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How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views

143 points by sztanko 13y ago

sztanko 13y ago
TL;DR version: the idea is that "content you might like" should recommend not only the relevant information of your views, but also the helpful information of opposite views from highly ranked authors. This will milden the polarisation of views and make everyone more informed of the issue.
- danielweber 13y ago
  There should be some kind of ranking algorithm for "the best people on our side for talking to people on the other side." This is often very different from the people that my side enjoys listening to, since that often includes a lot of puffery about how our side is obviously correct to anyone with half-a-brain.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    http://www.opposingviews.com/ http://www.opposingviews.com/ does a good job here. It lets you see the best arguments from either side at least. Edit: I dunno what came over me. I had the address transposed in my head. I meant to post a link to debate.org.
    - judk 13y ago
      Where? I just paged through and saw a bunch of mildly controversial news headlines (which did seen an intriguing collection of conversation starters, like hard income limits for Medicare), and then a pile of ad spam for "hot celebrity pics" and testosterone for sale.
      - bmelton 13y ago
        Corrected, with apologies.
        judk 13y ago
        Thanks! Debate.org looks good. It even has three sections for highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow; labelled dabatew, views, and polls respectively.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  - twobits 13y ago
    a) The best people of your side, may not be the best people to talk to the other side. Think rhetorics and clarity, vs depth, knowledge and insight. b) It can be gamed, especially online, by people being moles. c) There is usually a lot of context, "axioms" that make something "obvious" to you, but are too many to easily say to the other side.
- TheLegace 13y ago
  I've found that subreddits like /r/changemyview do a good job of stating opposing views, I know people aren't big fans of reddit here, but there are subreddits where polar opposing views are actually encouraged. I think(hope) one day people might get bored of their filter bubble, and may one day seek solutions to answers that aren't one dimensional as left or right.
  - ToastyMallows 13y ago
    Glad I CTRL+F for this subreddit before posting. Anyone that hasn't been on /r/changemyview before, it's great.
mkesper 13y ago
Using https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com as a first step: http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/
- cromwellian 13y ago
  That's not really the kind of bubble being talked about, and there are good arguments why a search engine should at least have some knowledge of search history to implement conversational search and better understand what the search terms mean in context. If I just searched for "apple pie recipes", and my next query is "where to buy apple", I don't want to see a link to Store.apple.com
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Hardly seems to address the problem stated in the article, as a search for "BP" on duckduckgo contains _only_ investment-related information, nothing about the oil spill. At DDG you are in a filter bubble, it's just not _your_ filter bubble. It's someone else's filter, presumably the collective bubble of the engineers at DDG's incredibly lackadaisical and tragically understaffed search quality department.
awjr 13y ago
As a keen cyclist (and politically active in this area trying to get better infrastructure in Bath, UK), I have noticed that I seem to be surrounding myself with people that have similar view points (cars are bad for cities, think of the kids). I have tried to bring in other views by following people, but it seems to only happen when one of the people I follow retweets an inflammatory tweet. I follow, get involved in the discussion then move on. Of course then I've noticed that most of my feed is pro-cycling. I've created my own filter bubble. I should probably start looking to break out of this 'sub-conscious' filtering I appear to be doing although it would be interesting to have twitter recommend people I would find very annoying to follow.
- tootie 13y ago
  Just because you are subject to confirmation bias doesn't mean you're wrong. I'm not a cyclist, but I can't stand all the cars clogging up my city. So dirty and noisy and dangerous. I'm not convinced cycling is the answer though. Mass transit is best. At least until we all have electric self-driving cars.
  - awjr 13y ago
    See now this is one of those viewpoints I don't see very often.
  - alextingle 13y ago
    Why would self-driving cars be better than mass-transit?
    - jfb 13y ago
      Because they're more specific, and thus more useful. I take the bus everywhere, but rarely does a single leg bus journey take me door-to-door. This is the nature of the shared resource.
    - Guvante 13y ago
      Outside of traffic, cars are dramatically more efficient than public transportation for each individual. It is only as a whole (note that traffic comment) that the efficiency breaks down. I can't take a bus from my driveway to my work. Nor does the path a bus take usually end up being the most direct one.
znowi 13y ago
> And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society. I think we already see the effect of this. It gets harder for opposing sides to find common ground - from local to government level. People get more prone to critical commentary, claiming "hurt feelings" at first opportunity. Even here on HN a constructive debate is uncommon.
- hindsightbias 13y ago
  There are many that see this as a feature, not a bug. The divisions already exist, someone is just exploiting and amplifying them. What's 'common ground' has radically shifted - so what you think is common really isn't so much.
bmelton 13y ago
