Why AI excels at math but fumbles economics: it mirrors the quality of training data

paulnovosad · x · 2026-09-13

A viral theory argues AI is great at math but bad at economics because most training data resembling theoretical math is correct, while a huge share of "economics" writing is simply bad — models faithfully mirror corpus quality. An economist adds that AI is at a sweet spot for the 90% of economics work that isn't economic intuition (data cleaning, coding, proofs), but still makes fallacious arguments when intuition matters.

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