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Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber
- padolsey 6y agoHi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by people who've also read the books entered?
- jsmith99 6y agoLoved it, but I felt a large proportion of the 'bubble breakers for software engineers' are actually referenced quite often on hacker news. Not 'Taking charge of your fertility' though.
- searchableguy 6y agoWhich two books did you add? I got that recommendation too.
- padolsey 6y agoYeh -- I do agree, though I suppose that shows that the HN demographic is broader than the stereotype of software. The fertility one's quite fun.
- andrewem 6y ago“Taking charge of your fertility” is basically about how to gather and analyze data about your body’s functioning, in order to achieve a desired health outcome (specifically, pregnancy).
- neilshevlin 6y agoI fell in love with this straight away. I'd love to be able to add my whole library tho.
- k1e 6y agoThank you for this service. What database are you using when looking for intersections?
- padolsey 6y agoIt's a large graph database that I've prepared myself over two years, as a kind of part-time hobby. It's largely an automated scrape of metadata available on wikipedia, goodreads, ISBNdb etc. Intersections are sourced from public ratings and reviews across the web. E.g. these books are all liked by one person so are can be made to intersect in the db - https://radicalreads.com/noname-favorite-books/ https://radicalreads.com/noname-favorite-books/
- veddox 6y agoFantastic effort, thank you very much!
- BenderV 6y agoThat’s really great! Congrats. If you can do an Amazon/Audible integration, that would be awesome (and will let you build your recommendation system?). From experience, I like to read the most populars/iconics books outside my perspective/pov, even though, if I had to grade them, it wouldn't be 5/5. Maybe though, the most problematic of theses "ideological bubbles" is that people don't generally want to escape it.
- padolsey 6y agoThanks! - When you say 'Amazon integration' do you mean like an import of books read so far? I think that's a great idea. I've been exploring doing that with Goodreads. Re: escaping ideological bubbles, I do agree, though I think that curiosity and gentle exposure can expand peoples' bubbles in a small enough way that it doesn't evoke ideological dissonance (especially in the realm of politics. Maybe there's a way that I can make it a gentler exposure to new ideas.
- k1m 6y agoVery nice! Liked seeing Chomsky, Fromm, Tolle and Postman when I clicked the "software engineering" link. Will check out some of the other recommendations.
- jrimbault 6y agoAnecdote : I put in the three first books of the Stormlight Archive series and it showed me many fantasy books, comics & BD, and mangas, I already read (I'd say 60 to 70%). I don't know what it should output for things not inherently political.
- rossdavidh 6y agoI like the idea a lot, and the interface is very easy to use. However, I entered a Neil Gaiman Sandman book in my first four, and it showed me another Neil Gaiman book, which seems odd? But then again I didn't recognize it, so maybe the statistics really do point that way. But excluding books by the same authors you've entered might make sense.
- psychometry 6y agoI added a few of my favorite books (mostly 20th century lit) and depending on the set got mostly children's books or non-English books. Not terribly helpful.
- hh3k0 6y agoI added Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West -- not because I like them but rather because I was curious what would come up as result --, it showed me mostly religious books as suggestion (He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart) and The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan.
- felixarba 6y agoHad a similar experience, most of my recommendations are childrens books.
- xmsam 6y agoDitto here. Mostly children’s books.
- fbelzile 6y agoSeems like a cool idea! Did you think about referral sales (Amazon Associates) as a way to fund the project instead of Patreon? I have no affiliation or experience with either, just genuinely curious if you chose one over the other. Affiliate sales seems like a good fit for this kind of service.
- padolsey 6y agoI'm trying out Amazon affiliates yeh, tho no commissions as yet .. :/ I'm also exploring commercial licensing and API access possibilities.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYes, we need more engines like yours. Instead, Amazon, Spotify, etc. simply steer me toward the more mainstream genre-media that I already know about. Oh you like Grandaddy? You'll like the Pixies. Oh you like the Pixies? You'll like Radiohead. Oh you like the Radiohead? You'll like Nirvana. Please, I want to go the opposite direction.
- fao_ 6y agoI listened to over 500 totally different genres on spotify lately, it's not difficult, it just means you have to do slightly more work than blindly listening to whatever spotify shoves you? The trick is to pick a specific genre of music -- soul, rock, whatever. Use spotify's playlists to get a rough idea of the genre and then use the radio feature to suggest more. There are good genre explorers, too -- i seem to remember one posted here that introduced me to tanci/pingtan, and managed to find some example works to listen to.
- mckirk 6y agoMaybe you're thinking of everynoise.com -- probably one of my favorite sites on the net.
- heavyset_go 6y agoLast.fm recommendations are great for this.
- iamacyborg 6y agoYeah, last.fm remains significantly better than Spotify for listening reccs. Better yearly stats too.
- spodek 6y agoI like it, even though it doesn't have my two books. How about a browser extension that tracks the articles, videos, discussion boards, HN threads, etc one reads and in real time suggests other anti-bubble ones? Not sure if your engine would support it, but I'd use it.
- vuciv1 6y agohi! What service did you use to search the books? where'd you get your data from? cool project!