I see this as, perhaps, the most important thing I've seen on HN this year. People come to a conclusion, sometimes by informed means, sometimes not, but however we come to it, we generally stick to that conclusion, for better or worse. Once we've reached that conclusion though, we become very bad scientists. We discard data that doesn't fit with our conclusion, or if we can't discard it, attempt to minimize its significance and promote things that do fit our conclusions as more important. The media panders to their audience, constantly surveying their audience and reactions, and serving up more and more of the news that we're already predisposed to the news we want to hear. Once a certain capture rate has occurred, the news that people choose begins shaping opinions. Newsroom parodies this somewhat (disclaimer, I love the show, even though its politics disagree with my own), proclaiming that the Fairness Doctrine was unnecessary, and you can deliver hard-hitting news fairly and accurately without it (which may be a true assumption, maybe not), but then they proceed to deliver extremely biased news coverage that is extremely colored by their own politics and beliefs, presented as intellectualism because we're supposed to get the idea that Will McAvoy is the smartest man in whatever room he's in, so all his opinions are informed by sheer fact and wisdom, so we should believe that whatever he says is true because of that. Despite that coloring, we see in every off-air scene that he's well informed, but terrible at drawing pragmatic conclusions from a given set of facts, belying that the central theme of the show is even possible with the cast of characters as presented. Back on topic, because I'm rambling terribly, but the brain rewards itself when it finds facts that agree with its pre-existing beliefs. A chemical 'high five' to reaffirm how right it already was, and to reinforce that it made the right decision before, and now the rest of the world is catching up. I don't know that this can be fixed, but I think that the surest way to mitigate it is to disallow it from becoming too set in its ways, to keep it slightly off-guard, and in a constant state of discomfort. This might kill us in some other way, and it's possible that the brain will just refuse to allow this, or that we'll all become blathering idiots as a result, but i's at least a step in the right direction of preventing a vicious cycle of arbitrary self-affirmation.
- wwinter 13y ago
  100% agreed. The last thing we need is to give a giant helping hand to confirmation bias. I've been rooting for an intelligent "anti-" recommendation system of this sort for so long.
jkldotio 13y ago
jkl.io tries to attack this problem in news by ranking with blended ranking signals, then clustering from a variety of sources so that even unpopular views will be in the top topic clusters. I am currently building a comment system to go with it that will promote informative comments in new ways and across threads/clusters if they are in the same time period.
dspeyer 13y ago
I'm interested in reading opposing views, but not stupid ones. If there's a large inferential gap, it often takes me a while to tell the difference. Does this software have a way to distinguish?
- jeremyjh 13y ago
  Did you read the article? No, software cannot tell you which views are "stupid". However, this approach finds people who are similar to or share common ground with you apart from some particular view - which would still act as a filter.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    In other words, if the recommendations are based on similarities in your interests outside the disagreement then you may be less likely to find them "stupid".
- dublinben 13y ago
  It's easier to find non-stupid views that you disagree with if you don't look online. Weekly political magazines represent every corner of the political spectrum, and are much better written than any random blog. You can also read books by the intellectual giants that you disagree with, to witness the original arguments, not their passed-down derivatives.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    It's worth noting that "passed-down derivatives" can be worse or better than the original. Most-to-all of these positions were developed by serious thinkers but weren't handed down from a source of Truth on high.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  I'd be interested, maybe, in seeing opposing political views or different opinions on economics, or something like that. Because I'm interested in those things and because I'm not very certain that my current beliefs are correct, when I even have a belief. Just today a friend introduced me to a good documentary that partially changed my view of nuclear power and I learned a lot. However I wouldn't want to get stuck with something that is a complete waste of time, like creationism, or religion, or abortion, or something along those lines. Or something that just doesn't interest me, like, say, climate change or conspiracy theories.
narrator 13y ago
The best way to get out of the bubble is to argue the opposite of your position for a while. Do it anonymously. Even argue a position that you ridicule, just for fun. It's a great excercise that often leads to a deeper understanding of an issue.
- alextingle 13y ago
  AKA "trolling".
  - narrator 13y ago
    Is it trolling if you are arguing the opposite of what you believe currently in a sincere non-inflammatory manner? It is because you don't believe it and you're misleading people about what you really think. Yes, but isn't the point of it all to get to the truth of the matter that exists independently of the debate. The truth of the matter exists and it's what you really believe. Playing around with contrary viewpoints is just childish. Why be so arrogant to think you're right and just have to convince the other person? Are you really convinced you know everything there is to know about the issue and can't learn any more from another person who doesn't agree with you? etc...
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    No, it's called playing devil's advocate.
  - nordsieck 13y ago
    The best version of this is called "steel man-ing", as in creating the opposite of a straw man.
  - icelancer 13y ago
    No, AKA "the socratic method."
- tetrep 13y ago
  i find it easier to start with a neutral view and then research a topic before arriving at a conclusion. time considerations aside, coming to conclusions via thorough research about even mundane topics is a great way to practice/utilize critical thinking skills. trying to argue for the "other" side can get quite complicated for complex topics, like religion.
linuxhansl 13y ago
Maybe it is just me, but when I search for something I look for information, not some bit I happen to agree with for my entertainment. We see the same problem with the news (think Fox News). It's not information, it's "infotainment". All it leads to is more people who are no longer able to even consider other viewpoints.
