10 ms·

Escape the echo chamber

83 points by kawera 9y ago

hawktheslayer 9y ago
To try and escape both pitfalls I attempt to follow Altucher's advice to have less opinions. https://jamesaltucher.com/2012/12/ten-reasons-i-dont-have-opinions/ https://jamesaltucher.com/2012/12/ten-reasons-i-dont-have-op...
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  I know I'm not supposed to just say "+1" here, but that was and awesome read. Perfect timing for me, especially J.
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    I'm probably not supposed to say "Me too" either, but it is good timing for me too.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  Which is a nice thought, but he’s outsourcing his opinions to someone else and betting on them to make the right call. Most people who did that in Syria are now dead or fleeing. If you’re wealthy this is no problem of course. The wealthier you are, the less opinions you should share or fight for. You can afford this because you can always put your fortune (and yourself) into an available free society with property rights. If you’re poor however, it only works as long as reason and democracty triumphs in your society. Because nobody will want you if you ever have to flee.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Rich-shaming for that post was already weird, but pulling the Syrian war is downright bizarre. Are you saying the Syrians caused the war, and did that by not having enough opinions?
- throwaway2041 9y ago
  His proper title is "Crypto Genius James Altucher"
ozten 9y ago
Not sure why, but that font Academica Book Pro vibrates on my screen and is difficult to read. Maybe it's too thin? It is a serif font and looks optimized for print. Firefox and Chrome on Mac.
overloadedArgs 9y ago
Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Not for one second, do I buy into that idea. Not for one second, do I imagine, that because of one election result, that suddenly people have somehow been transformed into anything vastly different throughout the world. We have phases, where aggregate priciples of interaction change, not unlike shifts in musical taste. Cycles of class and intellectualism, and cycles of low-brow simplicity. Each pole has its own facets and degrees of appeal and attraction. The cycles are an expression of the prevailing winds for the dominant age group. For the most part, a lot of people clearly thought their vote didn't matter, didn't really care who got elected, developed an opinion that the presidency doesn't matter, and cast the vote that seemed to be biggest joke. Two other, much smaller, groups of people exist: those that genuinely believe a tiny, weak, incompetant and ineffectual government is a good thing (because substitute teachers aren't as demanding), and those that genuinely want to help, improve the world, and make a difference in benefitting the lives of as many people as possible, starting with those that have the least going for them. The goof offs, though, voted the most and won. That's it. That's the only thing that happened, and it's not a disaster yet. Let's see if we can keep it that way, and stay on track. There's some violence and sabotage in the picture too, and all of it stems from an unnecessary war in Iraq that should have never happened. Some of the very real political destabilization on the fringes is essentially blowback and revenge for that debacle. Take a step back, and note the coincidence in timing for each. I'm not sure this stuff will difuse itself. It may simmer on in the background for some time, and might not have any solution, as retaliation tends to fuel a continuity of grudges.
ScottBurson 9y ago
Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers. Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust. It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction This makes it sound like Black undertook this "reboot" on his own, just by reading and listening. That's not how Black himself tells the story: In 2010, I moved across the state and started college at this little liberal arts college in Florida, which was about three and a half hours from home Okay, this was one step he did take on his own: he changed his environment. But eventually he started talking to his fellow students. And I would say, “This is what I believe about I.Q. differences, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years, here’s the journal that’s put this stuff together, I believe that this is true, that race predicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. differences in races.” And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and I’d say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold together and I’ll remove that from my ideological toolbox but everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn’t believe it anymore. The whole thing (it's a podcast transcript) is worth reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transcript-derek-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transc...
- jackfraser 9y ago
  > And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works Has anyone actually put this data together in a presentable way? I've only seen things that say the opposite and it would be good to actually have a read of something well-formed that sets the modern progressive case for dealing with this research, beyond simply ignoring it altogether.
  - 9y ago
gnicholas 9y ago
I work in the arena of echo chambers [1] and wrote a piece on the different usage of the terms "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" [2]. Interesting that the author chose "echo chamber", even though "filter bubble" tends to be used more often in academic settings. 1: http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com 2: https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-surprising-difference-between-filter-bubble-and-echo-chamber-b909ef2542cc https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-surprising-difference-betwee...
kristianc 9y ago
