It is not a bad headline, it is an opinionated headline (based on text from the article). I understand that you disagree with my point of view. Please understand that I disagree with yours, too. The "tangential direction" you are complaining about is the reason I posted the article. I would not have posted it otherwise. You should be glad that people who disagree can still be helpful each other, rather than complaining that your free ice cream wasn't the appropriate flavor.

In my experience, people who disagree can best cooperate if they emphasize accuracy in their statements -- thus quickly finding the areas of agreement and disagreement.

That you thought the statement "good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ" was the most important part of the article is a valid opinion I can respect. That you found the standing-still experiments an interesting way to measure child self-regulation is also a valid opinion I respect.

It is the pairing of the two opinions into the unsupported statement "Standing Still Predicts School Success Better Than IQ", and then the promotion of that dubious statement to the key position of headline, that I find objectionable.

Alternate approaches I wouldn't have objected to:

* contribute article with original headline, but post a first comment with "I found it interesting that the article suggests ability to stand still for longer may predict executive function, and thus school success, better than IQ."

* contribute article with original headline plus appended pot-stirring question: "Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills (Does standing-still predict success better than IQ?)

Or, if HN were to someday allow a comment-with-submission or subhead-with-submission, that would be a great place for highlighting an opinionated takeaway from deep in the article, even though the article's main thrust is something else.

The original headline is disagreeable to me. Most of the content of the article is disagreeable to me. It is not a neutral article. There is no simple neutral way to post it.

Actually, by altering the headline to your own taste, you introduced further distortion, which does not facilitate neutral discussion regarding the article itself, which is the actual topic, and should be treated with respect as one. While the article may be biased, introducing further bias does not help the readers's judgment, so the best headline to post would actually be the original headline; you let the reader decide whether it is disagreeable to them or not.

This is a fair point. I certainly agree with what the article is saying, but the presentation is one-sided. There is no mention of alternative explanations for the decline in ability to self-regulate, or wether standing still is measuring something other than self-regulation. As well, the headline is an accurate condensation of the research findings. It does not tell us the important part of the article, but it does tell us the only part that I am most willing to believe without reading the original study.

One of the factors that lead Reddit to become unreadable, in my opinion, was the proliferation of editorializing headlines.

When the headlines begin presenting ideas that are too large a subset or superset of the actual contents of the article, it becomes difficult to judge what articles one actually want to reads.