- bshanks 6y agoNeat, thanks for making this! Another tool I would like: find books that I am unlikely to read, but, if I did read them, likely to rate highly.
- kwerk 6y agoWhat source do you use for books and cover images? I’m building a project around book covers and currently looking at open library API. Google’s is good but the terms don’t allow charging for anything. Goodreads is deprecating theirs.
- diggan 6y agoSlightly unrelated but a little bit related. Been looking for a similar tool but for music. I love Spotify's recommendations for the most part, but sometimes I want to dive out of my music bubble and explore new genres or new anything really. Basically what I'm looking for is a tool that can give me recommendations of the music that is the opposite of what I usually listen to, or something like that. Anyone know of any?
- codq 6y agoThat's good! I'd love to see something like that. Would also like something similar but for _knowledge_. Take a look at my knowledge graph and interests, and fill in the gaps. In the meantime, I always recommend The Quietus [0] for music recommendations—always 'out there', but always quality. [0] https://thequietus.com/ https://thequietus.com/
- Bootvis 6y agoI really like this idea but I think it would be nice to the recommendations to a specific language. After adding - The Brothers Karamazov - Infinite Jest - Asterix the Gaul I get a bunch recommendations for Spanish books (which I can't read).
- padolsey 6y agoAh yes I'm working on a fix for this right now : )
- kamharrah 6y agoLove the idea! My one suggestion would be to add the ability to filter out children's books from the results. After I added Hitchhiker's Guide, Children of Time, and the Iliad, the majority of my recommendations were children's books. Or, maybe the tool is telling me something...
- padolsey 6y agoAgreed I would like to somehow do that. At the moment it's a bit tricky as some books we might classify as for children are more broadly enjoyed (e.g. The Little Prince). One way, I suppose, would be to use a dozen very explicitly children's books as "anchors" and assume other books that intersect a lot with those anchors must therefore be children's books as well. Then I can create a filter. Shall investigate :)
- Neputys 6y agoThis is quite fun actually! Tried different philosopher combinations. Get Alcoholics Anonymous recommendations for quite a few until I add Schopenhauer. And if you are a Rand, Rowling reading techie, apparently, you should read more Eddo-Lodge, Baldwin and Chomsky... Brightened my day, thnx. P.S. Are you sure this thing isn't pushing people from one echo chamber to another?
- padolsey 6y agoGlad it's brightened your day! Baldwin is wonderful to experience. Re: moving people from one chamber to another, one hopes that enough chamber-hopping might give people the broad perspective we hope for. Tribal ideology is always a trap but maybe it becomes less tempting as you experience more diverse echo chambers.
- Neputys 6y agoIf tribal ideology is all you are fighting then maybe. But it's a big maybe. Crap is crap. It will not get any less crappier if you get more diverse crap. If a person is not developing intellectually he'll take on some other BS that will be equally stupid. All effort in vain (unless that was the actual goal all the time).
- Kye 6y agoI tried three authors: Mary E. Lowd Kyell Gold / Tim Susman Rukis Croax Does this database not have books from small/independent publishers? edit: One of Kyell Gold's books pops up when I type his name in search after I clicked one of the examples. Still nothing on the others.
- padolsey 6y agoUnfortunately there will be some books missing, either because of lacking data on them or lacking intersections with other books, or because they're too new. There's also a difficulty in where to draw the line as every book added can slow down querying (each query traverses a database of over ten million relationships and around 400,000 books). This is a point of improvement that I'd like to work on though.
- pc86 6y agoIt would be great to see a summary of the book when you click on it!
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoThat's interesting, I thought you'd just look for books in an opposite field - maybe with matching stylistic characteristics - then choose a highly recommended book within that parameter space. You could ask people to provide the metadata if their book/author isn't present.
- pjc50 6y agoI think that community is too small to even count as a bubble.
- Kye 6y agoFurries have lots of bubbles. Some they bring with them, some they make inside the community.
- sol_invictus 6y agoPut some of my own favourite books (maths, business and Japanese fiction) onto the engine and got recommended african-american and feminist literature (and a cookbook.) Then I sampled three of these recommendations and put them into the engine (Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou and Carol Anderson) and again got recommended feminist, african-american and anti-capitalist literature. One does not simply escape the leftist bubble it seems.
- padolsey 6y agoIndeed. It's a real struggle as the nature of how this operates on intersections ("people who like Foo also like Baz") mean that escaping a "bubble" really just means moving to its fringes. The more inward and consolidated a bubble is, the harder it will be to escape it (with the current approach) because there'll be almost no intersections that reach beyond its borders. :/ And grabbing random books from beyond its borders is as useful as walking into a bookstore and pointing blindfolded at a shelf.
- frogulis 6y agoAh, that might explain some strange behaviour I had. I entered a few fairly disparate books including "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson and was recommended an Asimov compilation, which is not worlds apart. Though I guess if one iteratively reads at "the fringes" and uses this tool they'll gradually move out of the bubble? Cool tool though, I think I might try doing just that ^
- watwut 6y agoMartin Luther King was quite sexist himself. So feminist literature would antithesis to some of his convictions.
