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Comment by davidivadavid | Hacker News Reader

The question that nobody seems to be willing to ask is the following: who cares?

People don't like to experience cognitive dissonance so they stay within a group of people who do not cause cognitive dissonance.

When people are particularly intellectually adventurous, they Google things like "[something I believe] criticism" and they try to see the other point of view.

I have to apologize for being lazy in not developing the idea myself to make it justice, but certainly someone has a well developed counterpoint to offer to all that fear mongering about "filter bubbles" and "echo chambers"? Why, for instance, are people calling them that, instead of "safe spaces", or "friends bubbles", or "intellectual neighborhoods"?

I'm aware of a few books (Eli Pariser's) and papers (Brynjolfsson's paper on balkanization, most notably), but it seems like there's not much research done on that question. Any pointers welcome.

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All of entertainment is based on cognitive dissonance. I'm not convinced people don't like it. I think maybe they like it a bit too much. You get a hit of endorphins from it.

I'd be hard pressed to put numbers to it, but if people go through 10 conflict/resloution cycles in a day just from episodic TV, how much more is that than what our grandparents had ( or their grandparents if that is what it takes to get you back to before the barrage of entertainment product began, or at least began as much ).

The mechanism of Balkanization is about leadership using a divide and conquer strategy to maintain a power base. Then again, specifically the Balkans had Tito ruthlessly disappearing troublemakers. The Russians may have been bastards, but they kept a lid on it outside Yugoslavia. Stalin wasn't the horror he was for no reason.

It's not the others that cause cognitive dissonance. The dissonance is caused when your in-group AGREES with the others.

Without an in-group, the others are just datum to digest and process.

Without others, the in-group is just casually asserting the supremacy of its models over reality.

But can there be groups of humans without resorting to status-seeking? It appears to be worth it ( read: people still do it ).

The point of being in the in-group is being in the in-group, not the defense of some deep principle. If it's a sufficiently murderous in-group, then being in the in-group equates to staying alive.

    > The question that nobody seems to
    > be willing to ask is the following:
    > who cares?

I think a lot of people are asking that question, and the answer seems pretty clear to me: people care because this echo chamber effect seems to vastly increase the divide between groups. It makes it easier to dismiss opposing views as crackpot and evil who disagree because you're always surrounded by a steady roar of agreement. That increasingly bitter divide, and the accompanying increasingly entrenched and unswerving beliefs, are things I find deeply worrying.

Social media didn't invent this, of course, but it's made it much more prevalent.

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