Perhaps you misunderstood. I know what the user’s username is. Since being “lalitium” alone doesn’t give one any authority here to give commands, hence my question.
The tricky thing about predictions made by public entity or persona is that, the fact that they are making public predictions creates a major influence on the outcome itself. People react to predictions made by them.
A major reason why the new Fed chair is refusing to provide forward guidance, in a major departure from all(?) previous Fed chairs and will likely require textbooks to be rewritten.
Yes, one can see it this way, therefore they don’t want to provide forward guidance. One can also see it another way that ‘their job’ is to purposely use forward guidance to impact direction. Not sure which is the right way.
imo, its purpose is to be independent, because raising rates (combating inflation) is unpopular. otherwise, its job is pretty simple, it does't take much expertise, gravitas or technology to choose the number or to say no to the president.
Alan Greenspan (fed chair from 1987-2006) was famous for deliberately confusing forward guidance. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen are the historical anomalies for clearly communicating their intent.
> As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless had to testify before Congress. On questions that were too market-sensitive to answer, 'no comment' was indeed an answer. And so you construct what we used to call Fed-speak. I would hypothetically think of a little plate in front of my eyes, which was the Washington Post, the following morning's headline, and I would catch myself in the middle of a sentence. Then, instead of just stopping, I would continue on resolving the sentence in some obscure way which made it incomprehensible. But nobody was quite sure I wasn't saying something profound when I wasn't. And that became the so-called Fed-speak which I became an expert on over the years. It's a self-protection mechanism ... when you're in an environment where people are shooting questions at you, and you've got to be very careful about the nuances of what you're going to say and what you don't say.
I think the better Greenspan quote is from one of his earlier congressional testimony sessions: "Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said."
I don’t think The Economist has that kind of power. More likely that when they make covers like these every normie feels that way and it’s going the other way soon, as it has exhausted every buyer or seller and it has reached the ends of your earth and your Mom and Dad even feel that way.
Yep. That's why predicting the future of a system you're a part of is sometimes literally impossible; it boils, fundamentally, to the fact that logical negation doesn't have a fixed point.
Why ask a human being who might have the exact knowledge you are looking for when you can ask the "dumb machine of making things up and getting things wrong" instead.
Now being serious, LLMs are nondeterministic loosy compression algorithm which return "what a plausible answer to that question would be". They have no world model, no truth verification and formally will be excellent while having no verifiable content.
If you think of it as lossy compression algorithm that makes sense.
"There is a book about a boy in a magical school, with friends, who fights a big bad and its called ..."
should have Harry Potter as the highest possible response. But that is not the answer based on a truth model, just a statistical average. You could have been looking for Earthsea series. Or it could have the heat turned up and decide to go for a hallucinated answer over the statistically most likely token.
If you want a verifiable answer your best options would be to have the heat turned to 0, but that means it cannot create new responses. Or if you have heat, to ask 4 times and sample the avg. But at that point what is the advantage over just googling it?
And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
> If you want a verifiable answer your best options would be to have the heat turned to 0, [...]
I don't see how that helps? If you just want the same answer multiple times in a row, you could just write down the seed of your pseudorandom number generator?
> And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't guarantee you get a good answer either.
Game theory? Imagine a simple game of hunter and prey. There are two locations that they need to chose from. If they both chose the same location, the hunter wins. If they chose differently, the prey wins.
Now, if the hunter can accurately predict the prey's choice, they obviously simply need to select that same choice to always win. The similar logic works for the prey; but this means they can't both be perfect predictors of the future — if the hunter predicts that the prey will choose T, they will choose T as well, but that means the the prey will predict the hunter choosing T and will choose F instead, so the hunter has actually to predict that the prey will choose F, and so they will choose F as well, but that means the the prey will predict the hunter choosing F and will choose T instead...
If your prediction is a probability distribution, rather than a discrete outcome label, then, assuming the distribution over the future depends continuously on your action, there should be a fixed point, I think?
