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It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?

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You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a computer scientist at Google. But I agree, it's an opinion piece and it's not the Economist's job to grade it as a philosophical essay. Generally, I think the Economist is a high quality publication for news even if the opinion pieces are sometimes a bit silly.

It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.

Claiming a publication uses bad writers isn't a conspiracy.

And I "use" dead bodies for sustenance, without qualifying whether that relationship implies eating or necromancy. If the imprecision is because of a misunderstanding about what an op ed or guest essay is for: it's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.

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