Well, to me it sounds vague rather than fair. "Success" in what? In predicting new observations? Or in securing research grants? Or in letting people put the word "astonishing" in papers?
It just muddles things up to use qualitative terms in scholarly articles like that and it's standard advice to graduates to avoid it. And those who don't follow the advice have it repeated to them by reviewers. And that seems to be a good thing. Personally, I don't want to be told what is "astonishing", and, consequently, what isn't. I am perfectly capable of being astonished, or not, all on my own.
See, it's the "show, don't tell" principle. Astonish people, but don't tell them they're astonished, or they very likely won't.
> Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
For the last few days I have been wondering if there is any analysis to see if this "law" is accurate.
Is there anything other than this?
> With 46% non-polar and 20% answered “yes”, at least two thirds of our headline sample violates Betteridge’s law. We conclude that it cannot be “mostly correct” either.