Like, if you output a probability distribution among n options, and then there is a continuous map from the probability distribution you describe in your output, to another probability distribution over those options…
Err, hm, maybe you need a stronger hypothesis on the continuous map? If it is contractive then it will definitely have a fixed point. I don’t remember the hypothesis needed.
Yes, you can predict that the outcomes of e.g. the coin flip will have 50-50 distribution instead of "the coin will land heads up" but this is a pretty useless kind of "prediction"; this trivial fixed point corresponds to "I don't know, and I won't even bother to try to know"
Also, consider the game of hunter-and-prey from my reply to the sibling comment. Again, the prediction that the prey will make some choice is arguably not a prediction at all.
I'd love to know if "the pink" has the same problem because I used to find the editorial very good. As a non-investor, left leaning voter, it interested me that I found much to agree with in "the financial times" while still finding much to disagree with in "the times" and "the daily telegraph" and "the spectator" -as if money was more neutrally stanced on left-vs-right.
The view amongst the economically literate left (the LSE?) when I was in the UK, was that lying about money to money-makers was counter productive.
I tend to think this is true. The economist doesn't project into quite the same mindset of outcome, so I still think (despite your polemic) it's less likely the fin randomly lies about things, but I'm prepared to consider it on it's merits if somebody gives me better reasons than what I am afraid is just .. ranting.
Chomsky makes the same point in his book "Manufacturing Consent" about economic papers reporting more truthfully than most: the truth is what their readers need to make decisions in the real world.
Just look at how wrong Chomsky was about his core subject with the rise of LLMs. He basically invented a whole field that turned out to be a very wrong direction.
Yes, though I wouldn't hold it (too much) against him when he was young and the field was even younger. In the 1950s and 1960s and even later, it wasn't clear that LLMs would eventually win at all yet alone win so hard. And Chomsky's early work is genuinely useful. It's just that it's useful formal languages, like programming languages, and has only limited applicability to natural human languages.
If you’re a left leaning voter the Speccie is almost _never_ going to have an article for you.
And the “almost” is simply because often the articles are very well written and a pleasure to read even when the actual topic and argument are deeply deranged. Amazingly this was especially true when Boris was the editor!
There is an amazing write up[0] of somebody who was present when Boris gave some apparently "impromptu" speeches who absolutely pins him to the ground on his technique for appearing haphazard, off-the-cuff when it's patently clear its a rehearsed schtick. The man is literate.
The problem is he is also almost amoral, and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities, and he has some deeply unpleasant ones. (at least, from what I know of him from reading online, having never met him in the flesh)
There is form and there is content. Poor content is more dangerous with alluring form. Some declared having witnessed a bewildering scientific ignorance ("He can't understand data representations").
> and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities
This is quite the contradiction in a democracy. Democracies, at least in modern indirect democracy form, are popularity contests.
I personally prefer this form of government over other popular choices. But ignoring this aspect is exactly what leads to unqualified people being elected to office.
I get that being charming and literally convincing voters it a prerequisite for the job. However the idea that even despite having those qualities there are parts of his character that should disqualify him as a candidate seem equally plausible.
Charles Manson was very charming, but he should still not hold office.
Similarly, Obama or Mamdani being charming is not what gained them interest in progressive circles.
To add to this, I've read accounts that US Presidents suddenly needed to be charismatic to compete meaningfully after the debates started being televised. So even being charming had not always helped one win public office.
I recall a story about Calvin Coolidge, who had earned the nicname "Cool Cal" for his standoffish attitude, about a dinner party he attended. Another guest bet him they could get him to say three words to them by the time the party was over. He didn't say anything in response, then found them at the end of the party and said, "You lose."
Campaigns, for sure, are more marketing than discourse. Their infinitesimal silver lining is they serve as a veneer of social proof, their outcomes represent (to some) a form of legitimacy.
From monarchs to pure direct democracy, decisions have to be made. But how?
