Buying News By Metric

For many decades I’ve thought about how to reform areas of life via finding ways to measure the long term outcomes people want from each area, and then paying providers for achieving those outcomes. As soon I’ll be at an event where we will be talking about how to reform news, let me take a stab at doing that for news.

If what news customers want is to read the articles that others read, so they can discuss them together, then readers could pay proportional to how many others will read the same article.

If what customers want from news is a feeling of enjoyment from reading, we might just frequently give consumers two new articles, have them rate which they liked more, estimate personal ELO ratings from such tests, and pay news providers more for higher rated articles.

If what news customers want from news is info to predict the big picture future of humanity, we might test LLMs on their ability to predict such things, then pay for each article based on how much such LLM predictions improve by reading that article.

If, in addition to the above, news customers just want accurate articles, that make fewer false claims, we could just evaluate random articles for accuracy, and pay more for more accurate sources.

Sure there are many details re making each of these approaches work better. But the main problem seems to me to be that customers just don’t like such approaches. Most would feel ashamed to make cultural choices using more mechanical numerical mechanisms. Especially if explicit strong financial incentives were involved. Re culture, self-respecting folks follow their vibes.

For example, few seem interested in my many proposals to reform crime, health, career planning, and other areas of life via strong incentives tied to numerical metrics. And I’ve seen many visibly show me how much less they think less of me from learning that I rely heavily on MetaCritic to pick movies and TV shows.

To solve cultural drift, we are going to have to somehow recruit the same level of intense effort and accuracy that modernity has achieved in tech, science, and business practice to other areas of life now more dominated by norms and vibes. But a big obstacle to that is our norms and vibes against such things.

Added 27Feb: Of course I should mention a big way that news might change soon: it might include far more prediction market prices.