

Women navigate more efficiently than men - araneae
http://www.physorg.com/news192257546.html

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brm
Headline: Women Navigate More Efficiently Than Men

Intro: Women Navigate More Efficiently Than Men IN SOME CASES

Real story: Women expend less energy than men while picking mushrooms says a
study of a Mexican village

If nothing else this is a lesson in marketing

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nooneelse
The summary-compression method used in human group communication/cognition
seems very buggy and prone to information loss. And you are absolutely right
that this is a textbook case of how very bad it can be.

The first step of compression maps the task description to "navigate". The
word "gather" would seem more appropriate, given the past use of these terms
and the distinction they are supposed to encode. The second step of
compression is really, really terrible. It just drops the qualifier altogether
without any marker that it was ever there, which encourages over-
generalization of the alleged fact. A simple "can" would have been all that is
needed to communicate the existence of some qualification. It is shorter,
simpler, and still gives a lower word count than the Intro we got.

Better Headline: Women Can Gather More Efficiently Than Men.

Notice how this one also invites the reader to ask a "how?" question and
perhaps want to read the story. Whereas the one we got sounds like a closed
fact. It only has provocativeness/argument-starter appeal.