I see "government" as a kind of consensus algorithm. Policy work, adjudicating, record keeping, legislating, appropriations, etc. It's all just one big data processing machine, trying to discern signal from noise (information), hopefully learning stuff (knowledge), and occasionally acting.
For all our history, we've experimented with strategies for reducing transaction costs. Building trust, predictability, and stability.
How do you think we've done so far?
IMHO: Government, and especially bureaucracy, ain't great. But the alternative of no government isn't acceptable.
I agree that he should never have been given any power or responsibility, but he was bizarrely one of the best PMs we've had for promoting active infrastructure (i.e. cycle lanes). He was probably more progressive than Kid Starver.
His ability to focus and execute has been haphazard. But as you say he is a good writer and was apparently able to force his will upon most of the writers in the stable
Human beings act as if wisdom and intelligence are general whereas in reality every single area of human endeavor requires so much detail passion and time to acquire the specific knowledge and to maintain currency as the field evolves that those speaking outside their own specific scope are mostly full of shit.
Chomsky is a perfect example of an academic that should never have strayed outside the academy. Everything he's done outside of his narrow field of linguistics has been an embarrassment.
He really understands how to manipulate the situation and has founds various and fun ways to deny genocide. He is a human piece of fucking shit, who denied genocide more then once. Anybody that still hold him up as some kind of 'truth teller' has not done the proper research or is also a genocide denier.
Chomsky said that a long, long time ago. The newspaper and news businesses have almost in common with their old selves now. Though I kind of think The Economist, FT and WaPo are some of the least worst news sources remaining, once in a while. Looking at old newspapers is a good way to be reminded just how opinionated and not news news from the last few decades is.
I don’t think there’s any one thing or set of things you can read that will make you informed on all topics.
Human knowledge is siloed and you need to already be well-informed to judge the quality of information (this is the cause of the dunning-Kruger effect, if you’re really bad at something you lack the tools to understand just how bad you are).
So imo you have to accept you’ll always be ignorant of most topics and get comfortable with thinking “I don’t know”.
Within your own specific areas of competence you should be able to identify independent sources of information that add value and consume those while discarding the rest.
Also when it comes to politics and international affairs: no substitute for travel. Go to lots of places with different systems and you will learn a lot more than you will from reading the economist
> So imo you have to accept you’ll always be ignorant of most topics and get comfortable with thinking “I don’t know”.
Ok but I have to (or rather - I am expected to) vote on those topics. And not just during the elections or referendums, but also figuratively with my wallet and attention. In other words, my actions will be driven by how (mis)informed I am.
And even though I am comfortable with being ignorant, from my experience other people aren't comfortable with me being ignorant. Saying "I don't know, I haven't thought about it" is often met with shock if not anger. I don't have the luxury of dropping those people from my life either.
As for the travel, the perspective of a tourist is different from a person who lives there even for a few months, much less a few years. I agree it beats reading third-party summaries, but I don't think it gives you a much better clarity.
> Saying "I don't know, I haven't thought about it" is often met with shock if not anger. I don't have the luxury of dropping those people from my life either.
There's a softer middle ground. You could try to deflect or say that you'd rather not talk about it.
And honestly, it would be a pretty big issue for me if someone in my life got angry at me for saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure".
Maybe it's the "I haven't thought about it part" that is triggering them? It sounds like you have thought about a lot of these things.. it's just that they are genuinely difficult.
But I hear you. I've had similar thoughts and struggle with it as well.
Yes in theory it should be easier to get on with people if you yourself don’t hold many strong opinions.
Unless of course you’re dealing with a zealot who gets angry if you do anything other than passionately agree with them, but there’s not much you can do in that case anyway
Is this purely because of their economic stances or did the financial times dive into social issues and idpol and maybe some of the stances where a part of the left clashes (migration and such)?
The FT's market is the small remaining group of people who actively don't want to be lied to. The latter three are basically just propaganda now. James Delingpole has worked for at least two as a climate change denial correspondant.
After subscribing for 15 years or so, I noped out after their "walker" cover. The world has enough "both sides" journalism, and I had thought them somewhat immune from that.