- runawaybottle 6y agoWell, apparently the Bible is going to help me break out of my bubble.
- Rumperuu 6y agoVery interesting—I certainly wouldn't have expected the antithesis of Mein Kampf and Revolt Against the Modern World to be Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. Honourable mentions include the Bible (NIV) and The C Programming Language.
- jbjbjbjb 6y agoThe results remind me of wordtovec examples where the opposite of Hitler, -1*Hilter, is Plantar fascia. Which is the total opposite but it might be perfect for not just getting out of an echo chamber but just entirely taking a break from the topics we obsess about.
- postingpals 6y agoI made this point elsewhere, but honestly I think if a fascist reads Salt Fat Acid Heat (a book made by a woman, btw) they will probably become a little more in touch with reality.
- jjk166 6y agoI tried Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto, got Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men as the third result, which I also got as the second result when I tried the King James Bible and The Satanic Bible
- gcatalfamo 6y agoI think there is a genuine need for escaping echo chambers but every attempt is usually aimed just showing the opposite side/narrative. If I am conservative I won’t be open to be shown the most leftist content, and viceversa, while instead I might be open to be shown more balanced views that might gradually carry me out of my echo chamber instead of reinforcing it. edit: this an OT comment more related to the echo chamber topic than the submission itself. Interesting project, OP.
- isogon 6y agoMy own experience is that it works quite well for a certain kind of person: on Reddit I was simultaneously subbed to /r/The_Donald, /r/politics, /r/ChapoTrapHouse, /r/Libertarian, etc (while those were still around). I'd also drop by voat occasionally to get my weekly sample of virulently antisemitic takes. I think looking at extremes is the most realistic path. Purportedly balanced sources are dangerous because their bias is subtle; extreme sources typically have very clear bias that is easy to keep in mind as you. You can read many extreme sources and sort of take the intersection of what they show you to guess at some minimal amount of what must be really true.
- gcatalfamo 6y agoMy experience is surely anecdotal, but I feel your POV applies more to open minded people, while close minded people are more inclined to feel threatened by opposite perspectives.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoSometimes those opposite perspectives really are threatening, though.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoTrue enough. And the response that I think should appeal even to the close-minded: those perspectives don’t go away just because you’re not exposed to them, and you won’t understand enough to push back if you never study then.
- TooCreative 6y agoThis site always works well for me to broaden my literary horizon: https://www.literature-map.com https://www.literature-map.com I found some of my all time favorite authors this way.
- ozychhi 6y agoThat looks like a cool tool (would be cooler if it didn't start freezing up after 15 seconds). But I have a complaint, how is Bill Nye on the same tree as Richard Feynman? https://www.literature-map.com/richard+feynman https://www.literature-map.com/richard+feynman
- jonplackett 6y agoThis is a great idea! Thanks for making it. Is there any way you could bring in a synopsis without me having to leave the site? It would be nice to keep browsing there rather than have to link out to Amazon just based on the title and cover.
- padolsey 6y agoIt's something I'd really like to do yes, though was not sure where to source the synopsis from. I wasn't sure on the copyright ramifications of scraping from the likes of Amazon/Goodreads, and only very few books are listed on public domain sites like wikipedia :/ But I am going to explore this more. Thank you for trying it out -- and glad you liked it!
- CapitalistCartr 6y agoI don't want books based on POV; I want authors that think and analyze well.
- samlents 6y agoInteresting idea. Assuming this is still under development, I thought my experience might be of use. I input The Three-Body Problem (Cixin), Sapiens (Harari), Leonardo da Vinci (Isaacson), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Bluebeard (Vonnegut), and On the Shortness of Life (Seneca) and received in return...children's books! Age-gating the recommendations might be something to look into.
- padolsey 6y agoHi Sam. Thanks for pointing out this oddity. I've now implemented a "children's book" anchoring score which I can now promote or demote results based on. Please try your search again and see the difference. Here's the URL: http://abooklikefoo.com/escape?q=Rl0ZOz,Q6g65q,LY5PZp,PVK1,jYky,xk2JE&pop=b&fnf=a&period=a&_nocache http://abooklikefoo.com/escape?q=Rl0ZOz,Q6g65q,LY5PZp,PVK1,j...
- FriedrichN 6y agoAm I the only one getting a 403 on the XHR POST?
- padolsey 6y agoAh that may be related to an expired CSRF token. Could you try refreshing? Hope that works!
- FriedrichN 6y agoI guess I needed to allow cookies. But apparently I need to read Twelve Steps. That's rather disconcerting.
- bogwog 6y agoMe: The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Dune First result: The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Not sure what to make of that...
- bigbubba 6y agoI got that recommendation several times when putting in a variety of scifi or fantasy. It really likes Scrooge McDuck.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cambalache 6y agoI tried for Ayn Rand and about 30% of the books were precisely the kind of book fans of Rand adore, stuff like productivity,self-help, sales. The other 20% or so were books written by black authors, because apparently according to the author being a Randite is being a racist, that is not the case, the problem with Randites was nailed by John Rogers years ago: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
- DominikD 6y agoI like the idea a lot. In terms of the results, it seems to me that many more data points are needed. My bubble escape route contained a lot of authors and titles I know of, I've read, or I'm very familiar with. FWIW my sample trio were Dune/Starship Troopers/Sword of Destiny and results included a bunch of graphic novels (Preacher mostly) and mangas that I consumed in the past, a Harry potter series and a bunch of crime books that I also tried (and, often, didn't find interesting). But there were some genuinely interesting picks too so, again, more data will probably help.
