Getting High Quality News (Causal Model)

Goals

  1. Describe the “Success Model for News.”
  2. Skillfully apply this model → Get High Quality News
  3. Reap the rewards from being current with the news.

Causal Model (What)

A causal model is a model that tell anyone how to succeed (great great results).

A causal model defines the drivers (essentials) that are needed for success and that will reliably produce success if the drivers are grokked (deeply understood) and implemented skillfully.

Here is are three examples of causal models

  1. Fire + Oxygen + Fuel → Fire
  2. Ingredients/Tools + Preparation Steps + Oven → Great Apple Pie
  3. Gold + Easy Next Step + Trust → Persuasion Success

A causal model can be built for anything that can be succeeded at.

Causal Model (News Literacy)

A causal model of news literacy needs to do three things.

  1. Describes great results in the context of news literacy.
  2. Describe the causes of these results (drivers).
  3. Explain how the drivers are related.

Great Results (News Literacy)

Great Results in news literacy are defined as a person having an AVR (Accurate View of Reality) with respect to the news.

A learner is getting great results when their understanding of current events reliably tracks reality, rather than narratives, single sources, or identity-driven beliefs.

What AVR (Accurate View of Reality) Means

An AVR means holding beliefs that reflect the highest justified probabilities given the available evidence, not claiming certainty or absolute truth. AVR also means updating beliefs when evidence or values change.

In news and in most other things, absolute truth is rarely available. Accuracy therefore consists of approximating reality as closely as possible using the best evidence at hand.

Great Results (News Literacy)

Great Results in news literacy are defined as AVR (Accurate View of Reality) with respect to the news.

A learner is getting great results when their understanding of current events reliably tracks reality, rather than narratives, single sources, or identity-driven beliefs.

What AVR Means

AVR (Accurate View of Reality) is best understood as TVA (True View Approximation).

TVA means holding beliefs that reflect the highest justified probabilities given the available evidence, not claiming certainty or absolute truth.

In news and public affairs, complete ground truth is rarely available. Accuracy therefore consists of approximating reality as closely as possible using the best evidence at hand.

Operational Definition

AVR (with respect to the news) means:

Why This Definition Matters

This definition makes the goal of news literacy:

Connection to the News Literacy Model

Within the news literacy causal model:

When these drivers function well, the result is AVR with respect to the news.

Causal Model

(Standards → Coverage + Filter → Judge + Update) → AVR

Drivers of AVR

Standards

Standards are objective criteria that tells us whether something is good enough or not.

Example: Bridge standards tell us whether a bridge is good enough for public use. Bridge standards are why bridge failures are exceptionally rare.

Example: Safe water standards tells use whether or not water is safe to drink.

Standards are objective iff independent evaluators will reach the same conclusions. That is whether or not something meets standards is independent of anyone’s opinion.

Standards govern everything about the quality of news. Here are some of the the central pillars (the jobs of standards)

  1. Standards quantify what should covered.
  2. Standards quantify if news is safe for consumption (accurate and fair).
  3. Standards quantify how judgements should be made.
  4. Standards quantify how mistakes should be handled and how the system of system of standards should evolve with time.

Less than 1% of the population (my estimate) might know what the safety standards are for bridges are and even a smaller percentage would have the skill sets to evaluate whether or not they are met. But thanks to this tiny minority, we rarely hear of bridge collapse. Same idea pplies to commercial airliners. While they do crash occasionally, crashes are so uncommon that they are major news stories when they happen.

Standards are our best friends that we have never met. They keep us safe.

Coverage

Coverage involves looking at multiple news sources with different perspectives so that you can understand all the perspective with an aim of gaining the “best” perspecitive.

Coverage also involves looking at multiple types of topics.

Essential Topics: Topics that everyone should stay informed of: weather, financial, politics, and so on.

Personal Interest Topics: Topics that you might be personally interested in: sports, fashion, celebrities, science, computing, and so on.

Filter

Filtering is a skill that involves looking at accuracy and bias of a news item and filtering out the crud while retaining the good stuff. It is a crap filer.

Filtering focuses on accuracy and balance (fairness)

Accuracy filtering removes things that are untrue, not justifed to be true or not justabiable as true. Accuracy = claims justified by evidence proportional to their strength

Fair filtering in part removes things that promote unfairness but also looks for things that are missing from a fair perspective.

Judgement

Judgement is a skill that involves at different cases and deciding which case should be accepted or if the best case is some combination.

Example: In a murder case, a jury is responsible for deciding which side has the better case.

In the context of news, judgement involves gather the news on controversial and difficult issue and reaching a conclusion about what is best.

Update

Updating is a skill that involves changing your beliefs when new evidence emerges.

For example, in the 1800s physicians did not believe that hand washing was necessary. Semmilie??? proved otherwirse but was unable to have much impact and . The physicians of the time were unable to update their beiefs. I use this story because update seems like and easy and obvious skill but it is one of the hardest and most uncommon skills in the human repatoire.

Rationale for Driver Ordering

Standards are foundation of news literacy. They cover what gets covered, how filters work, how judgements work, and how the model is updated over.

Then

  1. Coverage supplies candidate claims.
  2. Filter removes low-quality claims.
  3. Judgement resolves remaining conflicts

For long term, update keeps the model aligned over time and fixes problems when news worthy claims change with time due to changing evidence or values.