Wait, what? People were offended by that? It seemed an apt cover in light of the situation.
For those unaware, the economist ran this [1] image after Biden’s historically disastrous debate in ‘24 (as a result of Biden’s age based senility being on full display after months of party and media complicity).
I think people were probably offended by the lack of such covers relating to Trump's diminished mental acuity when it was on display for all to see in the brief period of 2015-present.
(Not just The Economist, mind; almost every MSM outlet has mostly ignored Trump's mental inadequacy from the moment he came down the escalator. If they'd reported on it honestly from the start, there would be no Trump presidencies.)
Surely you don't think the two are equivalent, right?
Biden was clearly experiencing major cognitive decline over the course of his presidency. Trump was/is not. I've not seen any serious argument or evidence that Trump has experienced a cognitive decline, whereas the evidence for Biden's decline was his every public appearance. Are you being facetious, or is this your actual belief? If so, what is the evidence?
Just because Fox News crowed about it doesn’t mean it’s bad journalism. Arguably toeing the party line is what resulted in Democrats being in that situation (fielding a weaker candidate against Trump) in the first place.
Framing someone who supports democracy vs someone who tried to overturn a free and fair election as a 'weaker' candidate is kind of the problem though. In any sane world, you'd support a literal corpse over a guy who does not want there to be free and fair elections.
You’ll find no disagreement from me that January 6th should, at the very least, have resulted in a ban from serving in public office, but we don’t live there. Which corpse would you rather have, one rank with Biden admin inflation/immigration concerns, or perhaps a bit fresher one?
> In any sane world, you'd support a literal corpse over a guy who does not want there to be free and fair elections.
No, you’d be serious about picking the best candidate you’ve got to stand up against the formidable foe. If all you’ve got is a corpse you might as well not bother.
It's not really just framing though, it was reality. An election is a popularity contest, not a morality detector. Everybody knew Biden was (by then) a wet noodle that could not hold his own against Trump.
If your argument is that people must choose between the devil and the deep blue sea as a repeated excuse for fielding a candidate that isn't all that popular or optimal....
Well then you're going to lose to the devil from time in the binary shitflinging that is the american political system.
For me personally, seeing the phrase "both sides" used pejoratively is a red flag telling me I don't need to read any further.
When people disagree about something, hearing from both sides is important. Can this ideal of openmindedness be cynically abused by strawmanning one side while steelmanning the other? Yes, but in that case the appropriate response is to criticise the specific ways that one or both sides were misrepresented -- which is also the appropriate response to a piece that only presents one side, and does it badly. Muttering about "both sides" never adds anything to an argument. All it does is signal a deep commitment to remaining entrenched in your current position.
The problem is the assumption that in most debates there are sides to be taken, and that there are 2 of them. It leads to shoddy journalism where "balance" means finding someone to debate another, regardless of the bizarreness of their position.
In the real world there are many perspectives on a given issue, and a lot to be learned by everyone through open discussion. "Both sides" mentality discourages this, and also tends to give too much airtime to extreme views.
It's fine if you're talking about something where there are a broad spectrum of fairly reasonable policy positions. It's not fine when you have a TV segment that's like "here's Christina, an astrophysicist from Stanford, explaining how we measure the circumference of the earth, and up next we'll have Bob from the flat earth society"
> Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
Which makes the headline quite clever in this case, since people will assume that means they aren't wrong, when in fact it means they aren't _always_ wrong.
Not sure it's so clever because I completed it as "not always wrong but often wrong", which their graph in the article seems to confirm.
Mainstream predictions are easy, usually it means predicting status-quo. It's the out-of-consensus that matters (right 2 quadrants) and it looks like they are slightly worse than 50/50 on those.
It seems it may also be used for really embarrassing things that will make powerful people mad if you just state them outright so it is necessary to state it as a question when you know the answer is yes.
Of course any yes or no question can be answered "no" but Betteridge, as we know, means a factually correct answer, and so there are these edge cases where the question mark is used for slightly different reasons than the law assumes and can be answered "yes".