- mhurron 13y ago
  HN itself is something of an echo chamber, there are not many differing viewpoints held in high esteem here. So it's not always just when looking for information, but the fact that we try to find others who think like we do when actually looking for rest and entertainment. Your social group ends up shielding you from other viewpoints because that is the easier way to exist.
- ams6110 13y ago
  All television news networks and programs exist to sell advertising, and compete for viewers by picking sensational stories, dramatizing the reporting, and reacting to ratings.
  - linuxhansl 13y ago
    Not sure why your comment was down voted. You are correct. The "news" are reported such that you agree with them and your thus more likely to stay on the channel.
- mcguire 13y ago
  "...when I search for something I look for information..." The problem is, to paraphrase someone I generally disagree with, not in what you know that you don't know, but rather in what you don't know that you don't know. To look for information, you have to know it exists; you're less likely to know to look for something if it never impinges on your bubble.
  - linuxhansl 13y ago
    Isn't that what I do "partially" with searching, though? I am looking for something I don't necessarily know ahead of time. The stuff I don't know I don't know is exactly that which is most valuable to broaden my horizon.
niels_olson 13y ago
While this may be a mathematically valid thing, it doesn't make it correct. I submit that there may be left-right filter bubbles, but there is a growing flow from ignorant to well-informed, and that flow is right to left. This article is just a mathematical means of implementing the equal time rule (1), or the fairness doctrine (2). If anything, 30+ years of broadcast TV has shown us that these policies lead to stagnation of public though, not growth. NPR, for one, has attempted to recognize this and move the pendulum back toward the Enlightened pursuit of truth(3). (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine (3) http://ethics.npr.org/category/a1-accuracy/ http://ethics.npr.org/category/a1-accuracy/
- niels_olson 13y ago
  Gotta love it a well-cited competing view on an article about tolerating competing views gets downvoted.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    Well-cited? You made a manifestly false assertion, then linked to the definition of two terms and an article that specifically disagrees with your assertion: "For more accurate stories, seek diverse perspectives. "We tell stronger, better-informed stories when we sample a variety of perspectives on what we’re covering. The best reporting draws on the experiences of experts, influential figures and laypeople from across the demographic spectrum. "A story could accurately claim, for example, that unemployment in the Washington, D.C., metro area in the fall of 2011 was quite a bit lower than the national average. But that fact would probably ring false to a resident of the city proper, where the unemployment rate was considerably higher at the time. And such a story would describe a world vastly different from D.C.’s Ward 8, which had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Any of these vantage points could make for a technically accurate story. But drawing on all of them allows for a much more nuanced report. Means and medians can be informative, but true insight often comes from surveying experiences all along the spectrum."
jkscm 13y ago
How does this apply to content sites like hn/reddit/digg? The number one use case for commenting systems is the expression of opposing views, isn't it?
- maxerickson 13y ago
  By volume, I would say Reddit comments are used for cheering.
- sologrrl 13y ago
  Of course it does, in part thanks to the moderation and flamewar detector. Read this thread, especially PG's comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596038
- twobits 13y ago
  In popular reddit subs, you can't have an unpopular opinion. Your link submissions and your comments get downvoted to oblivion. It also happens in less popular ones.
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    Dunno, I've found Reddit seems to upvote controversial opinions much more frequently than HN. HN definitely filters out anything that is out of line with the consensus...
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Reddit reacts incredibly negatively to poor tone. You can be completely right about something, and unless you're nice about it, you will be below threshold in no time flat. Most of the comments I see hidden on Reddit are there, not because of simple disagreement, but because the person posting comes off as haughty or smug. I can't complain too much. Anything worth saying is worth saying nice.
crazygringo 13y ago
I'm not sure it's that simple. People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds. The real issue is integrating opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that's where actual understanding takes place. But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion. The only exception I can think of is The Economist, whose articles often follow exactly the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which of course is why they're known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present "both sides" in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.
- Angostura 13y ago
  > Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. I think it's actually very rare that the audience get to listen to these people unfiltered. Instead the audience will have chosen their preferred channels and these channels will have pre-digested, edited and analysed any speeches. Any nuance will have been stripped away to match a simplified narrative.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
- pointernil 13y ago
