[ultropolis]

A trick I learned recently that you can apply here is the following:

If a headline asks a yes/no question, the answer is "no".

[blenderob]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

[ultropolis]

I immediately tested the premise in my newsreader, and saw that modern clickbait gives us headlines like "How many weeks till Blandars Gnob is released?", So I added that it must be a binary question.

[latexr]

Either way, research suggests it’s not true. See the “Studies” section in the linked Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) (…) were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".

> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology (…). Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".

> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web (…) divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.

[inanutshellus]

> research suggests it’s not true

You misread. Betteridge's law says it can be "no"...

I think though his "law" is referring to clickbait that imply a falsehood to get you to read it.

"New Research asks - Can your baby live entirely off of kelp?!" ... "wow can she? that's nuts! lemme read! oh. no."

[pinnochio]

Hm, not much of a law if we boil it down to a tautology.

[1718627440]

Every true statement boils down to resolving it to a tautology. In a mathematical proof you resolve definitions until only a tautology is left.

[latexr]

> You misread. Betteridge's law says it can be "no"...

That doesn’t make sense. Of course Betteridge didn’t mean “it can be answered with “no”, but also “yes””. The point is that you can answer “no” instead of reading the article.

Either way, I was responding to ultropolis’ assertion—not Betteridge’s—by citing the studies which already suggest it to be false.

[pif]

mandatory reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

[cosmicgadget]

Ultropolis's Law of Headlines, they call it.