The Economist is partly owned by the Rothschild dynasty and was chaired by Evelyn de Rothschild for 17 years, so I've always just assumed it is going to tell you whatever would favor the global elite banking class.
The Economist has this to say about their ownership structure and editorial independence:
The Economist is part of The Economist Group, a private company with a special ownership structure designed to preserve editorial independence. Its shareholders date back more than a century, and include great names in British business, such as the Sainsburys, Cadburys and Schroders. Other shareholders today include funds owned by the Agnelli and Rothschild families. Many staff of The Economist Group also own shares, which are privately traded twice a year.
The company’s constitution does not permit any individual or group to gain a majority shareholding, and no shareholder can exercise more than 20% of voting rights. The editor is appointed by trustees, who are independent of commercial, political and proprietorial influences. This structure ensures that The Economist can take an independent view of the world—free to challenge conventional thinking and concentrations of power. Its role is to inform, not to serve vested interests.
She’s the reason I quit the Economist. In almost every issue for a while they inserted an article about the dangers of trans people, without ever speaking with an actual trans person. Weird. So I looked it up and found out they had secretly put an anti-trans crusader in charge of trans issues, giving her the Economist’s no-byline “voice of God”. If they have become that sleazy and one-sided on issues where I know when they are wildly off, how can I trust them on obscure international issues where they are my only source?
I'm fairly sure the old capital-L Liberal Economist wouldn't have done that, and it's a real shame they got dragged into culture war like everyone else.
They were always overt about being Liberal, though.
After reading their newspaper (their label, not mine) for years, I've come away with three revelations:
A) More than gaining insight and staying abreast of events, what I was really purchasing was the /feeling/ of being in-the-know.
B) Whenever I met with "certain" people, they were likely to also read The Economist which turned out to be another, tremendously handy means of anchoring conversation.
C) The trade balance tables on the inside back page were always interesting, sometimes jaw-dropping.
If you read it consistently you soon realize that every article has a short form summary in the front and long form article in the back, and sometimes a mid size as well, in the same edition.
The Economist is to the City of London (the financial center masquerading as a local authority, not the metropolis) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. Useless as a source of truth, but invaluable to find out who was going to be purged and you should disown stat. Similarly The Economist is useful as a barometer of conventional wisdom in as very specific demographic. Their science and arts section can be very good at times, however.
I find that publications aimed at business people to be a bit more reliable since their readers jobs are to make money and not have their biases confirmed. If the media isn’t useful in helping them make money (by giving them too much bad information), they will simply stop using it.
Of course, making money doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the best unbiased information, sometimes it simply means onboarding onto a bias before everyone else does (aka market intelligence).
This is why (in the US anyway) The Business Journals are fantastic. Also, they're extremely localized, which is most stuff of direct relevance anyway. Absolutely love those publications.
The Pravda parallel is a stretch. It's definitely opinion, but they do consult actual research and more so than most other English language publications. As a social scientist I think they do a better job of treating research than the NY Times or the New Yorker. Often I get the sense the journalists at those publications haven't seen a number since high school. That being said, if you think the kind of statistics based research that comes out of social sciences is all bunk, we live in different worlds and will have to agree to disagree.
The economist is the only paper I read where articles on topics I know about are fair, balanced and grounded in science. The opposite of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. They do have skin in the game, in the sense that their readers wouldn't want to pay for a newspaper that is consistently wrong. And, even if they don't, it doesn't mean that it's not valuable
That's not quite what "skin in the game" means in this context.
The Economist does not need to be right, they only need their readers to believe they are right. That's not quite the same thing, and that small difference is what separates "skin in the game" from not having it.
They can get readers to believe they're right either by being right, or by being ambiguous enough to appear right in multiple futures. Professions where there's skin in the game don't have ambiguity and persuasiveness as an escape to the same degree.
You can confirm their biases, and need to do that to a certain extent to maintain readership. The quality of the media really depends in the demands of the customers consuming it.