  .) isn't there even a whole research area dedicated to all biases and other effects which make persuasion and arguing a quite hard problem? (not only in public politics, btw) .)"People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them" ... and that tends to be the output of that research, btw ;) I personally wonder if it wouldn't be time to accept that nobody on earth actually can gather all insights, all arguments and for sure not all facts on any given topic and if instead of arguing against each other we should change the prevalent culture to arguing with each other (that's not a new idea ofc ;) and accept that every single argument even if provided by the utter worst "enemy" provides some additional information about the world which we should accept and incorporate into our ideas about the way to move forward... I think most of the time this valuable objective is not reached bcos of unwillingness to accept and understand diverging language and a tended culture (even official) of hyperbolic conflict. So even if it seams to me the Reps. are talking nonsense at first, I'd rather try to find out what they really mean and what information drives them... nope, it does not make arguments and discussion any easier ;)
jfasi 13y ago
This is huge from an academic standpoint, and I sincerely hope this sort of mind-expanding recommendation will enter the mainstream. Here is a off-the-top-of-my-head list of some introductory thoughts: - I'd be willing to bet that people won't react well to this sort of thing popping up in their existing news feeds without their explicit permission. For instance, I'd love to see Facebook or Twitter introduce this as a ranking signal, but I can't see that resulting in meaningful discussion without some careful tuning. - This being hacker news, the first thing that comes to mind is "let's found a startup that does this." I'd seriously love to see this turn into a product of some sort. It would face something of an uphill struggle for adoption, but it might not be so bad. One major feature of the "ideal customer" is already lined out: interest in or willingness to tolerate dissenting opinions. Synthesis of opposing views into a new one correlates strongly with education, so that's a group you can reasonably target. College students are into this sort of stuff, so you could go after them. Personally, I think this has potential as a space. - Gathering existing data for this sort of thing could be difficult. Access to significant amount of social network data is a must, especially if you will want to perform clustering-type analysis. My hunch is that there may be a way to make this happen without a large quantity of data, but nothing obvious or market-tested comes to mind.
notahacker 13y ago
The linked paper is a little underwhelming: they find that people generally find a similarity-based tweet recommendation engine "interesting" even with the secret twist that it only shows tweets from those who have opposing views on abortion. Given the study wasn't focused on politics or controversy (except to the extent Chilean Twitter feeds in general are) and no attempt was made to gauge whether anyone had felt their views challenged or found interesting new perspectives, I don't think the "filter bubble" was really burst at all.
summerdown2 13y ago
Maybe just me, but I'd love to sign up for a service that did this. I try to take in alternative views all the time, but it's very difficult because a) I know the reasonable (agreeable to me) voices on my side - I have no idea how to find quality on the other sides. b) I generally discover opposing views when someone I agree with throws up something so extreme to criticise it. It would be amazing to have a discovery service that gave good-quality alternative perspectives. Not all the time, because a lot of the time I'm just looking for a particular thing. But certainly some of the time.
dreeves 13y ago
In related research, the Filter Bubble problem itself is exaggerated: http://messymatters.com/bubble http://messymatters.com/bubble
icelancer 13y ago
If you live in a filter bubble, it is your fault. Google isn't the enemy. When you believe something and want to check the validity of said statement (already something almost no one does), your Google searches should not be guilty of confirmation bias. For example - you think test driven development is a pile of crap. If you search for "TDD is stupid," then that is not Google's fault. That is your fault for not understanding remedial philosophy/logic.
nateabele 13y ago
This isn't a technology problem, it's a human problem, and the best (and maybe only) way to solve it is through a little empathy. Ideas in an article you disagree with are easy to dismiss, less so with ideas in a human. When you surround yourself with a diverse group of people with differing views on a variety of subjects and actually listen to them, the problem goes away.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Do I need really to discuss earthquakes with someone who believes they are God's punishment on gay people?
epaga 13y ago
Here's what I would love to see some day and am quite sure I don't (yet) have the clout to pull off myself: A recommendation engine which points me to articles espousing opposite views to my own but which are rated highly in terms of being understandable & logical by other opponents of the view in the article. For example, as a Christian, I would love to find articles or books which are, say, pro-atheism which are rated by non-atheists as being well-argued and worth-while.
rpdillon 13y ago
I've seen a lot of discussion of the 'filter bubble', particularly as a way for DuckDuckGo to differentiate itself from other search engines. But I have never seen any scientific data indicating it actually exists. I've seen the TED talk, and I've seen the oft-repeated example involving BP, but I've never seen anything more than a couple of examples about how it might exist. Has anyone demonstrated in any scientific fashion whatsoever that there is a population of people that are insulated from news they don't want to hear because it is actively being kept from them on an ongoing basis by supposedly unbiased news sources? Here's the data I do know about: we already have 'news' channels that pander to particular audience, and we've already seen that watching news you agree with activates the same pleasure centers in the brain that are stimulated by watching pornography. Based on evidence I've seen, the problem is with the audience, not the news. The assertion in the article that the filter "can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society" seems, well, unfounded, at least so far.
- emp_zealoth 13y ago
  I can give you my own experience - i hate using condoms, for various reasons - last time i had to Google condoms i was greeted by pages upon pages of how they constantly break, slip off, make you miserable and on and on I also had a discussion with a friend - tried Googling to find his viewpoint - anything I'd get was heavily biased towards mine