- simonbarker87 6y agoI put in SevenEves (my favour book) by Neal Stephenson and Leviathan Wakes by JSA Corey and the recommendations include: Game of thrones, Bernard Corwell books Isaac Asimov I've read these and I would put them in the same camp as the input books so I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be doing. Nice idea but, unless I'm missing something, not the expected behaviour. I would more have expected "the old man who climbed out the window and disappeared", Clarkson's biography and maybe a Jack Reacher type stuff (which I also enjoy but on the other end of the spectrum from the input books)
- conception 6y agoApropro of nothing but started to read Seveneves for the first time this year and had to tap out - decidedly a poor book to read for escapism from being trapped inside while the world burns and people die around you.
- simonbarker87 6y agoAh man, don't read that book until the pandemic is over and you're in a good place. I encourage you to go back to it when you can though, I love it, the only book I have read twice.
- conception 6y agoYeah, I had to quit during Part 2. Just... too depressing. My friend kept telling me Part 3 is really interesting but the world will need to be a lot happier of a place to jump back in. I've considered just skipping the rest of Part 2 and going to 3 but seems like cheating.
- thealig 6y agoInteresting tool. I put Intro to Algorithms by Cormen & Surely You're joking Mr. Feynman and got lots of autobiographical books that I wouldn't really pick up :). Though there are others which pique my interest somewhat. Out of curiosity, what kind of recommendation system has been used here?
- kevinmchugh 6y agoI'll give you this, I had no idea how much Christian self-help literature I was missing out on.
- werber 6y agoI’ve pretty actively read stuff in that vein for years trying to connect the religious tie to right in America. It’s fascinating
- lambdatronics 6y agoHow familiar are you with religious-right people in real life? I can't stand reading about it b/c I grew up in the thick of it: brings back bad memories.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoFor myself at least where I live, they tend to be targeted at older men and women trying to reconnect with religion when they're vulnerable around the midlife crisis age. Most "religious right" are purely single choice voters that just happen to care about money the exact same way a libertarian would. The only difference is they think a God divinely gods them as opposed to an atheist who does not. Almost all of these books are written by a lay person who basically parrots back interpretations or speeches from bishops, preachers, etc. They literally add no value to the system. They just milk an audience to be frank. You wouldn't read "The simple of of not giving a Fuck" would you? Likewise now, if you say on the title "Turning the other cheek" and put a picture of Jesus walking with a child on a beach and now you've got 99.99% of the christian self help books. The funniest thing that comes to mind is it's no different than the South Park episode "Christian Rock Hard" where Cartman starts a christian rock band. All he does is rewrite already made songs but add some christianic sayings or phrases. That is entirely that industry. They don't tell you anything new or something you can't just search on some forums anymore.
- werber 6y agoI somewhat grew up around it and escaped it before I had the chance to understand it. Now that I’m older and effectively live in an echo chamber it’s so foreign
- werber 6y agoTangential, but I’m on the far left of the American political spectrum and recently learned about https://www.newsmax.com/ https://www.newsmax.com/ and have been actively reading it to try to understand the current political schism because fox wasn’t cutting it anymore
- mellosouls 6y agoGood for you. I'm also somebody of the left who's spent a lot of time in the last few years in places that would lose me my right-on badges. It's been eye-opening at times, disturbing at others; but often educational and useful for my intellectual health and development.
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- befeltingu 6y agoI like this tool a lot. I wouldn’t mind having a similar concept applied to YouTube. If you actively try and watch videos from a different viewpoint then your recommendations are all over the place.
- kopakabana 6y agoI got Mother Goose.
- fao_ 6y agoWeirdly, I keep getting books I like in the search. It would be nice if I could add more than three authors because my reading is already extremely diverse, like music listening there is very little that I dislike (According to spotify, I listened to over 500 genres of music this year -- although I'm not really sure how useful that is because of how every piece of music seems to be categorized into it's own genre). For example, I put in: Mort - Terry Pratchett Mortal Engines - Stanisław Lem My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness - Kabi Nagata And Judith Butler was in the search results. So instead I realised that Mort and Mortal Engines are adjacent, genre-wise and tried: Mort - Terry Pratchett My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness - Kabi Nagata Gender Trouble - Judith Butler and in the search results I got: The Far Side comics "This Book Is Full of Spiders" Douglas Adams Kurt Vonnegut Brian Lee O'Mally Calvin and Hobbes All of these works I have enjoyed quite a lot -- I used to be able to quote the radio show of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy from memory, I own all of the John Dies at the End series, and I'm wondering about getting the special edition of Calvin and Hobbes because there's quite a lot I haven't seen and it's pretty timeless. The rest, mostly consisting of PG Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde, are works that I consider myself interested in yet unexposed to, but they are hardly opposites of the books I put in? So I'm not really convinced of the utility of this tool as it stands. Perhaps it is tailored to a single type of reader that only reads books within their purview (Perhaps, political history books, or purely science fiction books) to the exclusion of many other interesting and worthwhile genres? ---------------------------- Edit : What is especially interesting about this is that when I enter only My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness - Kabi Nagata Gender Trouble - Judith Butler I get a book by Sappho(!) and a literal deluge of mostly-feminist literature with only a handful of anti-feminist works -- with the touchpoint that those anti-feminist works are trying to sound and look feminist! I'm not sure how Sappho is directly in opposition to Nagata's work, and it strikes me that anyone who has read both Nagata and Butler would also be familiar with the works of Sappho?