Bernie's mittens of Fire can roundturn to Biden as dab-brushes, the economist can arrange for a formal hearing for Iowa caucuses as letters to Lagrange as first claim.
The Economist has been publishing since 1843. As such, one could be forgiven for expecting an article entitled "Is The Economist Always Wrong?" to engage meaningfully with the track record of either the publication or the field from which it draws its name in any meaningful way. Alas.
> To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders The Economist has published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.
"This millennium" is 26 years old. This millennium is still getting charged extra for renting a car. This millennium never saw the Soviet Union. This millennium never used a payphone, doesn't know what a collect call is, and doesn't know why you might need to make one.
This millennium is also entirely, utterly, absolutely defined by the short-sighted ideas of the economist.
I have a hard time passing on the economist. Best reading out there that is condensed and to the point.
The FT is great but I’m a paper guy and the font got too small to enjoy it.
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[ 509 ms ] story [ 4068 ms ] threadYes.
My view is that anybody is free to give commands if they feel like it, just as I'm free to ignore 'em.
When you see the title, you are excited to read, then you're hit with a paywall. Such a bummer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedspeak
Quote from Greenspan himself:
> As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless had to testify before Congress. On questions that were too market-sensitive to answer, 'no comment' was indeed an answer. And so you construct what we used to call Fed-speak. I would hypothetically think of a little plate in front of my eyes, which was the Washington Post, the following morning's headline, and I would catch myself in the middle of a sentence. Then, instead of just stopping, I would continue on resolving the sentence in some obscure way which made it incomprehensible. But nobody was quite sure I wasn't saying something profound when I wasn't. And that became the so-called Fed-speak which I became an expert on over the years. It's a self-protection mechanism ... when you're in an environment where people are shooting questions at you, and you've got to be very careful about the nuances of what you're going to say and what you don't say.
https://www.readtrung.com/p/the-economist-cover-curse-explai...
Now being serious, LLMs are nondeterministic loosy compression algorithm which return "what a plausible answer to that question would be". They have no world model, no truth verification and formally will be excellent while having no verifiable content.
"There is a book about a boy in a magical school, with friends, who fights a big bad and its called ..."
should have Harry Potter as the highest possible response. But that is not the answer based on a truth model, just a statistical average. You could have been looking for Earthsea series. Or it could have the heat turned up and decide to go for a hallucinated answer over the statistically most likely token.
If you want a verifiable answer your best options would be to have the heat turned to 0, but that means it cannot create new responses. Or if you have heat, to ask 4 times and sample the avg. But at that point what is the advantage over just googling it?
And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
I don't see how that helps? If you just want the same answer multiple times in a row, you could just write down the seed of your pseudorandom number generator?
> And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't guarantee you get a good answer either.
Now, if the hunter can accurately predict the prey's choice, they obviously simply need to select that same choice to always win. The similar logic works for the prey; but this means they can't both be perfect predictors of the future — if the hunter predicts that the prey will choose T, they will choose T as well, but that means the the prey will predict the hunter choosing T and will choose F instead, so the hunter has actually to predict that the prey will choose F, and so they will choose F as well, but that means the the prey will predict the hunter choosing F and will choose T instead...
Like, if you output a probability distribution among n options, and then there is a continuous map from the probability distribution you describe in your output, to another probability distribution over those options…
Err, hm, maybe you need a stronger hypothesis on the continuous map? If it is contractive then it will definitely have a fixed point. I don’t remember the hypothesis needed.
Also, consider the game of hunter-and-prey from my reply to the sibling comment. Again, the prediction that the prey will make some choice is arguably not a prediction at all.
The pink is also wrong more often than not when they're talking about non-European issues.
When they talk about Europe they lie.
Subtle difference.
I tend to think this is true. The economist doesn't project into quite the same mindset of outcome, so I still think (despite your polemic) it's less likely the fin randomly lies about things, but I'm prepared to consider it on it's merits if somebody gives me better reasons than what I am afraid is just .. ranting.
