Is The Economist Always Wrong? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#81

Post by jrowen » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

bluebarbet wrote: post #56

DicIfTEx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coincidentally enough, frequent Atlantic contributor James Fallows wrote a rather scathing assessment of the Economist (albeit in the Post ) way back in 1991: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot...

To be fair, people have been writing scathing assessments of newspapers they don't like for centuries.

After reading some of that article and the one from Current Affairs in the other comment, I decided I don't have much of a taste for that genre. They may have some decent points, but it's such toxic bickering.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#82

Post by flashman » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 5:58 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #59

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 understand why it wouldn’t be feasible for a human to do this, but I’m quite sceptical about an AI assessing how accurate predictions turned out to be/how contrarian they were at the time. Quite the contrary actually. The economist has a fairly consistent editing style that gets enforced, so its writing style is very linear and very consistent, fairly easy to “understand” for and advanced llm like GPT-5.5

You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted.

I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#83

Post by znpy » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

flashman wrote: post #82

znpy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand why it wouldn’t be feasible for a human to do this, but I’m quite sceptical about an AI assessing how accurate predictions turned out to be/how contrarian they were at the time. Quite the contrary actually. The economist has a fairly consistent editing style that gets enforced, so its writing style is very linear and very consistent, fairly easy to “understand” for and advanced llm like GPT-5.5

You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted. I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26700664

> The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who own the Economist's "voice".

> I interned at the Economist one summer in college and wrote two articles for it - the published articles bore a small relationship to what I had submitted. The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's of a certain age with an eclectic range of expertises, as far as I recall.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#84

Post by cman1444 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

zipy124 wrote: post #28

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #6

rare example of a question in the headline where the answer is yes

Wait isn't the answer No here? The dots are clearly clustered mostly in the correct half of the graph?

Shhhhh, it's way more fun to spout cynical and clever quips about a publication without backing it up with any reasoning.