- Freak_NL 6y agoThis tool seems a bit nonsensical for anything that isn't as blatantly politically one-sided and polarized as Ayn Rand. Just a random couple of highly appreciated titles from my collection: Hyperion, Gormenghast, Lolita (Sci-fi, British gothic fantasy, 20th century American literature) And it suggests The Farside (well yeah, if you want something completely on the opposite side of well-written prose), Tintin, and Shakespeare (huh?). As for breaking any bubble I might live in: I grew up reading Tintin. Interestingly enough it throws up Preacher as well, a comic written by Garth Ennis. Again not really breaking any bubble there: I love his works and have read Preacher, The Boys, Battlefields, and all his Punisher stories (that man is the only comic writer who truly groks Frank Castle).
- diego_moita 6y agoNow I am very confused. In theory it sounds like a very good idea. But when I tried this site what I got is a lot of books about religion. And I don't want to know anything about religion. I just can't bring myself to have intellectual respect for it. "Open your mind" can be healthy if you are stuck in dumbness but can be a bad advice if you have sound and valid core beliefs as in "a mind too open doesn't hold anything of value". In which of these states am I?
- Siira 6y agoYou need to find opposing views that are just on the edge of your current comfort zone, I think. Of course, the whole exercise of having an open mind doesn’t reward one that much, as having a sound worldview has diminishing returns.
- diego_moita 6y agoYeah, this is very meaningful. I agree with you. Usually, when you exercise careful judgement and have a broad culture you don't jump from one belief system to it's complete opposite. Usually you slowly evolve it along time.
- lambdatronics 6y agoThe OP states elsewhere in the discussion: >I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. I think this is a natural result of the system as designed. There may be some value in understanding what other people like, even if you don't enjoy it yourself. Personally, I wouldn't buy any (or even check out from the library) 95% of the books it listed for me, but I think that means it is working correctly. I guess one issue is that it I really like non-fiction, so I get mostly fiction or personal memoirs -- it's a genre thing that has nothing to do with viewpoint.
- pc86 6y agoWow this is some impressive "you should open your mind, provided you disagree with me." The whole point of this is to show you stuff you wouldn't normally read. You don't need to have "intellectual respect" (whatever that means) for a topic to read a book about it.
- bencollier49 6y agoIt did a good job! I utterly loathe the authors, themes and genres of the books it anti-recommended. Well done! I've genuinely tried to find one which I think I could read to broaden my horizons, but I can't bring myself to buy any of them.
- mdoms 6y ago"Carl Sagan" Unable to find that title "Demon-Haunted World" Unable to find that title "Richard Dawkins" Unable to find that title "The Selfish Gene" Unable to find that title I think it needs some work.
- AntiImperialist 6y agoMaybe you tried it when it was down? I put "The Selfish Gene" and "The Demon-Haunted World" and I got "Women, Race and Class" by Angela Davis and "The Feynman Lectures".
- lambdatronics 6y agoI think it works: I put in "Zero to One", "The Idea Factory" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" -- one of the top results was "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life." This was reviewed on Amazon as "Not For a White Male Forty-Year-Old Software Engineer." https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1WB4G83DRI8PV/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1101912197 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1WB4G83DRI8PV/re...
- Bodell 6y agoI tried various combinations of the books I’ve read over the last couple of years[1]. And either I got stuff already on my bookshelf or sphere of reference[2], or a lot of Calvin and Hobbes (seriously every result had at least one, sometimes several), or children’s books, or adult comic books. Which I guess is by some definition the opposite of adult novels. But a fun and interesting tool to play around with either way. [1] Underworld, Blood Meridian, The Bluest Eye, Milkman, Pale Fire, Borges, etc... [2] Chekhov, Ursula Le Guin, Proust, Umberto Eco, etc. Edit: I scrolled down and read the creators summary of how the search works. And now believe my results really nailed his description: rarest but highly rated by readers of the same books. Which also explains all the Calvin and Hobbes, which I think have a universal appeal.
- bigbubba 6y agoI see the same; Neuromancer,Anathem gives me a Far Side comic anthology. If I add The Name of the Rose then I get Scrooge McDuck and Game of Thrones. For The Name of the Rose and Cat's Cradle, 9 of the first 12 suggestions seem to be kids books. It's an interesting project, but so far I don't think many of the suggestions are useful for me.