And the “almost” is simply because often the articles are very well written and a pleasure to read even when the actual topic and argument are deeply deranged. Amazingly this was especially true when Boris was the editor!
The problem is he is also almost amoral, and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities, and he has some deeply unpleasant ones. (at least, from what I know of him from reading online, having never met him in the flesh)
[0]: "My Boris Johnson Story" by Jeremy Vine: https://spectator.com/article/my-boris-johnson-story/
There is form and there is content. Poor content is more dangerous with alluring form. Some declared having witnessed a bewildering scientific ignorance ("He can't understand data representations").
I personally prefer this form of government over other popular choices. But ignoring this aspect is exactly what leads to unqualified people being elected to office.
Is it?
I get that being charming and literally convincing voters it a prerequisite for the job. However the idea that even despite having those qualities there are parts of his character that should disqualify him as a candidate seem equally plausible.
Charles Manson was very charming, but he should still not hold office.
Similarly, Obama or Mamdani being charming is not what gained them interest in progressive circles.
I recall a story about Calvin Coolidge, who had earned the nicname "Cool Cal" for his standoffish attitude, about a dinner party he attended. Another guest bet him they could get him to say three words to them by the time the party was over. He didn't say anything in response, then found them at the end of the party and said, "You lose."
From monarchs to pure direct democracy, decisions have to be made. But how?
I see "government" as a kind of consensus algorithm. Policy work, adjudicating, record keeping, legislating, appropriations, etc. It's all just one big data processing machine, trying to discern signal from noise (information), hopefully learning stuff (knowledge), and occasionally acting.
For all our history, we've experimented with strategies for reducing transaction costs. Building trust, predictability, and stability.
How do you think we've done so far?
IMHO: Government, and especially bureaucracy, ain't great. But the alternative of no government isn't acceptable.
Before reading them you're merely uninformed, after you're misinformed which is far worse
Human knowledge is siloed and you need to already be well-informed to judge the quality of information (this is the cause of the dunning-Kruger effect, if you’re really bad at something you lack the tools to understand just how bad you are).
So imo you have to accept you’ll always be ignorant of most topics and get comfortable with thinking “I don’t know”.
Within your own specific areas of competence you should be able to identify independent sources of information that add value and consume those while discarding the rest.
Also when it comes to politics and international affairs: no substitute for travel. Go to lots of places with different systems and you will learn a lot more than you will from reading the economist
Ok but I have to (or rather - I am expected to) vote on those topics. And not just during the elections or referendums, but also figuratively with my wallet and attention. In other words, my actions will be driven by how (mis)informed I am.
And even though I am comfortable with being ignorant, from my experience other people aren't comfortable with me being ignorant. Saying "I don't know, I haven't thought about it" is often met with shock if not anger. I don't have the luxury of dropping those people from my life either.
As for the travel, the perspective of a tourist is different from a person who lives there even for a few months, much less a few years. I agree it beats reading third-party summaries, but I don't think it gives you a much better clarity.
There's a softer middle ground. You could try to deflect or say that you'd rather not talk about it.
And honestly, it would be a pretty big issue for me if someone in my life got angry at me for saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure".
Maybe it's the "I haven't thought about it part" that is triggering them? It sounds like you have thought about a lot of these things.. it's just that they are genuinely difficult.
But I hear you. I've had similar thoughts and struggle with it as well.
Unless of course you’re dealing with a zealot who gets angry if you do anything other than passionately agree with them, but there’s not much you can do in that case anyway
Peter Oborne on resigning from the Telegraph, 10 years ago: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-i-have-resigned-from-te...
For those unaware, the economist ran this [1] image after Biden’s historically disastrous debate in ‘24 (as a result of Biden’s age based senility being on full display after months of party and media complicity).
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/04/why-biden-must-...
(Not just The Economist, mind; almost every MSM outlet has mostly ignored Trump's mental inadequacy from the moment he came down the escalator. If they'd reported on it honestly from the start, there would be no Trump presidencies.)
