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Is The Economist Always Wrong?

economist.com

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Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#21

Post by platelminto »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #14

> We asked it [GPT-5.5] to assess whether each leader had made a falsifiable claim about the future as part of its main thesis. About 1,400 did. We then extracted those predictions, and asked the AI to mark out of ten both how contrarian the leader’s outlook was at the time and how accurate the prediction turned out to be. We ran those queries several times and took an average. I understand why it wouldn’t be feasibl…

I thought the same while reading this - I can easily imagine the AI using hindsight to affect "how contrarian the leader's outlook was at the time", in a way that's similar to how we often do the same.

Would be interesting to do a similar analysis but maybe pushing the AI to search the web for articles/other reporting written during that time, to at least correct for that bias a little bit.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#24

Post by memoriyato3 »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #14

> We asked it [GPT-5.5] to assess whether each leader had made a falsifiable claim about the future as part of its main thesis. About 1,400 did. We then extracted those predictions, and asked the AI to mark out of ten both how contrarian the leader’s outlook was at the time and how accurate the prediction turned out to be. We ran those queries several times and took an average. I understand why it wouldn’t be feasibl…

you can still judge if it was correct or not, irrespective of contrarianness, still a good signal to measure

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#25

Post by throwaway27448 »

memoriyato3 wrote: post #24
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #14

> We asked it [GPT-5.5] to assess whether each leader had made a falsifiable claim about the future as part of its main thesis. About 1,400 did. We then extracted those predictions, and asked the AI to mark out of ten both how contrarian the leader’s outlook was at the time and how accurate the prediction turned out to be. We ran those queries several times and took an average. I understand why it wouldn’t be feasibl…

you can still judge if it was correct or not, irrespective of contrarianness, still a good signal to measure

It can give a judgement, correct or not.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#26

Post by memoriyato3 »

t43562 wrote: post #17

One should do this analysis for various politicians, political parties, TV and news media and so on. How do we know how good or bad the Economist is if we have no other source to compare against? Presumably it isn't trivial to predict the outcome of millions of people's reactions to all the complicated things that are happening to them.

psychohistory, some are already doing it today (LLMs simulating various people with various beliefs interacting)

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#27

Post by roenxi »

The major crime of media is misframing as opposed to being wrong.

> The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction

The issue here is not whether or not the Iraqis had any weapons of any type, the issue is whether the US has a basic right to travel to the opposite side of the globe and invade random countries. One of the issues the anti-Trump crowd has right now coming down on his crazy and unprovoked attacks on Iran has been that it is absolutely an established pattern of US behaviour and he's well within normal practice. Trump is even claiming it is because of WMDs! Again! Eventually at least, after he tried a few other excuses first. "He's lying" doesn't cut much ice because that is pretty normal when the US goes to war and it usually isn't particularly subtle. The only difference from the Economist's perspective is how enthusiastically the reporters want to pretend they believe the obvious mistruths.

Anyway, that rant aside, the issue is more that the Economist is pretending that the unknowable is knowable rather than that they get it wrong more often or not than anyone else. It doesn't seem theoretically possible to predict the price of things more than "up", "down" and "assume it does what it always does". Mapping out the supply/demand curve and confidently forecasting how it could shift in the short term requires knowledge of all actors, their preferences, options and operational constraints. Even for a relatively superficial forecast. Who's got that sort of modelling firepower?

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#29

Post by giacomoforte »

epolanski wrote: post #8

I really like the economist, they are quite centric in their views but don't hide a certain bias for strong representative democracies, deregulation, globalism and open (publicly traded) markets. Their writing style is probably the cleanest in the industry and they always point out potential conflict of interest even though I've never seen the write anything really positive about the companies Exor controls (Stellant…

Nobody ever recognizes themselves as extremist.
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