143 points by sztanko 13y ago

TL;DR version: the idea is that "content you might like" should recommend not only the relevant information of your views, but also the helpful information of opposite views from highly ranked authors. This will milden the polarisation of views and make everyone more informed of the issue.

danielweber 13y ago
There should be some kind of ranking algorithm for "the best people on our side for talking to people on the other side." This is often very different from the people that my side enjoys listening to, since that often includes a lot of puffery about how our side is obviously correct to anyone with half-a-brain.
- bmelton 13y ago
  http://www.opposingviews.com/ http://www.opposingviews.com/ does a good job here. It lets you see the best arguments from either side at least. Edit: I dunno what came over me. I had the address transposed in my head. I meant to post a link to debate.org.
  - judk 13y ago
    Where? I just paged through and saw a bunch of mildly controversial news headlines (which did seen an intriguing collection of conversation starters, like hard income limits for Medicare), and then a pile of ad spam for "hot celebrity pics" and testosterone for sale.
    - bmelton 13y ago
      Corrected, with apologies.
      - judk 13y ago
        Thanks! Debate.org looks good. It even has three sections for highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow; labelled dabatew, views, and polls respectively.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- twobits 13y ago
  a) The best people of your side, may not be the best people to talk to the other side. Think rhetorics and clarity, vs depth, knowledge and insight. b) It can be gamed, especially online, by people being moles. c) There is usually a lot of context, "axioms" that make something "obvious" to you, but are too many to easily say to the other side.
TheLegace 13y ago
I've found that subreddits like /r/changemyview do a good job of stating opposing views, I know people aren't big fans of reddit here, but there are subreddits where polar opposing views are actually encouraged. I think(hope) one day people might get bored of their filter bubble, and may one day seek solutions to answers that aren't one dimensional as left or right.
- ToastyMallows 13y ago
  Glad I CTRL+F for this subreddit before posting. Anyone that hasn't been on /r/changemyview before, it's great.

mkesper 13y ago

Using https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com as a first step: http://dontbubble.us/ http://dontbubble.us/

cromwellian 13y ago
That's not really the kind of bubble being talked about, and there are good arguments why a search engine should at least have some knowledge of search history to implement conversational search and better understand what the search terms mean in context. If I just searched for "apple pie recipes", and my next query is "where to buy apple", I don't want to see a link to Store.apple.com
thrownaway2424 13y ago
Hardly seems to address the problem stated in the article, as a search for "BP" on duckduckgo contains _only_ investment-related information, nothing about the oil spill. At DDG you are in a filter bubble, it's just not _your_ filter bubble. It's someone else's filter, presumably the collective bubble of the engineers at DDG's incredibly lackadaisical and tragically understaffed search quality department.

awjr 13y ago

As a keen cyclist (and politically active in this area trying to get better infrastructure in Bath, UK), I have noticed that I seem to be surrounding myself with people that have similar view points (cars are bad for cities, think of the kids). I have tried to bring in other views by following people, but it seems to only happen when one of the people I follow retweets an inflammatory tweet. I follow, get involved in the discussion then move on. Of course then I've noticed that most of my feed is pro-cycling. I've created my own filter bubble. I should probably start looking to break out of this 'sub-conscious' filtering I appear to be doing although it would be interesting to have twitter recommend people I would find very annoying to follow.

tootie 13y ago
Just because you are subject to confirmation bias doesn't mean you're wrong. I'm not a cyclist, but I can't stand all the cars clogging up my city. So dirty and noisy and dangerous. I'm not convinced cycling is the answer though. Mass transit is best. At least until we all have electric self-driving cars.
- awjr 13y ago
  See now this is one of those viewpoints I don't see very often.
- alextingle 13y ago
  Why would self-driving cars be better than mass-transit?
  - jfb 13y ago
    Because they're more specific, and thus more useful. I take the bus everywhere, but rarely does a single leg bus journey take me door-to-door. This is the nature of the shared resource.
  - Guvante 13y ago
    Outside of traffic, cars are dramatically more efficient than public transportation for each individual. It is only as a whole (note that traffic comment) that the efficiency breaks down. I can't take a bus from my driveway to my work. Nor does the path a bus take usually end up being the most direct one.

znowi 13y ago

> And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society. I think we already see the effect of this. It gets harder for opposing sides to find common ground - from local to government level. People get more prone to critical commentary, claiming "hurt feelings" at first opportunity. Even here on HN a constructive debate is uncommon.

hindsightbias 13y ago
There are many that see this as a feature, not a bug. The divisions already exist, someone is just exploiting and amplifying them. What's 'common ground' has radically shifted - so what you think is common really isn't so much.

