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gjm comments on Hedge drift and advanced motte-and-bailey - Less Wrong Discussion
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Asking scientists to keep their paper titles hedge-drift-resistant means (1) asking each individual scientist to do something that will reduce the visibility of their work relative to others', for the sake of a global benefit -- a class of policy that for obvious reasons doesn't have a great track record -- and (2) asking them to give their papers titles that are boring and wordy.
I agree that the world might be a better place if scientists consistently did this. But it doesn't seem very likely to happen.
(Also, here's what might happen if they almost consistently did this: the better, more conscientious scientists all write carefully hedged articles with carefully hedged titles, and journalists ignore all of them because they all sound like "Correlational analysis of OCEAN traits weakly suggest slight association between conscientiousness and Y-chromosome haplogroup O3". A few less careful scientists write lower-quality papers that, among other things, have titles like "The Chinese work harder: correlational analysis of OCEAN traits and genotype", and those are the ones that the journalists pick up. These are also the ones without the careful hedging in the actual analysis, without serious attempts to correct for multiple correlations, etc. So we end up with worse stuff in the press.)
Good points. I agree that what you write within parentheses is a potential problem. Indeed, it is a problem for many kinds of far-reaching norms on altruistic behaviour compliance with which is hard to observe: they might handicap conscientious people relative to less conscientious people to such an extent that the norms do more harm than good.
I also agree that individualistic solutions to collective problems have a chequered record. The point of 1)-3) was rather to indicate how you potentially could reduce hedge drift, given that you want to do that. To get scientists and others to want to reduce hedge drift is probably a harder problem.
In conversation, Ben Levinstein suggested that it is partly the editors' role to frame articles in a way such that hedge drift doesn't occur. There is something to that, though it is of course also true that editors often have incentives to encourage hedge drift as well.