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Comment by halhod | Hacker News Reader

I don’t mind at all. The honest answer is I don’t really know. Broadly speaking it helps our voice sound authoritative and readable to not be breaking the flow of a piece up with lots of quotes and citations. But I can assure you I spoke to many people, and read many papers, in reporting the article

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I see. So you’re positing, essentially, two reasons: 1) stylistically it’s annoying to read broken sentences, and 2) The Economist is, ostensibly, an authoritative source and the reader is assumed to, more or less, just trust that they’re doing their homework - and you are here assuring us that your homework was, in fact, done.

I’m not sure where you’re at, though I suppose it’s not unreasonable to assume the U.K., so this might be my US bias showing … but when I read something and the primary source is missing or there is insufficient citation (especially on a technical topic) I am immediately skeptical of the argument and my null hypothesis becomes that the piece is pushing a narrative. Perhaps that’s just cynical, but I’ve seen this phenomenon so many times where an article says X and doesn’t actually link the law (or court ruling or whatever) and when I go check it on my own it’s almost comically absurd for one to draw the article’s conclusion from the actual primary source.

Of course, I’m not accusing you of doing this at all. Thanks for being a good sport.

yeah you’ve got it. i’m based in London. i am fairly confident that our style can come across as arrogant. i don’t always ageee with it, though i can see its advantages. you’ll see i put a bunch of my sources below for you to check out if you like

I wouldn't say arrogant, really. The Economist definitely has an audience, which is in my view an educated urban professional who works in financial service, or maybe tech or tech-adjacent, or something on the periphery of government. So the tone is spot on, in my estimation. I'm probably just a cynical American and am too used to my news media intentionally lying to me, so don't take it personal if my question and/or explanation came off as rude. I did check out the links, thanks for providing them.

no worries at all, did not take it as such. and yeah, i guess i think just cos something has worked well for us for a long time, doesn’t mean it’s not worth thinking about how well it works today

Just chiming in, I think while your approach may have worked fine in the past, in today's world of half-truths and believable lies it's more important than ever to at least add your sources below like you did now. Because a reputation once lost, even if only by somebody misinterpreting an article, can be a struggle to regain.

I think about this a lot, and I think you may be right, but I am also not sure anyone ever had their mind changed by having sources cited. My main thought is that in an age of cheap machine generated text, we may need to be more transparent about the sourcing we offer, even at cost of style

I think the style could be preserved if the sourcing is done in the style you did here: an aside by the author separate from the main article.

It doesn't have to be paper style in the middle of the article, but it's good if it's present on the page (perhaps behind a button labeled "source disclosure" or similar)

I also think this increases the value I get from pieces like this, in more ways than whether or not my mind was changed. Sourcing might not influence mind changing in particular, but it'll help me if I want to dive deeper in the topic. Just yesterday I had trouble figuring out which paper was referred to by an economist piece by using google scholar queries- if there was a sources section, I'd have known instantly.

yes, good point. I am sure this has been discussed internally and not adopted to date for a good reason, but I will think on it more

I also don't see that sourcing as changing the minds of the untrusting, but as avoiding to lose the existing trust.

Does The Economist still have a statistics page at the back of the print magazine? It's been a while since I picked up the physical edition, but suppose we had a digital version of the magazine and you could footnote primary sources like you did in this thread and stash them at the end, after the stats summary.

it has one page of indicators in the back, yes. it would defo be too many sources to fit in print, but clearly digital makes this possible as a little clickable footnote at the bottom or similar. part of the issue is that one can't help but feel that you are competing with "attention apps", and so there's this deep incentive not to link out. my own view is that you can't succumb to this, and have to trust the reader with their own attention, but it is hard, still to push readers out of the site/app in any way

Well hold on a minute mate, this is an opportunity.

The draw of The Economist is that they are not the attention apps. The Economist could implement the most severe of editorial standards on select issues, wherein you do as I said upthread and bang the citation to a footnote at the bottom (or the last page in the print edition). The only readers who will "link out" are the people like me who you are talking to right now. Everyone else is going to see that the claim is footnoted and think "ah, of course The Economist footnoted this. It's The Economist".

I agree with you, and I hope we will go that way; free range organic high quality etc etc. but the lure of metrics affects our thinking too, in ways one cannot avoid wrestling with

> But I can assure you I spoke to many people, and read many papers, in reporting the article

You keep saying that and not citing them. Please do.

It hasn't even been an hour. Chill tf out.

I'm aware. Please point to the part where I specified a 1 hour (or any) deadline. They're free to do whatever the damn well please quite frankly, but as they've made multiple assurances that said sources do exists, I was just explicitly stating that we would like those citations. EDIT: And while typing this, they delivered.

Deadline? You wrote as if they were stalling or an unreasonably long time has passed, when hardly any time had passed at all.

Incorrect. They were waiting for someone to explicitly ask. And I Did. See their comment. You're the one that's reading far too into this and need to chill.

I'm not criticizing you for asking. That phrasing is accusational and expresses annoyance, I'm reading it normally.

The author was clearly making a point to make us ask explicitly even after we expressed concerns about their and their publications sources. Yes, I was annoyed by this. You however grossly misinterpreted as me being upset and demanding sources IMMEDIATELY, which wasn't the case. I made a single request to follow up on what the initial commenter in this thread said to reinforce that there are multiple of us in the comments that are highly skeptical of the claims in the paper, especially in light of a lack of byline or citations by the publisher.

The author then happily obliged in a timely and respectful manner and addressed my concerns. You, however, are the one that took issue with it.

I interpreted it normally. It seems you wrote it wrong.

I said it once, and waited for them to express interest. Now you have. Here are some of the papers from which the reporting is drawn:

starting point for abyssal biomass calcs - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.6710...

more on abyssal biomass- https://www.nature.com/articles/srep30492

plant biomass per hectare in Sulawesi - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781...

nickel assessment in nori-d for per hectare numbers https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1798562/000121390021...

I spoke to Kris van Nijen, Gerard Barron, Nathan Eastwood, Adrian Glover, François Mosnier, Pia Heidak, Peter Tom Jones, Mervyn Stevens, Alex Laugharne

Much appreciated. This goes a long way in alleviating concerns about this being a paid piece by TMC and gives some insightful credence into the claims about deep water sea life and potential impacts.

As I've apparently upset someone else in the comments by asking for citations, I just want to clarify that I didn't intend that as an attack. I'm just a bit incredulous that an organization with as much "prestige" and alleged journalistic integrity as The Economist doesn't - as a rule - cite their sources or byline their authors.

Perhaps it's just a different way of doing things, but that really doesn't sit right with me for a number of reasons, and as a result, I have a hard time taking anything it says without a spoonfull of salt/sources.

Thanks again.

No problem, happy to help

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