- chevill 6y agoIt does not seem to work well IMO. If you start over and type in the books that it recommends for readers of the books that the dev obviously thinks are "bad", it still recommends more of the books that the devs think are "good" instead of giving you the "opposite" of those. I think it would be more effective for the devs to manually put together a recommended reading list of progressive literature and explain why they feel each book is worth investing time into. I would find that really helpful because even though I'm not part of their target demographic of extremely conservative people, I wouldn't really know which progressive works of literature are considered essential reading.
- k__ 6y agolol I added Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and got Shakespeare. 10/10
- stanrivers 6y agoWell, my very first recommendation was the Bible. So, I guess I've got that going for me.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoThe opposite of that is probably the Bible, or maybe Art of the Deal ... Seriously though, I think the Bible is a bad book recommendation given its a diverse collection of books (statutes [eg Leviticus], erotic poetry [Song of Songs], apocalyptic predictions, communist idealism, segregationist supremacy, creation, etc.) written across a couple of millennia.
- mercury_craze 6y agoI enjoyed playing around with this and I got real value out of it as a discovery tool when I filtered to showing aclaimed fiction. I know its survivor bias, but I dont want to waste my time on something both terribly written and outside my echo chamber. One usability tweak based on how I interacted with it would be to add a 'I already like this' button to suggested books to save me from re-adding them. It also suggested another H.P. Lovecraft novel despite me already marking At the Mountains of Madness as a liked book, I'm pretty sure that if you like one Lovecraft book, you'd like the rest. The one recommendation I had a strong negative reaction to was by Jeffrey Archer which I guess means that its the book I should read next.
- thomasahle 6y agoGreat tool! Apparently I need to read about Knitting "Catering Moss", which honestly sounds like the most relaxing book I would have never thought to read.
- frederikvs 6y agoAs an experiment, I gave it The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, and the silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. A pretty standard selection of well-known books in the Fantasy genre. Out of the 90 books I get, 53 either have the word "Dragon" in the title, or a dragon on the cover of the book. Clearly, a majority of the results also fall in the Fantasy genre, so have my doubts this counts as escaping the echo chamber. On the other hand, there are a lot of books in that list that I have never heard about, and that look interesting (insofar as you can judge a book by its cover). When I'm done with my current series of books, I'll have a good look at this :-)
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- bordercases 6y agoTrue software engineers don't read the US Constitution.
- austincheney 6y agoI put in The Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The Test of the Twins by Margaret Weis, and On Libert by Mills. I got back a collection of literature by women of color and books about colonialism. I had no idea my book preferences were so conservative.
- cgriswald 6y agoI'm not sure it works well for fiction. I put in a few different sets of science fiction works ranging from Heinlein to Atwood and it returns about half comic books, a significant number of fantasy/sci-fi works, and a smatter of other things. Oddly, it includes children's books I've read to my kid. My bubble very much includes both Dune and The Far Side and I'm not certain how these are supposed to be in different bubbles. Are most Dune readers snobs who wouldn't stoop to reading a cartoon?
- jaggirs 6y agoI think in this case it probably ends up suggesting random books that were read by your 'cluster' at different periods of their life (i.e. when they were a child) that they may not necessarily like to read now (I loved this book when I was a kid: 5 stars)
- dragonwriter 6y agoApparently I don't have a literary bubble, because even with eight books listed it is still recommending books that are high on my list of books that I've read and liked.
- ArtWomb 6y agoI've been recommending Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. Very few under 30s have heard of it. A classic of the 1970s New Left. Yet stunningly predicts the current secessionist mindset of the Alt Right. Plus ca change ;)
- pc86 6y agoThis is interesting. I put in a handful of books on my shelf that I have read and enjoyed, and the results that it returned seem to be largely: a) religion of all kinds but largely Christian apology, and b) civil rights and apartheid. Both topics I wouldn't go out of my way to read about but I might if it the book seemed particularly interesting and was well reviewed (so pretty much the point of this project). One interesting note is that there are several books on the list I absolutely would read, I just didn't know they existed or hadn't sought them out. One of Stephen Hawking's books, some American military books, a few biographies, etc.
- AntiImperialist 6y agoWhen I put: - "The Sovereign Individual" by James D. Davidson - "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" by Harry Browne I got suggested The Bible NIV and a bunch of other Christian books. Is it trying to tell me that the western totalitarian tendencies come from their Christian heritage or am I reading too much into it?
- kaetemi 6y agoInteresting. I picked the software engineer sample link. Added the 2 books I have right next to me. And it's recommending my wife's taste in books.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoWould love to have this for Twitter follows.
- thekiptxt 6y agoI've always thought that recommendation services would be better of this logic were layered in. E.g. I'm on YouTube and 1 in 10 recommendations are popular/trending videos that the algorithm doesn't think I'll enjoy. Aside from the obvious necessity of bubble-breaking, it has the nice side effect of retraining the recommendation engine without rampant confirmation bias.
- madhadron 6y agoThis keeping recommending books I have read or books very similar to books I have read. I've added some of the books that show up to try to force that kind of book out, but it brings in more things that are proximate to my reading. I don't know if I've just confused it or I don't have an echo chamber. I did find some proximate reading that I hadn't heard of that sounds interesting, though!
