Authors of articles in publications rarely get to write the headlines. However, Hacker News people pay inordinate attention to headlines, so we see statements like this: "trust in the scientific community ... gets eroded" because of headlines. We don't need to pay more attention to the problem of clickbait headlines. We pay too much attention to that already. What matters is the substance and interested people can dive deeper, treating headlines and press releases with appropriate skepticism.
It's not that HN folks pay inordinate attention to headlines in isolation. I don't think you meant it that way, but that's how it comes off. The issue is that people often don't read the articles that the headlines are for. We can see this on any social media app. For the purposes of this comment, maybe discussion?, I think that HN, Reddit, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, etc., are all social media. Some folks might want to squabble over exacts but to make things simple to discuss I chose to define it as such.
For science in particular, I think it gets a bad wrap generally because people don't like it when you tell them something might be true then say it isn't. The general population really doesn't seem to like it when the scientific community says "we may have the answer for x, y, and/or z but we don't know for certain." as that's too complex of a thought to keep. We, generally, love to be told simple truths for complex problems.
We see this in politics broadly, as well. When discussing tickets as a SWE I know we tend to understand this by the time we're intermediate developers and adapt our language appropriately.
> However, Hacker News people pay inordinate attention to headlines, so we see statements like this: "trust in the scientific community ... gets eroded" because of headlines.
Trust in HN's ability to think critically is eroded every time circumstances force you to remind everyone of this.
It's always interesting to see which groups of people are held responsible for other people misrepresenting them, and which aren't.
I mean, you're right that the personal adaptation everyone can start making today is to treat headlines and press releases with appropriate skepticism.
But this isn't some fringe HN phenomenon where riled up nerds focus on spurious details and make big complaints about them. Headlines matter. Before social media, headlines are what people read as they walked by the newsstand, what they heard from the crier, what they saw on the overlay on the TV news station in the lobby and at the gym. And now, in the age of social media, headlines are an even louder currency of fact. Almost all social media sites operate as headline + votes + comments. There are stories behind those headlines, a click (and maybe a paywall) away, and the minority of intellectually diligent communities like HN do a a good job of surfacing the details into the comments so that bad headlines are less toxic.
But our behavior here is already the exception and we do need to keep banging on misrepresentative headlines. While also a form of clickbait, they are a different and far more irresponsible class of it than the than harmlessly, wastefully vague click-for-the-mystery headlines that you're tired of hearing complaints about.
In some HN discussions, it seems that half of the comments are from people who only read the headline and are flaming about it, or who read the headline and the article and want to argue about whether they match, or whether the headline is overly sensational and promises something that the article doesn't deliver. Too much meta-discussion, not enough real discussion. And here I am engaging in it too, if only to push back.