bmelton 13y ago

I see this as, perhaps, the most important thing I've seen on HN this year. People come to a conclusion, sometimes by informed means, sometimes not, but however we come to it, we generally stick to that conclusion, for better or worse. Once we've reached that conclusion though, we become very bad scientists. We discard data that doesn't fit with our conclusion, or if we can't discard it, attempt to minimize its significance and promote things that do fit our conclusions as more important. The media panders to their audience, constantly surveying their audience and reactions, and serving up more and more of the news that we're already predisposed to the news we want to hear. Once a certain capture rate has occurred, the news that people choose begins shaping opinions. Newsroom parodies this somewhat (disclaimer, I love the show, even though its politics disagree with my own), proclaiming that the Fairness Doctrine was unnecessary, and you can deliver hard-hitting news fairly and accurately without it (which may be a true assumption, maybe not), but then they proceed to deliver extremely biased news coverage that is extremely colored by their own politics and beliefs, presented as intellectualism because we're supposed to get the idea that Will McAvoy is the smartest man in whatever room he's in, so all his opinions are informed by sheer fact and wisdom, so we should believe that whatever he says is true because of that. Despite that coloring, we see in every off-air scene that he's well informed, but terrible at drawing pragmatic conclusions from a given set of facts, belying that the central theme of the show is even possible with the cast of characters as presented. Back on topic, because I'm rambling terribly, but the brain rewards itself when it finds facts that agree with its pre-existing beliefs. A chemical 'high five' to reaffirm how right it already was, and to reinforce that it made the right decision before, and now the rest of the world is catching up. I don't know that this can be fixed, but I think that the surest way to mitigate it is to disallow it from becoming too set in its ways, to keep it slightly off-guard, and in a constant state of discomfort. This might kill us in some other way, and it's possible that the brain will just refuse to allow this, or that we'll all become blathering idiots as a result, but i's at least a step in the right direction of preventing a vicious cycle of arbitrary self-affirmation.

wwinter 13y ago
100% agreed. The last thing we need is to give a giant helping hand to confirmation bias. I've been rooting for an intelligent "anti-" recommendation system of this sort for so long.

jkldotio 13y ago

jkl.io tries to attack this problem in news by ranking with blended ranking signals, then clustering from a variety of sources so that even unpopular views will be in the top topic clusters. I am currently building a comment system to go with it that will promote informative comments in new ways and across threads/clusters if they are in the same time period.

dspeyer 13y ago

I'm interested in reading opposing views, but not stupid ones. If there's a large inferential gap, it often takes me a while to tell the difference. Does this software have a way to distinguish?

jeremyjh 13y ago
Did you read the article? No, software cannot tell you which views are "stupid". However, this approach finds people who are similar to or share common ground with you apart from some particular view - which would still act as a filter.
- mcguire 13y ago
  In other words, if the recommendations are based on similarities in your interests outside the disagreement then you may be less likely to find them "stupid".
dublinben 13y ago
It's easier to find non-stupid views that you disagree with if you don't look online. Weekly political magazines represent every corner of the political spectrum, and are much better written than any random blog. You can also read books by the intellectual giants that you disagree with, to witness the original arguments, not their passed-down derivatives.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  It's worth noting that "passed-down derivatives" can be worse or better than the original. Most-to-all of these positions were developed by serious thinkers but weren't handed down from a source of Truth on high.
Houshalter 13y ago
I'd be interested, maybe, in seeing opposing political views or different opinions on economics, or something like that. Because I'm interested in those things and because I'm not very certain that my current beliefs are correct, when I even have a belief. Just today a friend introduced me to a good documentary that partially changed my view of nuclear power and I learned a lot. However I wouldn't want to get stuck with something that is a complete waste of time, like creationism, or religion, or abortion, or something along those lines. Or something that just doesn't interest me, like, say, climate change or conspiracy theories.

narrator 13y ago

The best way to get out of the bubble is to argue the opposite of your position for a while. Do it anonymously. Even argue a position that you ridicule, just for fun. It's a great excercise that often leads to a deeper understanding of an issue.

alextingle 13y ago
AKA "trolling".
- narrator 13y ago
  Is it trolling if you are arguing the opposite of what you believe currently in a sincere non-inflammatory manner? It is because you don't believe it and you're misleading people about what you really think. Yes, but isn't the point of it all to get to the truth of the matter that exists independently of the debate. The truth of the matter exists and it's what you really believe. Playing around with contrary viewpoints is just childish. Why be so arrogant to think you're right and just have to convince the other person? Are you really convinced you know everything there is to know about the issue and can't learn any more from another person who doesn't agree with you? etc...
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  No, it's called playing devil's advocate.
- nordsieck 13y ago
  The best version of this is called "steel man-ing", as in creating the opposite of a straw man.
- icelancer 13y ago
  No, AKA "the socratic method."
tetrep 13y ago
i find it easier to start with a neutral view and then research a topic before arriving at a conclusion. time considerations aside, coming to conclusions via thorough research about even mundane topics is a great way to practice/utilize critical thinking skills. trying to argue for the "other" side can get quite complicated for complex topics, like religion.