- maxk42 6y agoThe idea is good but the execution leaves much to be desired: I entered two political books on economics and the climate and got a list of cookbooks and a few political books that agreed with the original two books.
- zahma 6y agoTrue. I am definitely breaking out of my echo chamber (Cannery Row / For Whom the Bell Tolls) if I read a bunch of romantic fiction and Calvin and Hobbes comics. Those genres were the bulk of my suggestions, But I don't want to stray that far...
- kashyapc 6y agoI realize, the site's aim is to help you escape the "echo chamber". But I've recently been mulling over this other idea from Seneca (writing 2000 years ago!) on limiting the number of books you read, hard as it is, for an avid reader: [...] Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. Food does not benefit or become part of the body when it is eaten and immediately expelled. Nothing impedes healing as much as frequent change of medications. A wound does not close up when one is always trying out different dressings on it; a seedling that is transplanted repeatedly will never grow strong. [...] "But I want to read different books at different times," you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. [...] — Letter 2 ("A beneficial reading program"); translation by Long and Graver
- goto11 6y agoIf you want to follow the spirit of the advice, you should certainly cut down on internet forums before you cut down on books.
- kashyapc 6y agoGood news—I'm jubiliated to report that I haven't used any "traditional" social media in nearly eight years. Astonishing as it is, HN is the only internet forum that I occasionally frequent, for its palatable signal-to-noise ratio; please don't rob me of it. :-) Most of my leisure time, when I'm not out and about walking in nature or seeing real humans, is dedicated to offline (i.e. dead wood books) reading.
- cgriswald 6y agoI read that more as advice on focusing your reading. Maybe instead of reading all books on astrophysics, cooking, and interpersonal communications you read a few books on one of the subjects. I don’t think it’s in conflict with breaking your bubble with this site.
- onecommentman 6y agoI think this could be more impactful if it focused on short form/summary/critique recommendations. Recommending someone from the left to read a book by Solzhenitsyn, or someone from the right to read a book by Maya Angelou is a hefty time commitment with little promise of proportionate intellectual gain for the time invested. But to have recommendations on good counterpoint short form content (short stories, journal articles, essays) might get someone who is busy with life and career to spend a few minutes. Harder to ultimately monetize, since the business model for the online book market is pretty mature at this point but no one directly directly pays for that single essay. So where are micro transactions? Anyone who has been in the position where their time was truly valuable instinctively protects their free time from “long form” intrusions. It the book is worthwhile, the essays on the essence of the ideas will be even more valuable (per minute). Most pop books or ideological rants might only need a paragraph. Condensing into short form might lead to the embarrassing disclosure that the emperor has no clothes. The idea that you have to read a long form text to understand a different perspective sets off alarm bells in my head. I seem to remember that cults would always want prospective recruits to stay at the Center the whole weekend.
- porb121 6y ago> But to have recommendations on good counterpoint short form content (short stories, journal articles, essays) might get someone who is busy with life and career to spend a few minutes. It's one book.
- throwawaygulf 6y ago"The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure" This book perfectly describes what caused radical leftism to seep into Bay Area (Portland, Seattle, etc.) software culture. If you have leftist activist employees or coworkers, I highly suggest this book for them.
- swayvil 6y agoJohn Dies At The End + Permutation City = Hunger Games
- kelnage 6y agoI provided two books as requested - an old favourite (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams) and a recent fantasy novel (The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin). My recommendations were... unhelpful? Lots of children’s books and comics (including Calvin & Hobbes), peppered with the occasional P. G. Wodehouse. The latter is particularly strange to me, since Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Wodehouse, used very similar humour, and even wrote forewords for Wodehouse re-printings.
- padolsey 6y agoHeya I've been working on ensuring that the results reflect the age-range of the queries, so hopefully you'll now get slightly less children's books. In terms of your latter point, it may just be a kink in the dataset, shall have a look.
- kgarten 6y agoAlso for me it didn't seem to work well. I entered "Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray and "12 rules for life" by Peterson ... I would have expected something of the likes of "Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini" or "How to argue with a racist by Adam Rutherford" to pop up, as both of them present well reasoned arguments against the world view depicted in the previous ones. (Reading recommendation for both btw. ). Yet, I got Go Forward with Faith: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley" and a lot of religious books. I can understand why this happens. Yet, a bit disappointing.
- onemorepoint 6y agoI tried a couple of math titles and got a ton of suggestions to read historical and political non-fiction.
- vhpoet 6y agoOne great way to find books to read is to see what people you look up to recommend. I've built a service that scans twitter for book recommendations from ~2000 thought leaders. https://www.readthistwice.com/people https://www.readthistwice.com/people
- padolsey 6y agoThanks for sharing, I hadn't seen this project before. It's great!!
