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by samclemens·11y ago·view on hn ↗
Decided to switch out the actual title of this one ("If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious") for fear that it could seem clickbait-y. In fact I think the actual text is very lucid and thoughtful; for whatever reason, philosophers just seem temperamentally inclined toward "cute" titles like that.
3 comments
I just want to comment that I only clicked on the article after reading your comment about the original title, and I feel that the edited title less accurately reflects the material.

You added your opinion to the title, rather than leaving it alone.

Ed:

In fact, your title less accurately reflects the material of the paper, which specifically deals with:

> Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.

Your title completely omits the key focus of the paper, and its examination, which the original title included.

You did this because you disagreed with the paper, and used the pretense of the nebulous notion of "clickbait" to edit in your disagreement.

The original title was more accurate as to the article contents.

I appreciate the note, but at the risk of being offensive you took something that was quite reflective of the style and content of the article and made it sound dry and academic -- almost research-y. It may have outright reduced the clicks to the article; at the very least, it probably changed the sort of person who read it.
Since several users have made a good case for the existing title, we've reverted it. If it were obviously in violation of the rules (misleading or clickbait), we wouldn't do that, but this is one at most arguable.

I think samclemens was genuinely trying to follow the guidelines, though, which is good.

Perhaps ironically, the post is at #2 anyway, which is way high for this sort of thing.

Thanks for the transparency!