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Niemanlab seem a bit confused here. People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias. The concern with Google and Faceb

Niemanlab seem a bit confused here. People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias. The concern with Google and Facebook and YouTube is that they are now re-inforcing that confirmation bias even more. NiemanLab cite a few studies here but them seem to be focusing on Google Search Results whereas things like Facebook Walls and the way YouTube recommends 'extreme' points of view on any given topic are also of concern. Essentially a huge part of the internet is now optimising for clicks, which means targeted clickbait and sensationalism will always crowd out reasoned argument.

lostmyoldone 8y ago
Yeah, they seem to missing the point completely. The problem, which is hopefully well known, but bears repeating is that our brain learns the structure of the world by repetition and exposure, and typically seem to be quite unbiased apart from this exposure. Hence, a continuous over-abundance of content that caters to our biases will strongly affect our behavior, often even when we consciously think it's garbage. It is why and how advertising works, and probably why averages of peoples faces are seen as more beautiful than any of the faces in the mix. In sensor tasks, the vision system ( amongst other ) can be shown to be close to Bayesian perfect in how it recovers information from sensory input, which should give pause to any argument - as those in the article - that only complete filter bubbles should be seen as such. Even a partial filter bubble could, and anecdotally does, sometimes completely shortcut this information recovery from noisy data, as the basic "assumption" of the brain would have to be that the environment doesn't lie. Which in a bubble is no longer true. If we were adept at living in a world that lies to us, I imagine neuropathologies that create auditory hallucinations of various forms would not be even remotely as problematic as they are. But assuming a purely statistical interpretation of the environment, it's easy to see that eg a persistent voice in your head is going to cause serious issues over time. If you boil it all down, that is what a filter bubble becomes, a voice persistently telling lie about how the world looks and works, on average. This in turn can lead to radicalization, distrust, paranoia, and other forms of unhealthy thought patterns, as similar mechanisms does when "statistical lies" are generated internally by our minds.

lostmyoldone 8y ago

Yeah, they seem to missing the point completely. The problem, which is hopefully well known, but bears repeating is that our brain learns the structure of the world by repetition and exposure, and typically seem to be quite unbiased apart from this exposure. Hence, a continuous over-abundance of content that caters to our biases will strongly affect our behavior, often even when we consciously think it's garbage. It is why and how advertising works, and probably why averages of peoples faces are seen as more beautiful than any of the faces in the mix. In sensor tasks, the vision system ( amongst other ) can be shown to be close to Bayesian perfect in how it recovers information from sensory input, which should give pause to any argument - as those in the article - that only complete filter bubbles should be seen as such. Even a partial filter bubble could, and anecdotally does, sometimes completely shortcut this information recovery from noisy data, as the basic "assumption" of the brain would have to be that the environment doesn't lie. Which in a bubble is no longer true. If we were adept at living in a world that lies to us, I imagine neuropathologies that create auditory hallucinations of various forms would not be even remotely as problematic as they are. But assuming a purely statistical interpretation of the environment, it's easy to see that eg a persistent voice in your head is going to cause serious issues over time. If you boil it all down, that is what a filter bubble becomes, a voice persistently telling lie about how the world looks and works, on average. This in turn can lead to radicalization, distrust, paranoia, and other forms of unhealthy thought patterns, as similar mechanisms does when "statistical lies" are generated internally by our minds.