Ask HN: Why do you consider “echo chambers” bad?

Because they:

a. Effortlessly gather people that have similar ideas but don't want to challenge them for their validity and only want peer approval, which they receive. It started mentioned recently mostly because of advent of simple and far-reaching communication means which exacerbated the problem that existed even before that.

b. Implicitly use such approval, clarification and repetition of the same ideas as key ingredients for long-term learning. That's why such communities are all too easy to radicalize, making vague assumptions and feelings into established worldviews, and becoming toxic or even aggressive toward out-groups and out-ideas.

c. Prone to become target for informational poisoning and manipulation as ideas are rarely challenged there.

d. Create and amplify skewed norms because they tend to miss on naturally occurring diversity of opinions.

well said.

now, the next step is - how do you identify whether you are in the real open world or just another, bigger, echo chamber with lots and lots of "like minded" folks who all think they are extremely open minded, to the point of congratulating themselves on it incessantly? (i can't think of any place like that...)

the answer is that if you are typing, it's almost always the later and if you are speaking to someone IRL it's the often the former.

Echo chambers amplify invalid assumptions. An example of this IRL is when a founding member of a company hire only people that think exactly like them and so on and so forth. When they have a bad idea, everyone will agree it is a good idea and act on it. Good leaders hire diverse employees and are open to accepting feedback from those that dissent with their views. Some of the best and most successful leaders I have met love it when someone challenges their held views with verifiable data of course.

>We accept that a random person jumping on the stage, grabbing the mike, and saying uncomfortable ideas is against social norms, even antisocial. You are confusing reasoned debate with shouting/trolling. This is the difference between scientists trying to figure out the truth versus two trolls screaming at each other.

>explain why echo chambers are bad. If you are leader who makes decisions that affects the lives of your team mates and their families, you want to make the best decision possible. At the most simplistic level, decisions are choices between option1, option2, and option3. You weigh each option according to its risks and its benefits. If you have clear and accurate facts, making decisions would be easy. The problem is that rarely you know what the risks and benefits are. In your words, "different interest groups" are shouting their own version of the facts. In other words, determining the facts are the hard part. That is why echo chambers are bad. You only hear what you want to hear.

Echo 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.

First, I understand subj as a sound bouncing of the walls multiple times, so you can’t track its origin or reason anymore, but it persists.

In a technological context, echo chambers made me a great disservice making me believe in certain “textbook truths” that are not. These truths just bounce around mindlessly. Some of them are (were) our well-known best practices and approaches. Maybe they are true in some context, but everyone reinforces them without providing it, and many of us work in very different situations. Pretty sure that this happens in all areas, and in those that you have no expertise in they create a complete trash views in your head which harm your own reality.

That said, people sometimes assume that there are echo chambers and also main/good views. I don’t believe so. As we tend (^tend, not always do) to turn every piece of knowledge into religious crap, it is everywhere. So ECs are bad, but it’s not that I consider them bad in favor of something else, because there is none.

For example, I fully, completely agree with the top comment (by norhi999), but we’ll probably start a flamewar here if I elaborate on what my “textbook truths” are.

> 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?

If one's goal is to be as correct as possible, either at producing truth or making moral prescriptions, there is little reason to think an echo chamber is more likely to be correct, and many reasons to believe it's likely a strong impediment.

Echo chambers don't ideologically clean house, and vibrant merged discourse is anti-fragile. Weak or bad ideas can linger for a long time in an echo chamber, because of conflict avoidance, social pressures and the apathy of "sounds right, I guess" in an environment without any challengers willing to raise opposition to support their elimination. A vibrant discourse aggressively tears apart weak ideas of both sides, and creates an arms race to have good, hard-to-tear-down ideas which can pull people over.

Echo chambers struggle to agree on base realities and in doing so ultimately polarize in a way that is harmful for society's core fabric. Research seems to indicate that the partisan polarization we're experiencing today was very strongly correlated with the rise of cable television [1], which allowed people to self-segregate into bias-catering echo chambers. Regardless of your view, I feel most would agree it is a bad thing to live in a democracy where 30% of the electorate believes the seated president won by voter fraud [2] as disagreement on this point being split on these growing partisan lines is a powder keg.