Biden was clearly experiencing major cognitive decline over the course of his presidency. Trump was/is not. I've not seen any serious argument or evidence that Trump has experienced a cognitive decline, whereas the evidence for Biden's decline was his every public appearance. Are you being facetious, or is this your actual belief? If so, what is the evidence?
I don't know what to tell you if you can't see it from literally every public appearance he makes.
People did actual research on how much the 'old!' thing was very inconsistent in narrative and framing:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
No, you’d be serious about picking the best candidate you’ve got to stand up against the formidable foe. If all you’ve got is a corpse you might as well not bother.
When people disagree about something, hearing from both sides is important. Can this ideal of openmindedness be cynically abused by strawmanning one side while steelmanning the other? Yes, but in that case the appropriate response is to criticise the specific ways that one or both sides were misrepresented -- which is also the appropriate response to a piece that only presents one side, and does it badly. Muttering about "both sides" never adds anything to an argument. All it does is signal a deep commitment to remaining entrenched in your current position.
In the real world there are many perspectives on a given issue, and a lot to be learned by everyone through open discussion. "Both sides" mentality discourages this, and also tends to give too much airtime to extreme views.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
It's fine if you're talking about something where there are a broad spectrum of fairly reasonable policy positions. It's not fine when you have a TV segment that's like "here's Christina, an astrophysicist from Stanford, explaining how we measure the circumference of the earth, and up next we'll have Bob from the flat earth society"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Mainstream predictions are easy, usually it means predicting status-quo. It's the out-of-consensus that matters (right 2 quadrants) and it looks like they are slightly worse than 50/50 on those.
Props for publishing it though.
It seems it may also be used for really embarrassing things that will make powerful people mad if you just state them outright so it is necessary to state it as a question when you know the answer is yes.
Of course any yes or no question can be answered "no" but Betteridge, as we know, means a factually correct answer, and so there are these edge cases where the question mark is used for slightly different reasons than the law assumes and can be answered "yes".
I would post links, but it's pointless.
https://archive.is/FziAy
The Economist is partly owned by the Rothschild dynasty and was chaired by Evelyn de Rothschild for 17 years, so I've always just assumed it is going to tell you whatever would favor the global elite banking class.
The Economist is part of The Economist Group, a private company with a special ownership structure designed to preserve editorial independence. Its shareholders date back more than a century, and include great names in British business, such as the Sainsburys, Cadburys and Schroders. Other shareholders today include funds owned by the Agnelli and Rothschild families. Many staff of The Economist Group also own shares, which are privately traded twice a year.
The company’s constitution does not permit any individual or group to gain a majority shareholding, and no shareholder can exercise more than 20% of voting rights. The editor is appointed by trustees, who are independent of commercial, political and proprietorial influences. This structure ensures that The Economist can take an independent view of the world—free to challenge conventional thinking and concentrations of power. Its role is to inform, not to serve vested interests.
https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/Who-owns-The-Econo...
You were meant to ingest the word "Rothschild" and then immediately cease all thought and begin your 60 seconds of hate.
They were always overt about being Liberal, though.
Of course, making money doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the best unbiased information, sometimes it simply means onboarding onto a bias before everyone else does (aka market intelligence).
Who cares if they're right about something? Are they putting money on the line? What is their P/L for being "right"?
But I get what you mean!
The Economist does not need to be right, they only need their readers to believe they are right. That's not quite the same thing, and that small difference is what separates "skin in the game" from not having it.
They can get readers to believe they're right either by being right, or by being ambiguous enough to appear right in multiple futures. Professions where there's skin in the game don't have ambiguity and persuasiveness as an escape to the same degree.
> To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders The Economist has published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.
"This millennium" is 26 years old. This millennium is still getting charged extra for renting a car. This millennium never saw the Soviet Union. This millennium never used a payphone, doesn't know what a collect call is, and doesn't know why you might need to make one.
This millennium is also entirely, utterly, absolutely defined by the short-sighted ideas of the economist.