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"
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.
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.
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
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!
Stay curious, and never stop learning. —Forrest Valkai
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.
“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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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"
But Britishers weren't around back then, time travellers notwithstanding, because the land wasn't Britain yet. Furthermore, using "British" in place of "Some" would mitigate the problem but not solve it- owing to that the implication is that the set of Iron Age men were not homogenous. Reducing them to a subset, regardless of the name, still implies that the subset, now, is homogenous. No homo.
So not trying to argue, just have a genuine conversation. Talking from an American perspective, British implies the British Isles (place) to me and not the people (who I honestly have no idea when they lived or currently live there??). I'm not familiar with any other name for the isles (again speaking as an American).
Also, I think (or hope) that most people would understand and any research into the Iron Age is only showing a survival bias that may not indicate the whole population in an area. However, I think it's fair to state that if you see a trend across multiple sites in roughly the same time period, it indicates a larger cultural practice in that area because we are only seeing a small amount of surving evidence. For this reason, I think "some" is too broad.