linuxhansl 13y ago

Maybe it is just me, but when I search for something I look for information, not some bit I happen to agree with for my entertainment. We see the same problem with the news (think Fox News). It's not information, it's "infotainment". All it leads to is more people who are no longer able to even consider other viewpoints.

mhurron 13y ago
HN itself is something of an echo chamber, there are not many differing viewpoints held in high esteem here. So it's not always just when looking for information, but the fact that we try to find others who think like we do when actually looking for rest and entertainment. Your social group ends up shielding you from other viewpoints because that is the easier way to exist.
ams6110 13y ago
All television news networks and programs exist to sell advertising, and compete for viewers by picking sensational stories, dramatizing the reporting, and reacting to ratings.
- linuxhansl 13y ago
  Not sure why your comment was down voted. You are correct. The "news" are reported such that you agree with them and your thus more likely to stay on the channel.
mcguire 13y ago
"...when I search for something I look for information..." The problem is, to paraphrase someone I generally disagree with, not in what you know that you don't know, but rather in what you don't know that you don't know. To look for information, you have to know it exists; you're less likely to know to look for something if it never impinges on your bubble.
- linuxhansl 13y ago
  Isn't that what I do "partially" with searching, though? I am looking for something I don't necessarily know ahead of time. The stuff I don't know I don't know is exactly that which is most valuable to broaden my horizon.

niels_olson 13y ago

While this may be a mathematically valid thing, it doesn't make it correct. I submit that there may be left-right filter bubbles, but there is a growing flow from ignorant to well-informed, and that flow is right to left. This article is just a mathematical means of implementing the equal time rule (1), or the fairness doctrine (2). If anything, 30+ years of broadcast TV has shown us that these policies lead to stagnation of public though, not growth. NPR, for one, has attempted to recognize this and move the pendulum back toward the Enlightened pursuit of truth(3). (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine (3) http://ethics.npr.org/category/a1-accuracy/ http://ethics.npr.org/category/a1-accuracy/

niels_olson 13y ago
Gotta love it a well-cited competing view on an article about tolerating competing views gets downvoted.
- mcguire 13y ago
  Well-cited? You made a manifestly false assertion, then linked to the definition of two terms and an article that specifically disagrees with your assertion: "For more accurate stories, seek diverse perspectives. "We tell stronger, better-informed stories when we sample a variety of perspectives on what we’re covering. The best reporting draws on the experiences of experts, influential figures and laypeople from across the demographic spectrum. "A story could accurately claim, for example, that unemployment in the Washington, D.C., metro area in the fall of 2011 was quite a bit lower than the national average. But that fact would probably ring false to a resident of the city proper, where the unemployment rate was considerably higher at the time. And such a story would describe a world vastly different from D.C.’s Ward 8, which had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Any of these vantage points could make for a technically accurate story. But drawing on all of them allows for a much more nuanced report. Means and medians can be informative, but true insight often comes from surveying experiences all along the spectrum."

jkscm 13y ago

How does this apply to content sites like hn/reddit/digg? The number one use case for commenting systems is the expression of opposing views, isn't it?

maxerickson 13y ago
By volume, I would say Reddit comments are used for cheering.
sologrrl 13y ago
Of course it does, in part thanks to the moderation and flamewar detector. Read this thread, especially PG's comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596038
twobits 13y ago
In popular reddit subs, you can't have an unpopular opinion. Your link submissions and your comments get downvoted to oblivion. It also happens in less popular ones.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Dunno, I've found Reddit seems to upvote controversial opinions much more frequently than HN. HN definitely filters out anything that is out of line with the consensus...
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Reddit reacts incredibly negatively to poor tone. You can be completely right about something, and unless you're nice about it, you will be below threshold in no time flat. Most of the comments I see hidden on Reddit are there, not because of simple disagreement, but because the person posting comes off as haughty or smug. I can't complain too much. Anything worth saying is worth saying nice.

crazygringo 13y ago

I'm not sure it's that simple. People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds. The real issue is integrating opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that's where actual understanding takes place. But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion. The only exception I can think of is The Economist, whose articles often follow exactly the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which of course is why they're known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present "both sides" in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.

Angostura 13y ago
> Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. I think it's actually very rare that the audience get to listen to these people unfiltered. Instead the audience will have chosen their preferred channels and these channels will have pre-digested, edited and analysed any speeches. Any nuance will have been stripped away to match a simplified narrative.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
pointernil 13y ago
.) isn't there even a whole research area dedicated to all biases and other effects which make persuasion and arguing a quite hard problem? (not only in public politics, btw) .)"People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them" ... and that tends to be the output of that research, btw ;) I personally wonder if it wouldn't be time to accept that nobody on earth actually can gather all insights, all arguments and for sure not all facts on any given topic and if instead of arguing against each other we should change the prevalent culture to arguing with each other (that's not a new idea ofc ;) and accept that every single argument even if provided by the utter worst "enemy" provides some additional information about the world which we should accept and incorporate into our ideas about the way to move forward... I think most of the time this valuable objective is not reached bcos of unwillingness to accept and understand diverging language and a tended culture (even official) of hyperbolic conflict. So even if it seams to me the Reps. are talking nonsense at first, I'd rather try to find out what they really mean and what information drives them... nope, it does not make arguments and discussion any easier ;)

