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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Well, for starters, it would make The Economist's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype.

[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...

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This comment reminds me of the forever present HN comments that take a form like "HN is so hypocritical. In this thread commenters are saying they love X, when just last week in a thready about Y, commenters were saying that they hated X."

All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team.

Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.

I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.

It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI.

If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.

This doesn't seem right to me. From the article I believe you are referencing ("What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?"):

> If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of Stanford, one of Mr Chow’s co-authors. A draft paper released on July 15th by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi of mit finds that bond yields have on average declined around the release of new ai models by the likes of Openai and DeepSeek, rather than rising.

It absolutely (beyond being clearly titled "what if") presented real counterarguments to its core premise.

There are plenty of other scenarios that they have explored since then, including the totally contrary "What if the AI stock market blows up?" article.

This is pretty typical for them IME. They definitely have a bias, but they do try to explore multiple sides of the same idea in earnest.

I think any improvements to productivity AI brings will also create uncertainty and disruption to employment, and maybe the latter is greater than the former, and investors see that.

And a tacit admission that absolutely nobody knows for sure what will happen so maybe let's just game out a few scenarios and be prepared.

re: Why are The Economist’s writers anonymous?, Frqy3 had a good take on this back in 2017:

> From an economic viewpoint, this also means that the brand value of the articles remains with the masthead rather than the individual authors. This commodifies the authors and makes then more fungible.

> Being The Economist, I am sure they are aware of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016517

Quite a cynical perspective. The Economist’s writers have been anonymous since the magazine’s founding in 1843. In the 19th century, anonymity was normal in publications like this. Signing one’s name to articles was seen as pretentious.

Even if articles are reviewed by their editors (which I assume is true of all serious publications) they are probably reviewing for some level of quality and relevance rather than cross-article consistency. If there are interesting arguments for and against a thing it’s worth hearing both imo.

I will bite here. It is completely valid comment. It points out to the fact that seeming consensus in this thread can not be taken as a sign that there is actually a consensus.

People on HN do not engage in discussion with different opinions on certain topics and prefer to avoid disagreement on those topic.

Well, it's better the same publication publish views contradicting their past than never changing their views with new info.

If you back every horse in a race, you win every time.

I'm perfectly happy reading different, well-argued cases in a magazine even if they contradict each other.

Why would you expect opinion pieces from different people to agree with one another?

I’m curious about exploring the topics “What if the war in Ukraine ends in the next 12 months” just as much as “What if the war in Ukraine keeps going for the next 10 years”, doesn’t mean I expect both to happen.

To add to your point, both article titles are questions that start with "What if". The same person could have written both and there would be no contradiction.

I don’t see anything inherently wrong in a news site reporting different views on the same topic.

I wish more would do that and let me make up my own mind, instead of pursuing a specific editorial line cherry-picking what news to comment and how to spin them, which seems to be the case for most (I’m talking in general terms).

I don't understand, that recent article is a fairly balanced take on what the title literally asks: What if? It examines what if the hype is true, or what if it is partially true. That seems like a good article. You might have a point if the article was, "The hype is true: examining how the world will now change" or something.

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