> A social network composed entirely of incredibly smart, obsessive opera fans would deliver all the information I could want about the opera scene, but it would fail to clue me in to the fact that, say, my country had been infested by a rising tide of neo-Nazis. Except it would. I know no-one that talks about opera (or anything) all of the time, and it's hard to think that a rising tide of neo-Nazis would escape the notice of a group of reasonably educated, establishment liberals. Much of filter bubble theory as it applies to social media seems to treat humans as unthinking demographic blobs defined entirely by their status and political beliefs, and the bubble as something impenetrable, through which new information about the world cannot pass. Sure, within groups there is groupthink, and I get the appeal of techno-dystopianism, but I can't accept the idea that this is in any way a new phenomenon, or that we are not more connected to new ideas now than we have ever been.
- mercer 9y ago
  While it's perhaps also true that it's easier now than ever to just remain in a bubble of like-minded people, I sometimes wonder if that maybe misses the point. Perhaps the problem is not so much lack of access or exposure to new information, but rather that it's information, or 'self marketing' social interaction instead of real, sustained, connection/relation. Kind of a 'medium is the message' type deal: technology enables/encourages us to relate in ways that involve promotion, lack of day-to-day interaction, increased compartmentalization of our social lives, etc. For example, one argument against the 'bubble' theory is that a hugely popular site like reddit makes it easier than ever to be exposed to wildly different viewpoints. Not just through the 'all' section, but also by subscribing to various subreddits with a simple click. But the fact that none of these pieces of text represent people that I know, that I grew up with, that are part of my daily life, that I talk to about my person non-partisan troubles, that I experienced things with, or touched/saw/heard, they're rather abstract. In fact, they're so abstract that it's even difficult to 'link' their particular messages to each other and form a picture of a person who is more than the contents of that one message + the subreddit we're in. I definitely feel that both online, and in 'real life', it's not so much the lack of information that is a problem, but rather the lack of real, ongoing relationships with others. I've seen so many examples of people changing their minds on things simply because of their partner, or close friends, etc. I've seen far right individuals change their views after they sort of accidentally became friends with an immigrant. I've seen extremely conservative Christians change their views on, say, homosexuality because they had a wonderful colleague who was gay. And so on. I've seen much fewer examples of people who 'engaged' with information (books, articles, study, whatever) and made similar changes in their views. Furthermore, I think we actively hide the effect of relationships on our views, because we want to think that our convictions are reasonable, and well-considered. So if our beliefs change through relationship (and of course information too), we are likely to de-emphasize that. Because it's not exactly 'rational'. The documentary "Accidental Courtesy" highlights this well, I think. Some of Louis Theroux's stuff also shows this dynamic.
rapnie 9y ago
Your page has loads of problems! Like: Who are you? Why would I trust you? What's your business model? What's your privacy policy? Code of Ethics? Security? How does it work? I would not install the app, nor fill in your website forms before anything like that is clear! Maybe you should interact with The Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com), because the subject matter is really interesting, and the problem and ways to avoid it need more attention.
- rapnie 9y ago
  I am getting downvoted, but this is honest feedback. Points for improvement.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Are you sure you've posted on the right thread? You've probably been downvoted because those questions are either easily answerable or simply don't make sense (what app?).
    - rapnie 9y ago
      Wow, thanks for pointing that out. This is my mistake! I was commenting on gnicholas above, and this link: http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com/ http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com/ My bad, everyone :(
IIAOPSW 9y ago
>we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. I disagree with the premise already. Anyone got data? How many people actually get their news from FB? And no hn, reddit and other content aggregators are not just as bad. Following topics != following people.
jamesblonde 9y ago
I believe that there are even cases of echo chambers for systems software out there. For example, the database community is pretty tight with a center of gravity around Stonebraker (Postgres, Vertica for columnar stores, voltdb for NewSQL dbs). Well, there's a DB out there for OLTP workloads called NDB (MySQL Cluster) and not only is it the fastest in the world (200m transactions/sec on commodity hardware), but it is also GPL-v2 licensed. But, it's completely unknown in the valley. And when evidence is presented about it it, the evidence is ignored and conflated "in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined" Reference: http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-second-in-mysql-cluster.html http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-sec...
imartin2k 9y ago
Maybe the best article I’ve read on the topic. Too often people use terms like filter bubble or echo chamber and mean different things. Generally, the lack of access to contrarian viewpoints. But that’s rarely the actual problem. If the author is correct, it’s the lack of trust. This is especially great: “Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.”
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 9y ago
> Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. That proves it is in fact bad logic; the victims of the echo chamber are not rational to the point of behaving in a logically sound way. In actual logic, the order among a set of prepositions makes no difference and they can be evaluated in parallel also to the extent that they are independent; there are no side-effects. If two propositions A and B contradict each other, that one of them you heard first isn't necessarily the true one. If everyone is working in good faith (mistakes are acknowledged and fixed) then rather chronologically later propositions should be more trustworthy. People who are not willing to replace old propositions with new ones that contradict them are making themselves impervious to the good-faith improvement in understanding.