jfasi 13y ago

This is huge from an academic standpoint, and I sincerely hope this sort of mind-expanding recommendation will enter the mainstream. Here is a off-the-top-of-my-head list of some introductory thoughts: - I'd be willing to bet that people won't react well to this sort of thing popping up in their existing news feeds without their explicit permission. For instance, I'd love to see Facebook or Twitter introduce this as a ranking signal, but I can't see that resulting in meaningful discussion without some careful tuning. - This being hacker news, the first thing that comes to mind is "let's found a startup that does this." I'd seriously love to see this turn into a product of some sort. It would face something of an uphill struggle for adoption, but it might not be so bad. One major feature of the "ideal customer" is already lined out: interest in or willingness to tolerate dissenting opinions. Synthesis of opposing views into a new one correlates strongly with education, so that's a group you can reasonably target. College students are into this sort of stuff, so you could go after them. Personally, I think this has potential as a space. - Gathering existing data for this sort of thing could be difficult. Access to significant amount of social network data is a must, especially if you will want to perform clustering-type analysis. My hunch is that there may be a way to make this happen without a large quantity of data, but nothing obvious or market-tested comes to mind.

notahacker 13y ago

The linked paper is a little underwhelming: they find that people generally find a similarity-based tweet recommendation engine "interesting" even with the secret twist that it only shows tweets from those who have opposing views on abortion. Given the study wasn't focused on politics or controversy (except to the extent Chilean Twitter feeds in general are) and no attempt was made to gauge whether anyone had felt their views challenged or found interesting new perspectives, I don't think the "filter bubble" was really burst at all.

summerdown2 13y ago

Maybe just me, but I'd love to sign up for a service that did this. I try to take in alternative views all the time, but it's very difficult because a) I know the reasonable (agreeable to me) voices on my side - I have no idea how to find quality on the other sides. b) I generally discover opposing views when someone I agree with throws up something so extreme to criticise it. It would be amazing to have a discovery service that gave good-quality alternative perspectives. Not all the time, because a lot of the time I'm just looking for a particular thing. But certainly some of the time.

dreeves 13y ago

In related research, the Filter Bubble problem itself is exaggerated: http://messymatters.com/bubble http://messymatters.com/bubble

icelancer 13y ago

If you live in a filter bubble, it is your fault. Google isn't the enemy. When you believe something and want to check the validity of said statement (already something almost no one does), your Google searches should not be guilty of confirmation bias. For example - you think test driven development is a pile of crap. If you search for "TDD is stupid," then that is not Google's fault. That is your fault for not understanding remedial philosophy/logic.

nateabele 13y ago

This isn't a technology problem, it's a human problem, and the best (and maybe only) way to solve it is through a little empathy. Ideas in an article you disagree with are easy to dismiss, less so with ideas in a human. When you surround yourself with a diverse group of people with differing views on a variety of subjects and actually listen to them, the problem goes away.

auctiontheory 13y ago

Do I need really to discuss earthquakes with someone who believes they are God's punishment on gay people?

epaga 13y ago

Here's what I would love to see some day and am quite sure I don't (yet) have the clout to pull off myself: A recommendation engine which points me to articles espousing opposite views to my own but which are rated highly in terms of being understandable & logical by other opponents of the view in the article. For example, as a Christian, I would love to find articles or books which are, say, pro-atheism which are rated by non-atheists as being well-argued and worth-while.

rpdillon 13y ago

I've seen a lot of discussion of the 'filter bubble', particularly as a way for DuckDuckGo to differentiate itself from other search engines. But I have never seen any scientific data indicating it actually exists. I've seen the TED talk, and I've seen the oft-repeated example involving BP, but I've never seen anything more than a couple of examples about how it might exist. Has anyone demonstrated in any scientific fashion whatsoever that there is a population of people that are insulated from news they don't want to hear because it is actively being kept from them on an ongoing basis by supposedly unbiased news sources? Here's the data I do know about: we already have 'news' channels that pander to particular audience, and we've already seen that watching news you agree with activates the same pleasure centers in the brain that are stimulated by watching pornography. Based on evidence I've seen, the problem is with the audience, not the news. The assertion in the article that the filter "can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society" seems, well, unfounded, at least so far.

emp_zealoth 13y ago
I can give you my own experience - i hate using condoms, for various reasons - last time i had to Google condoms i was greeted by pages upon pages of how they constantly break, slip off, make you miserable and on and on I also had a discussion with a friend - tried Googling to find his viewpoint - anything I'd get was heavily biased towards mine