- djsumdog 6y agoI dunno. I seem to see a lot of the same titles for different searches. Non-fiction books are also more difficult to read than fiction; so these types of books tend to be a big time investment (a lot of them feel like extended essays). There are a couple of books I've read in the past few years that I actually didn't fully agree with. Sometimes they were badly sourced or made some arguments I didn't think were sound, but there was also a ton of interesting and good material in them; which I think made some good points. Based on that, I guess my recommendations for breaking bubbles would be: "The Strange Death of Europe" (Murray, Davies, et al.) "The War Against Boys" (Sommers) "The Fountainhead" (Ryand)
- Qision 6y agoHi, thanks for this website, I'm goinng to use it a lot I think! I'd like to add a suggestion, when we pick a book, you propose two links, one is Amazon and the other one is Goggle. Could you replace those links by DuckDuckGo and maybe Goodreads (or any other website that doesn't almost control the market)? It's just to avoid those big companies.
- prodmanAIML 6y agoCan I integrate it somehow with my goodreads account?
- nestorD 6y agoThe concept is intriguing. One thing I would do is trying to find books orthogonal to my tastes rather than opposites. I do not want to find books I know I will hate, I want to find books around axis I have not even considered.
- vzaliva 6y agoI remember attending a presentation from Pandroa many years ago and one thing struck me as very interesting. I am rephraizin from memory: "It is of little value to recommend obvious things. For example if you like Duke Ellington there is no point to recommend you Ella Fitzgeral d. You probably already aware of her. But if we recommend you a song by Madonna, whom you would not normaly consider listening, which happens to be very much in jazzy style you like, you will be pleasantly surprised." This is how you break a bubble.
- throwaway_2047 6y agoThe search seems down. No matter what I input the result is "Unable to find that title" Terms used: - 1984 - Zero to one - A Promised Land
- cwp 6y agoOk, this is fascinating. Even beyond escaping my own echo chamber, it's really neat to escape other echo chambers. Let's escape the woke bubble: 1. How to Be an Antiracist 2. White Fagility 3. Between the World and Me The books it recommends are pretty diverse - Maya Angelou to Peter Drucker to Plato. Or how about the Trump bubble: 1. Time to Get Tough 2. Righteous Indignation 3. Going Rogue Lots of religion here. What if we escape atheism? 1. Letter to a Christian Nation 2. God is Not Great 3. The God Delusion Hmm. Not so much religion here... but we got Aldous Huxley, Bruce Li and Richard Feynmann. I think... I've got a lot of reading to do. I LOVE this tool.
- CortexM4 6y agoIs it down? I am stuck at: Your query is taking a while. Sorry about that, but it's not long now! We're leaving no book unturned in order to find you your perfect matches.
- padolsey 6y agoHeya, can you try refreshing? If it still fails would you mind pasting the URL here? The DB is struggling a bit under the strain but it should be back to normal now, fingers crossed.
- tigerbelt 6y agoI really like the book thumbnail preview click ! (uX)
- e2e4 6y agoGreat to see a new type of recommenders (long overdue). A related problem is of exploitation vs exploration (being recommended something one likes vs recommended new but with high uncertainty if it will be enjoyable or not) some of my work on this related topic of active learning in recommender systems: presentation: https://www2.slideshare.net/nrubens/active-learning-in-recommender-systems https://www2.slideshare.net/nrubens/active-learning-in-recom... book chapter: http://machinelearning202.pbworks.com/f/Rubens-Active-Learning-RecSysHB2010.pdf http://machinelearning202.pbworks.com/f/Rubens-Active-Learni... a more basic primer (aimed at startups) https://www2.slideshare.net/nrubens/1-of-40-recommender-systems-and-active-learning-for-startups/ https://www2.slideshare.net/nrubens/1-of-40-recommender-syst... am happy to answer any questions
- bra-ket 6y agoThe real 'bubble-breaker' for Ayn Rand would be something from Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. Not "Secret lives of Millionaires". C’mon man.
- smurf_t 6y agoI always thought that recommendation engines should be customized and adjusted by the user. It seems that social platforms are forcing what they think is relevant on me, and I have stopped using some social platforms for this reason. In some cases, I wrote scripts to fetch content (e.g. tweets, rss feeds) and apply my own methods to track topics, or bust the bubble. When the timeline started to show irrelevant topics to my interest (that changed over time), or non-eye opener topics, I usually start leaving the platform as a user.
- shgidi 6y agoHow do you evaluate recommenders? You enter 5-10 entries, and see whether recommendations are relevant. (e.g see a few books I've read and liked) So I'm sorry, but I couldn't find any in this one. Nice UI though.
- watwut 6y agoIf you put in real books about history written by historians, it recommends "restauration agriculture" and "gospel according to harry potter" and "magic school bus" and I think I am fine to stay in my bubble.
- michaelbrave 6y agoSo my initial thought when it said anti-recomendation was the idea that you give it a list of books and then it removes the ones that are "too mainstream", or "written by a journalist" or "proven false". In a way kind of want that more than what's proposed.
- forrestconnors 6y agoTried the first 6 books I could think of that I liked, none of them appeared in the search :/
- ASalazarMX 6y agoSince each book has an Amazon link, an additional Good Reads link would be very useful.
- egberts1 6y agoI put about 18 titles into it. cricket Did I win or what?
- fromaj 6y agoI really want this for youtube
- lajarre 6y agoWhat if self-help (or "personal development") is itself an echo chamber? Seems it's not helping to get our of this one.