Is The Economist Always Wrong?
economist.com
economist.com
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. It seems like that would depend a lot on what sources it chooses, be liable to hallucination or getting poisoned by bad sources, etc. They don’t mention whether they used independent queries for each prediction either, or whether it was doing multiple sequentially.
Given that LLMs can’t really distinguish prompt from instructions etc, I’m sceptical that they can reason particularly well about things like how contrarian a view was at a particular point in time.
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.
The whole thing is bizarre. They could at least have drawn 100 samples and evaluated the model's response. But no, they ran it a few times and hoped that the slight randomness in sampling magically resulted in a balanced assessment of accuracy and contrariness, at some point in time for which we don't even know how much training data there was, nor if that data accurately reflects the opinions of that time. But hey, we've got a graph, so it must be true.
How can people be so stupid?
> cheap bioethanol ... [has] yet to bring about the breakthroughs we prophesied.
Oh.
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
I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?
> 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.
Even in this article they mention “The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction”, something they remind the reader of each time the Iraq War is discussed. I remember an article from 2017 that said the Economist got it wrong, while a less honest publication wouldn’t have.
It’s more remarkable considering that the economist’s articles and opinions are published without the authors details. So when an article gets it wrong, it reflects poorly on the economist as a whole. They can’t simply blame the previous guy, it’s their fault.
They’ll be talking about how they got the Iraq War wrong as long as someone mentions it even in passing 50 years from now. That’s candour I appreciate.
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 (Stellantis, Philips, etc).
There are a number of examples of this (e.g. the Afghanistan and Iraq wars).
They usually use a lot of hedging language to cover their behinds when they make predictions, though, so their predictions are usually more nudges and winks than they are commitments.
Still, the quality of The Economist's writing is in a league of its own. No denying that.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-am...
I explicitly chose a criticism from someone with a wildly different political ideology than my own, just to show that this is not a partisan take. I disagree with almost every opinion expressed in that link, yet agree completely with the validity of the examples given. The Atlantic routinely makes statements contrary to fact, and seemingly has no qualms about lying or exaggerating to make an attention-grabbing point. It’s coverage during Covid was particularly atrocious.
I notice it because I've been reading it for 20+ years. In the last 10 years it has taken a notable turn to the left. Whatever your viewpoint, the "tone" and "lean" of the magazine has shifted in the last decade. It's still a good source of information and I do read it every week.
I somehow expected them to have statisticians and data journalist working for them, but perhaps my assumption was just silly. This article seems to point that they do not, because as pointed elsewhere, this sort pf LLM-heavy approach is far from trustworthy.
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.
That said, though The Economist clearly has flaws I have yet to find something better. A weekly, sober, well-written newspaper is a hard thing to find.
Hardly your typical economist op ed writer.
No skin in the game, as it were.
How many op ed writers have tried to have skin in the game at all? How many of them produce writing which is actually high quality and not just concern trolling about China or what have you?
they are good at schemas that contain specific criteria, a list of objectives that apply to the whole dataset
that then can be reduced to a fraction, 1/10, 8/10, 9/10
they didnt do that here so run the query again when your rate limit is lifted
Betteridge's law wrapping a paywall wrapping an AI piece masquerading as domain-specific analysis.
Of course they're reliably wrong. The stories are immoral by default and often objectively insane. But the Serious People either believe them, or put a lot of money and effort into making sure politicians and the media repeat them.
The public don't set policy and don't read The Economist, so they're handed their beliefs by other means.
Why "alas?" They wanted an economic collapse?
> 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?
You can imagine some narcissistic abuser saying the same thing.
Maybe "not always wrong" isn't the bar you should be shooting for.