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."

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kamikazeturtles 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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janalsncm 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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m_fayer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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jcranmer 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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AnIrishDuck 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	naasking 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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tootie 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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shoo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	cgh 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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watwut 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.