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Ask HN: Why do you consider “echo chambers” bad?
TLDR: If you are against echo chambers, can you explain why echo chambers are bad?
In real life:
1) Most of us live our lives in our own comfort zones.
2) Keeping away from an idea, person, or organization that makes us uncomfortable is common and socially accepted.
3) Most of us don't attend political or cultural meetings on ideas that we disagree with.
4) Most of us don't read books on ideas we have pre-judged to be nonsense or uncomfortable.
5) There are no leaders of one ideology habitually goading their followers to attend meetings of another ideology.
6) For example, there are no atheist influencers telling atheists to attend religious congregations nor religious influencers persuading their followers to attend atheist seminars.
All this "echo chamber" narrative - including the axiom that "echo chambers are bad" - seems to be an entirely online phenomenon
of recent vintage. Ngrams viewer says the phrase started in the mid-20th century and took off only in the '00s.
Books, newspapers, journals, and special interest groups have existed for centuries before that but there were no such concerns over "echo chambers."
Personally, I don't see anything bad about online echo chambers. I feel comfortable spending most of my online life in my echo chamber with people of the same mental and moral wavelength.
I generally don't feel I have anything valuable to learn from other ideologies because their moral values make me very uncomfortable.
Once in a while, I go into other echo chambers out of curiosity to verify if my predictions about them over some issue are correct. So it's not like our echo chambers are unreachable to one another.
I think of them as different conference rooms at a large seminar. We accept that some attendees will choose to not enter some rooms.
We accept that a random person jumping on the stage, grabbing the mike, and saying uncomfortable ideas is against social norms, even antisocial.
At a progressive meet, it may be someone shouting homosexuality is unnatural. At a conservative meet, it may be someone saying it's natural.
Either way, the norms of behavior are the same. We accept that calling security or cops to haul them out isn't an outrageous reaction. Reddit implements this conference room analogy well.
But I see a lot of people - here on HN and elsewhere - repeat the axiom "echo chambers are bad" or "end up with an echo chamber" as if it's a bad or unnatural thing though that's how we live IRL.
If you have this anti-echo-chamber sentiment, can you explain why echo chambers are bad, especially when they are accessible to all other echo chambers?
- h2odragon 4y ago"echo chambers are bad" usually means that the particular forum in discussion has a tendency to host opinions one doesn't agree with. When people are throwing the term around, as you point out, they do not often hold up their own tightly moderated, well policed communities as examples of the evils they're fighting.
- ozzythecat 4y agoI don’t think this is entirely true. For sure, one could say “X” is bad because it conflicts with their view, and that’s something that has long existed before the concept of “echo chambers” became well known. I think echo chambers are unhelpful in the sense that they reinforce a certain view without nuance or deep dive. I had a friend recently tell me how a certain personality is crazy. I asked them why, and after pressing on them a few times, they admitted they had no real data points to say this person is crazy or attack them. It’s just what they’ve heard everyone else say, and so my friend was convinced that if enough people are saying something, obviously it must be true.
- Comevius 4y agoEcho chambers can distort a person's perspective, sometimes radically. Only so many times you can hear from everyone that Clinton is drinking the blood of underage girls in the basement of a pizzeria before you are inclined to do something about it. That's how right-wing extremism, including QAnon works in the United States, thanks to the internet, and it's how the Third Reich worked in Germany, thanks to the radio. The problem is not echo chambers as you see, it's the people with the agenda purposefully creating and taking advantage of echo chambers.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago> That's a trendy synonym for group-think. There are plenty examples in history where group-think went sideways. It's not what echo chambers / group think are per se, it's what they're not. They're not open to other possibilities. Blind spots? What can go wrong?
- luckylion 4y agoEcho chambers in the real world are called cults. They tend to get more extreme by cutting people off from outside voices and only communicating among themselves, until they get ready for the space ship that's supposed to take them to paradise and hand out the Kool Aid. Echo chambers are where development dies. You won't be challenged, you won't discover new thoughts, you'll remain stagnant. I'm sure it's more stable, but it's the stability of a stone age tribe being left behind while the rest of the world advances.