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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

The thing about The Economist - there are small handful of topics, I do know something about. When The Economist writes about them, I tend to think "hey, that's a pretty good article". That tends to give me confidence in the quality of the rest of its coverage.

I don't always agree with it, but it's at least well argued and thought provoking.

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I had the opposite experience. I read an article I know a lot about once and, although factually correct, the whole thing was wrong because of what they left out and because of the smug 1st world conclusions they drew as a result. I don't know if they left out those facts because it didn't fit with the tone of the magazine of if they failed to do their research properly. I came to the conclusion that it was the former and from that point on I just couldn't trust anything I read from that magazine. They have this way of making the reader feel smug about the knowledge that they are picking up from the magazine without ever challenging the reader's core beliefs. What I am saying is that the magazine is never disagreeable for the reader. It's like only having friends who share your world view. How much are you missing out by not extending your reach?

Doesn't seem to be a reasonable stance to label an entire publication to be untrustable just because you feel it left out from an otherwise factual and subjective data point that you feel strongly about. If sounds a lot like you wanted an echo chamber but as you didn't experienced a specific echo then you just preferred to move onward.

Cherry picking facts that strengthen only one side of an argument is as bad, or even worse than getting the facts wrong. "Wrong facts" are easily caught. Facts that are omitted or those that are presented without context are only discernible to someone who knows the subject, and otherwise appears balanced and well argued to anyone who isn't an expert.

Pointing out the omission of facts isn't "wanting an echo chamber".

> Cherry picking facts

OP's assertion was that the literature review didn't went as deep as he felt like it should with regards to a single data point.

That's not remotely comparable to cherry picking.

Read again:

> I don't know if they left out those facts because it didn't fit with the tone of the magazine of if they failed to do their research properly

> I came to the conclusion that it was the former

OP is explicit that they left out facts that didn't "fit the tone of their magazine". That's pretty much the definition of cherry picking. And leaving out facts always has the advantage of falling back on plausible deniability.

I don’t think it’s an echo chamber to tell both sides of a story. Maybe you can’t tell every possible fact from every viewpoint but deliberate exclusion can be just as bad as false facts. NYT hides one side of the story because it doesn’t fit their editorial viewpoint. It would be better solved to get more political diversity into the news room.

> I don’t think it’s an echo chamber to tell both sides of a story.

But that was not OP's complain. The OP just feels strongly about an issue, and just because a publication known for publishing terse and non-in-depth but otherwise correct articles managed to not cover a detail the OP's feels strongly about... That doesn't mean it is biased, doesn't it?

In the end,if you think about it, the OP is just complaining that the publication doesn't share his personal bias, and the OP feels so strongly and is so adamant in pushing his personal world view that a single slip in a single article published in a single edition is interpreted as an offense so aggravating that he accuses the whole publication of not being trusted.

This alone says more about the accusers than the target of these baseless accusations.

I agree. It's really good magazine considering how wide the scope it covers. Economist is clearly has point of view I don't nessesarlily agree with, but it's not any less high quality journalism because of it. Their viewpoint comes mostly from omission of subjects, focus and weighting of different things. Something any intelligent reader can live with.

This has been exactly my feeling as well. I have found no other general-interest publication where I can read articles about my areas of expertise and not cringe.

Have you looked at The Atlantic? I keep coming across articles from it and have the same feeling about them as I do The Economist, but I’m not a subscriber to The Atlantic so I don’t really kno

Interesting. Because I've several times come by articles in the Economist on subjects that I know, which argue a divisive point based on certain facts. But more often than not, the "facts" presented are deliberately one-sided and distorted by the act of omission.

Prospect is quite possibly the only other magazine for which I'd say the same, to be fair.

Michael Chrichton wrote about this syndrome. When the economist writes about my job, IT, it is usually pretty good. When it writes about my country, Finland, it is sometimes a bit shallow, but the facts are still right.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

As another Finn I don't think it's shallow - I would call it terse. The facts speak for themselves. Like when describing the rabid gambling problem our country has due to state monopoly and broken incentives on public safety versus financial gains.

Just to note, he writes about the exact opposite of what is happening here.

This actually sounds like the opposite of what Michael Crichton described. The Gell-Mann Amnesia occurs when, due to your domain expertise, you are able to see when a publication display a complete lack of understanding on the topic they are covering, yet despite this continue to assume that the publication is qualified to cover topics outside your narrow area of domain expertise. (It is, in a certain sense, a refusal to believe the evidence of your own eyes: you see that a publication has no credibility, yet continue to assume that it has credibility for some reason.)

The effect described by the poster you're responding to is the opposite of that, and actually how credibility is presumed to normally work: you see that a publication get things right in a narrow domain that you have a lot of expertise in (and thus are qualified to identify which publications are purveyors of truth), and extrapolate that and assume, "if this one story is of impressive quality, then there's a good chance the rest of the publication is held to a similar standard." This is how a publication earns a badge of trustworthiness.

I had the opposite experience. The Economist is the least credible repporting source for me.

> The Economist is the least credible repporting source for me.

The Sun? The Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Guardian? The UK has a wide range of shitty print media and The Economist is better than most of them.

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