83 points by kawera 9y ago

To try and escape both pitfalls I attempt to follow Altucher's advice to have less opinions. https://jamesaltucher.com/2012/12/ten-reasons-i-dont-have-opinions/ https://jamesaltucher.com/2012/12/ten-reasons-i-dont-have-op...

jasonkostempski 9y ago
I know I'm not supposed to just say "+1" here, but that was and awesome read. Perfect timing for me, especially J.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  I'm probably not supposed to say "Me too" either, but it is good timing for me too.
eksemplar 9y ago
Which is a nice thought, but he’s outsourcing his opinions to someone else and betting on them to make the right call. Most people who did that in Syria are now dead or fleeing. If you’re wealthy this is no problem of course. The wealthier you are, the less opinions you should share or fight for. You can afford this because you can always put your fortune (and yourself) into an available free society with property rights. If you’re poor however, it only works as long as reason and democracty triumphs in your society. Because nobody will want you if you ever have to flee.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Rich-shaming for that post was already weird, but pulling the Syrian war is downright bizarre. Are you saying the Syrians caused the war, and did that by not having enough opinions?
throwaway2041 9y ago
His proper title is "Crypto Genius James Altucher"

ozten 9y ago

Not sure why, but that font Academica Book Pro vibrates on my screen and is difficult to read. Maybe it's too thin? It is a serif font and looks optimized for print. Firefox and Chrome on Mac.

overloadedArgs 9y ago

Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Not for one second, do I buy into that idea. Not for one second, do I imagine, that because of one election result, that suddenly people have somehow been transformed into anything vastly different throughout the world. We have phases, where aggregate priciples of interaction change, not unlike shifts in musical taste. Cycles of class and intellectualism, and cycles of low-brow simplicity. Each pole has its own facets and degrees of appeal and attraction. The cycles are an expression of the prevailing winds for the dominant age group. For the most part, a lot of people clearly thought their vote didn't matter, didn't really care who got elected, developed an opinion that the presidency doesn't matter, and cast the vote that seemed to be biggest joke. Two other, much smaller, groups of people exist: those that genuinely believe a tiny, weak, incompetant and ineffectual government is a good thing (because substitute teachers aren't as demanding), and those that genuinely want to help, improve the world, and make a difference in benefitting the lives of as many people as possible, starting with those that have the least going for them. The goof offs, though, voted the most and won. That's it. That's the only thing that happened, and it's not a disaster yet. Let's see if we can keep it that way, and stay on track. There's some violence and sabotage in the picture too, and all of it stems from an unnecessary war in Iraq that should have never happened. Some of the very real political destabilization on the fringes is essentially blowback and revenge for that debacle. Take a step back, and note the coincidence in timing for each. I'm not sure this stuff will difuse itself. It may simmer on in the background for some time, and might not have any solution, as retaliation tends to fuel a continuity of grudges.

ScottBurson 9y ago

Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers. Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust. It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction This makes it sound like Black undertook this "reboot" on his own, just by reading and listening. That's not how Black himself tells the story: In 2010, I moved across the state and started college at this little liberal arts college in Florida, which was about three and a half hours from home Okay, this was one step he did take on his own: he changed his environment. But eventually he started talking to his fellow students. And I would say, “This is what I believe about I.Q. differences, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years, here’s the journal that’s put this stuff together, I believe that this is true, that race predicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. differences in races.” And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and I’d say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold together and I’ll remove that from my ideological toolbox but everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn’t believe it anymore. The whole thing (it's a podcast transcript) is worth reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transcript-derek-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transc...

jackfraser 9y ago
> And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works Has anyone actually put this data together in a presentable way? I've only seen things that say the opposite and it would be good to actually have a read of something well-formed that sets the modern progressive case for dealing with this research, beyond simply ignoring it altogether.
- 9y ago

gnicholas 9y ago

I work in the arena of echo chambers [1] and wrote a piece on the different usage of the terms "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" [2]. Interesting that the author chose "echo chamber", even though "filter bubble" tends to be used more often in academic settings. 1: http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com 2: https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-surprising-difference-between-filter-bubble-and-echo-chamber-b909ef2542cc https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-surprising-difference-betwee...

kristianc 9y ago

> A social network composed entirely of incredibly smart, obsessive opera fans would deliver all the information I could want about the opera scene, but it would fail to clue me in to the fact that, say, my country had been infested by a rising tide of neo-Nazis. Except it would. I know no-one that talks about opera (or anything) all of the time, and it's hard to think that a rising tide of neo-Nazis would escape the notice of a group of reasonably educated, establishment liberals. Much of filter bubble theory as it applies to social media seems to treat humans as unthinking demographic blobs defined entirely by their status and political beliefs, and the bubble as something impenetrable, through which new information about the world cannot pass. Sure, within groups there is groupthink, and I get the appeal of techno-dystopianism, but I can't accept the idea that this is in any way a new phenomenon, or that we are not more connected to new ideas now than we have ever been.

