Congressional lawmakers 47% pts better at picking stocks
When I looked at the thread, the top comment was this [1]:
Incorrect title, the finding is "lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension" This is saying that people in congressional leadership positions do 47% better than other members of Congress.
That top comment then spawned a subthread containing (so far) 212 replies, debating the accuracy of the title and the actual findings of the report.
This is a prime example of why we ask users not to editorialize titles. When people take it upon themselves to write a more “descriptive” title, they often get it wrong, commonly by focusing on a statistic or detail that feels important to them but is not truly reflective of the full contents of the article or findings of the study. But that then becomes the starting point for the discussion, and then much of the discussion thread is responding to the incorrect detail in the title, or is discussing the accuracy of the title, just as has happened here.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
For the record, I tried to find a way to word the title in a “descriptive” way, as you had sought to do, but from reading the article and discussion thread I determined that the findings of the study were too detailed and nuanced to be able to summarize in 80 characters, and so the only option was to preserve the paper's original title.
Still, the submission has received 825 upvotes and 550 comments so far, so it's not as if it's been light-on for exposure.
