“What do I actually want to learn, rather than just impulse clicking on whatever the algorithms have put in front of me?”

When the pandemic hit, many of us started binge watching TV, eating too much, working in our garden or renovating our home. Max Tegmark, an MIT Professor, physicist, cosmologist, and machine learning expert took another path. He built a few bots that downloaded millions and millions of articles from the internet. He threw in a cup of Artificial Intelligence (AI), added machine learning to read these articles and, voila, built a free tool for users who want to take a better approach to their news consumption. The result was improvethenews.org.

Tegmark suggests that we should approach news consumption the same way we might approach healthier food consumption. It’s common knowledge that going to the grocery store when you’re starving is a bad idea. That usually leads to buying random things that aren’t the healthiest options.  Simply making a list before going to the grocery store is a far better idea. I confess I haven’t fully perfected this technique!

What if we approached our news diet in the same way? What if we take control over the news we consume with the same intentionality? While we may somewhat control our news diet, there are manipulative bots feeding us junk news we haven’t requested. Improve the News is a free little news aggregator that can help change our news “menu” for the better.

When you go to the website, you’ll find a list of the publications from which you can elect to be “fed.” There are topics you can elect to see. There are sliders that allow you to customize your preferences. The first slider is for Political Stance. This allows you say, “Okay, I want to see what my conservative uncle is reading,” and you can move the political slider to the right. Or you can say, “Now I want to see what my left leaning neighbor is thinking,” and pull the slider to the left. This makes it very easy to get all the different perspectives you wish to see. There’s even the ability to check the box for Split, which gives you both perspectives. There are also sliders for Establishment Stance as well as Writing Style, Depth, Shelf Life and Recency.

Tegmark built Improve the News from the perspective of a scientist. He observes that, “Scientists hate it when people tell them, ‘Don’t read this person’s theory because it’s wrong.’ This is exactly what Galileo fought so hard against, the kind of censorship where people say ‘Oh, your feeble mind cannot handle being exposed to Breitbart or Counter Punch.’ This is so insulting.”

He goes on to observe, “Imagine if Galileo had put out a tweet saying, ‘Hey, the Earth is actually orbiting the sun, not the other way around.’ The fact-checkers would have responded, ‘No, this is wrong. It violates our community guidelines.’ That’s why they put him under house arrest. Over time, that approach has not proven to be very useful in science. David Rand, who’s a professor here at MIT, has vindicated the scientific approach to truth finding. What he found was that people are actually quite interested in being shown other perspectives if it’s done in a respectful way.” I now receive an email each morning from info@improvethenews.org that gives me the Facts and the Spin (from different perspectives) on the articles that fit within the way I moved the Sliders. I can click on “See Full Story & Sources” to be able to read the full stories that catch my attention. If I choose to read an article, at least I know what I’m getting into! So far, it’s been a useful and enjoyable experience. I hope you find it useful.

Rick Adkins, CFP®, ChFC, MBA

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