegemite on toast for breakfast".
It's an absurdity to refute that statement on the basis that it's an unqualified generalisation. It's very obvious to everyone that not every Australian enjoys Vegemite, and that some Australian's probably enjoy Vegemite at other times of the day. The whole point of the sentence is to convey that Australians are more likely to enjoy Vegemite than people of other nations.
If you'd like to spend your life refuting every general assertion on the basis that it's not qualified by saying "some" Australians enjoy Vegemite then I guess you're welcome to do so, but it seems like a very odd proclivity to me.
I miss every point, I'm far too fast
Are you a child physically, or just mentally?
Weren't you trolling on another part of the thread? I already forgave you, but you're back at it with more conversational terrorism. What's with the dark patterns, friend? You some sort of bad actor type?
As for your question, I am neither. I am a genetically modified oak leaf that has gained sentience (unrelated to the genetic modification - that only made me glow in the dark) and manipulated a pack of squirrels to steal a cell phone from a hiker, typing for me in exchange for acorns and the occassional drip of morning dew.
No i wasn't. You're the child trolling in this post as a response to everyone rightfully telling you you're wrong.
I never asked for your forgiveness. I couldn't care less what you think of me.
That is very rude of you, I've already told you I am a sentient oak leaf and yet you continuously refer to me as a child. Why the bigotry? Please desist the harassment, friend.
Because people can figure that out by a combination of using a bit of common sense and reading the article in any doubt. And I say "people" even though there's at least one person who can't, and people will understand anyway.
It's not well and good to assume that common sense is a real thing, seeing the amount of maroons congregating since the proliferation of the Internet. People are easily led, misled, outraged or cowed. Case in point, Flat Earthers
Clickbait is "you'll never believe why these men from the iron age moved in with their..."
Generally something is left out and intentionally worded to make you curious.
A regular headline is meant to convey a single sentence summary, not necessarily covering the why.
I'm not going to lambast you, but I will point out that reading only headlines is why Alex Jones still has a job and has been able to effectively lie for 30 years.
The article is really easy to understand, and it has details that wouldn't fit or would otherwise be missing context in a headline. I really do recommend reading it. Plus, learning is fun!
So, to be honest, I did read the article, but it's still important to hold journalism to professional standards, lest we regress towards the dumb.
What standards is this headline guilty of violating?
It says what the article will be about, which is what headlines are for.
Just the standard about hurting my feelings online. Don't they know that gives me gas? It's a good thing I was on the toilet while reading it, or as the kids say, "Yeeting the kids to the pool, yolo". So the gas was actually helpful as a propellant. For my butt.
Journalists don't write headlines for the most part, editors do. If you think the headline is bad you should email the newspaper, not the journalist, because they probably have no control over it.
And expecting a headline to be both succinct and completely explain the story is an unreasonable expectation. That's why the article is there, to explain what the headline doesn't. Despite what reddit and Twitter would have you believe, browsing a bunch of headlines is not reading the news.
Editors were once journalists, so I would expect them to keep with the standards, unless they got the job through fraud or nepotism
“Summarize all the details of the article in the headline so that reading the article is unnecessary” is not an editorial standard held by any newspapers, to my knowledge.
Your use of quotation marks implies that you're quoting me. Please point to where I said, "Summarize all the details of the article in the headline so that reading the article is unnecessary”
Or perhaps you're acting in bad faith? I believe that may have been a strawman dark pattern you've just used.
Oh, you’re a debate pervert, not someone having a conversation. Kind of on me for not seeing that before now. Don’t worry about it, man. We’re done now.
Insults, now?
It's okay, I forgive you.
Oh booo you have to read more than one sentence to learn things. The horror!
You seemed to be able to judge me on just one of my sentences, so it seems we're on the level
I judged you on all of your sentences in this comment section.
I didn't judge you for that judgment. Did you ever notice how we drop the "e" in judge when we conjugate it into "judgment"? Isn't that wild? I first noticed it while playing House of the Dead 2 on the Sega Dreamcast, and let me tell you the voice acting in that game really lifts the notch's top.
You conjugated into judgement, not me. So no, it's not wild. Or whatever you're talking about. Videogames, sure. Whatever.
Headlines are not meant to tell you everything about a story. You have to read the article to learn all the details. It's not difficult or wild to understand.
Have a good weekend.
Headlines, "meant"? I thought you were against orthodoxy? But it turns out you've been agreeing with me the whole time? Looks like this is gonna be a sweet weekend after all!
Live long and prosper, friendo!
No, this headline is perfectly good. It's got all the key details. The extra details would make the headline too long.
What does too long mean? Are we rationing attention spans now?
There are character limits. And conventions.
The article has the details. The headline describes what will be in the article. For this article, it works.
The word "some" at the beginning of the headline would have been a perfectly acceptable qualification of the phrase which also would've better described the actual findings of the study.
I disagree. It doesn't say "all". "Some" is kind of meaningless because it implies it's something that has happened ever. Like most things within the realm of possibility.
Not having the qualifier implies it's a trend -- neither a certainty nor a rarity.
I don't even disagree that it's a fine headline, but this community shits its pants everytime an article isn't extremely accurate in it's headline, so it's funny to suddenly have an army of people descent upon this comment section to defend specifically this one.
"Some" would be more useful in this instance, as it would distinguish it from the general case. That's pretty standard behaviour for news headlines too, right? This study does not concern itself with iron age populations in general but specifically celtic communities between 100 BC and 100 AD in Britain.
Who would understand it to mean "every single man" just because it doesn't explicitly say "some"? That would be a pretty strange way to read it.
I never implied that it would mean "every single man". That's a pretty strange way to read my comment.
What are you talking about click bait? Nobody got slammed.
You're right. In my home country of Canuckistan, every headline must mention someone "slamming" someone else. I believe that term to be linguistic appropiation, however, because the textbook definiton of "slamming", when I was a fresh budding leaf, meant, "to fuck, hardddddd"
How the hell would you know unless you read the article?
Because I am actually a genie, and have foreknowledge on everything ever written. You can ask me anything, but they count as wishes and you've already used one.
No response.
You're not a very good genie then.
hahahahaha!!!