I think the author still has a point. Nobody from this "1st class newspaper" has noticed the mistake in 18 months. Their quality control does not seem to be as good as their reputation might suggest.
Even if it’s not used seriously it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Even if it’s nostalgic or an old guy who checked the paper for 50yrs and today still likes checking on a couple of his pet stocks once in while on paper.
This was the thesis of the Emotional Design book (the follow up to famous tea kettle design book) that engineers and amateur designers often over focus purely on function and ignore emotion - they overvalue the most rational approach. For ex: programmers always want the least amount of clicks to do x, when an extra step with an info box and a button might help ease worries and anxieties and smooth the UX.
Often there is value in the pure visceral experience, sometimes emotion, or nostalgia, or pure beauty of the design. This is often what creates a great product that people become religious about. So such things can’t be dismissed out of hand simply because the value cant be reduced to going from point A to B faster/efficiently/cheaper.
Some variant of logical positivism is typically drilled into engineers pretty hard. If it can't be quantified, it's not meaningful. In fairness, this is largely true within the context of engineering-related fields, but generalizes poorly outside of that area. But same way a fish is the last to discover water, it's very hard to discover these assumptions while inundated in them. That "not meaningful" slips by very easily, because nobody stops to ask meaningful in what sense. It already sounds so abstract it's easy to think the line of thought is complete.
Did you not read the article? Most of the post was about how the data being wrong wasn’t the big deal it’s that they shouldnt have the numbers section at all since it means no one reads it.
The fact FT messed up by automating it and not doing basic QA is a signal but it’s not the whole story. A few extra pages for nostalgia reasons, style, and a few hardcore fans is hardly a big burden on a product. But who knows. Maybe it is useless.
Shortly before gitlab was going public I saw a related article where the author called the company github instead. Often I see comments correct the article’s figures.