mercer 9y ago
While it's perhaps also true that it's easier now than ever to just remain in a bubble of like-minded people, I sometimes wonder if that maybe misses the point. Perhaps the problem is not so much lack of access or exposure to new information, but rather that it's information, or 'self marketing' social interaction instead of real, sustained, connection/relation. Kind of a 'medium is the message' type deal: technology enables/encourages us to relate in ways that involve promotion, lack of day-to-day interaction, increased compartmentalization of our social lives, etc. For example, one argument against the 'bubble' theory is that a hugely popular site like reddit makes it easier than ever to be exposed to wildly different viewpoints. Not just through the 'all' section, but also by subscribing to various subreddits with a simple click. But the fact that none of these pieces of text represent people that I know, that I grew up with, that are part of my daily life, that I talk to about my person non-partisan troubles, that I experienced things with, or touched/saw/heard, they're rather abstract. In fact, they're so abstract that it's even difficult to 'link' their particular messages to each other and form a picture of a person who is more than the contents of that one message + the subreddit we're in. I definitely feel that both online, and in 'real life', it's not so much the lack of information that is a problem, but rather the lack of real, ongoing relationships with others. I've seen so many examples of people changing their minds on things simply because of their partner, or close friends, etc. I've seen far right individuals change their views after they sort of accidentally became friends with an immigrant. I've seen extremely conservative Christians change their views on, say, homosexuality because they had a wonderful colleague who was gay. And so on. I've seen much fewer examples of people who 'engaged' with information (books, articles, study, whatever) and made similar changes in their views. Furthermore, I think we actively hide the effect of relationships on our views, because we want to think that our convictions are reasonable, and well-considered. So if our beliefs change through relationship (and of course information too), we are likely to de-emphasize that. Because it's not exactly 'rational'. The documentary "Accidental Courtesy" highlights this well, I think. Some of Louis Theroux's stuff also shows this dynamic.

rapnie 9y ago

Your page has loads of problems! Like: Who are you? Why would I trust you? What's your business model? What's your privacy policy? Code of Ethics? Security? How does it work? I would not install the app, nor fill in your website forms before anything like that is clear! Maybe you should interact with The Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com), because the subject matter is really interesting, and the problem and ways to avoid it need more attention.

rapnie 9y ago
I am getting downvoted, but this is honest feedback. Points for improvement.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Are you sure you've posted on the right thread? You've probably been downvoted because those questions are either easily answerable or simply don't make sense (what app?).
  - rapnie 9y ago
    Wow, thanks for pointing that out. This is my mistake! I was commenting on gnicholas above, and this link: http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com/ http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com/ My bad, everyone :(

IIAOPSW 9y ago

>we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. I disagree with the premise already. Anyone got data? How many people actually get their news from FB? And no hn, reddit and other content aggregators are not just as bad. Following topics != following people.

jamesblonde 9y ago

I believe that there are even cases of echo chambers for systems software out there. For example, the database community is pretty tight with a center of gravity around Stonebraker (Postgres, Vertica for columnar stores, voltdb for NewSQL dbs). Well, there's a DB out there for OLTP workloads called NDB (MySQL Cluster) and not only is it the fastest in the world (200m transactions/sec on commodity hardware), but it is also GPL-v2 licensed. But, it's completely unknown in the valley. And when evidence is presented about it it, the evidence is ignored and conflated "in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined" Reference: http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-second-in-mysql-cluster.html http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-sec...

imartin2k 9y ago

Maybe the best article I’ve read on the topic. Too often people use terms like filter bubble or echo chamber and mean different things. Generally, the lack of access to contrarian viewpoints. But that’s rarely the actual problem. If the author is correct, it’s the lack of trust. This is especially great: “Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.”

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kazinator 9y ago

> Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. That proves it is in fact bad logic; the victims of the echo chamber are not rational to the point of behaving in a logically sound way. In actual logic, the order among a set of prepositions makes no difference and they can be evaluated in parallel also to the extent that they are independent; there are no side-effects. If two propositions A and B contradict each other, that one of them you heard first isn't necessarily the true one. If everyone is working in good faith (mistakes are acknowledged and fixed) then rather chronologically later propositions should be more trustworthy. People who are not willing to replace old propositions with new ones that contradict them are making themselves impervious to the good-faith improvement in understanding.