131–140 of 189 posts
An outgoing foreign affairs editor suggested in 1988 that the newspaper ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’. 𐞸 𐞸 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/05/27/book-rev... 𐞸 Maybe outdated regarding the later conflicts (tbh i don't know, i didn't follow their positions on the Ukraine and the Middle-East wars).
I'd love to know if "the pink" has the same problem because I used to find the editorial very good. As a non-investor, left leaning voter, it interested me that I found much to agree with in "the financial times" while still finding much to disagree with in "the times" and "the daily telegraph" and "the spectator" -as if money was more neutrally stanced on left-vs-right.
Peter Oborne on resigning from the Telegraph, 10 years ago: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-i-have-resigned-from-te...
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Probably a reference to Helen Joyce, a prominent gender-critical author/activist. Formerly an editor at The Economist.
She’s the reason I quit the Economist. In almost every issue for a while they inserted an article about the dangers of trans people, without ever speaking with an actual trans person. Weird. So I looked it up and found out they had secretly put an anti-trans crusader in charge of trans issues, giving her the Economist’s no-byline “voice of God”. If they have become that sleazy and one-sided on issues where I know whe…
They were always overt about being Liberal, though.
After reading their newspaper (their label, not mine) for years, I've come away with three revelations: A) More than gaining insight and staying abreast of events, what I was really purchasing was the /feeling/ of being in-the-know. B) Whenever I met with "certain" people, they were likely to also read The Economist which turned out to be another, tremendously handy means of anchoring conversation. C) The trade balan…
The Economist is to the City of London (the financial center masquerading as a local authority, not the metropolis) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. Useless as a source of truth, but invaluable to find out who was going to be purged and you should disown stat. Similarly The Economist is useful as a barometer of conventional wisdom in as very specific demographic. Their science and arts section can be ve…
Of course, making money doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the best unbiased information, sometimes it simply means onboarding onto a bias before everyone else does (aka market intelligence).
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Chomsky makes the same point in his book "Manufacturing Consent": Economic papers report more truthfully than most because the truth is what their readers need to make decisions in the real world. I find that pretty convincing and I do check out such papers occasionally for that reason.
It's somewhat funny that the rest of Chomsky's ideology doesn't seem to really take that insight serious.
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I think that's the wrong way to look at it. They do have skin in the game, in the sense that their readers wouldn't want to pay for a newspaper that is consistently wrong. And, even if they don't, it doesn't mean that it's not valuable
That's not quite what "skin in the game" means in this context. The Economist does not need to be right, they only need their readers to believe they are right . That's not quite the same thing, and that small difference is what separates "skin in the game" from not having it. They can get readers to believe they're right either by being right, or by being ambiguous enough to appear right in multiple futures. Profess…
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Chomsky is a perfect example of an academic that should never have strayed outside the academy. Everything he's done outside of his narrow field of linguistics has been an embarrassment.
no, he also underatands the system, propaganda, manipulation pretty well... he was just on the wrong side of truth and justice.
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Just copy and paste the sentence you admire into your favourite LLM and then ask the question you had?
Why ask a human being who might have the exact knowledge you are looking for when you can ask the "dumb machine of making things up and getting things wrong" instead. Now being serious, LLMs are nondeterministic loosy compression algorithm which return "what a plausible answer to that question would be". They have no world model, no truth verification and formally will be excellent while having no verifiable content.
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A major reason why the new Fed chair is refusing to provide forward guidance, in a major departure from all(?) previous Fed chairs and will likely require textbooks to be rewritten.
Alan Greenspan (fed chair from 1987-2006) was famous for deliberately confusing forward guidance. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen are the historical anomalies for clearly communicating their intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedspeak Quote from Greenspan himself: > As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless ha…