Echo chambers in real life duplicate local conditions ideologically and morally, which is often bad. Ethnic cleansing, lynching, slavery, and other horrific abuses were at many points in history "how things were done around here", and while these are extreme examples, there's no reason to think that your local area "gets things right" just by nature of its proximity to you - the same social pressure towards conformity in these groups will likely apply at all levels, big and small, giving you opportunities to be wrong about all kinds of things.

For someone who wants to be right or in the right, echo chambers are a losing formula.

[1] https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/poll...

Echo chambers are where insecure people intentionally congregate to cast heckler’s vetos. Often the content is less important than the act of deference to a group. I would prefer to not associate with intellectually lazy (stupid) people.

There are many good answers here but maybe there is a useful distinction to be made between:

- an echo chamber as a comunity in which certain ideas are amplified and others deemphasized or banned

- belonging to an echo chamber as an aspect of one's Identity

I would like to question whether a person interacting in multiple conflicting echo chambers and self censoring accordingly within each, would by subject to the detrimental effects of echo chambers in the same way.

I am not suggesting this actually happens. People are generally creatures of comfort.

Different people will have different interests, and nobody can know everything. People should not always going to be agreement with each other. It is good.

Nevertheless, things do overlap, and sometimes you can do something else, not always the same thing each time. Furthermore not everyone agrees with everything that belongs to that group anyways, and that is just one kind of group anyways and is not the only possible kind.

(If you are religious, it is not necessarily only Christian vs Jewish vs Muslim vs Pagan vs Hindu vs etc. If you are politics, it is not necessarily only liberal vs conservative vs etc. If you speak one language, that does not necessarily mean that you do or do not speak other specific languages too. A book or radio or television or forums etc also might not be about only one thing, and other ideas also possible.)

> Most of us don't read books on ideas we have pre-judged to be nonsense or uncomfortable.

There are many books and if you go to library you might read many books. At least to me, it is. When I am at home or I buy books, it will be the one I am interested in, but in the library I might read any one.

> I generally don't feel I have anything valuable to learn from other ideologies because their moral values make me very uncomfortable.

I disagree. I think I can try to learn many things, whether or not I agree with them.

> I think of them as different conference rooms at a large seminar. We accept that some attendees will choose to not enter some rooms.

Yes, especially if there are multiple simultaneous meetings, or if the rooms are too small, etc. But you should not be required to attend some conferences anyways if you do not want to do.

> We accept that a random person jumping on the stage, grabbing the mike, and saying uncomfortable ideas is against social norms, even antisocial.

That shouldn't be about if the idea is uncomfortable or not; it isn't the thing to do while someone else is using the stage. If they have something to say they should say it, but not like that!

> At a progressive meet, it may be someone shouting homosexuality is unnatural. At a conservative meet, it may be someone saying it's natural.

It isn't simply saying such a thing that should be how to communicate; it should be to make the argument for/against it, considering the nuance, etc.

I think that "echo chamber" will be bad if it is the only thing, but, it is not going to be the only thing, I think. And, as with anything, some people will do bad things with it.

Echo 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.

"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.

I 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.

> At a progressive meet, it may be someone shouting homosexuality is unnatural. At a conservative meet, it may be someone saying it's natural.

The problem is what nor conservativeS nor progreesives [in this exaple] would't go to others meet to learn and change their minds, if needed. They are there to bolster their own opinions one more time - they just bring their own chamber with them.

As others are pointed out - it is not a new thing, it existed since people learned to communicate, but here lies the distinction between offline and online cults - you can't be 24/7 with people on other side of the country. With Internet - you can. You can even go to others meet to shout your things - without lifting your ass from the armchair.

If the world did not exist outside your echo chamber, then it wouldn't be a problem.

The problem with echo chambers is they trend away from information and knowledge and toward whatever is most often repeated. Add some malicious disinformation providers to the chamber, and like a capitalist monopoly you find yourself in a much worse situation down the road.

Replying to your specific items:

1. Indeed, and this can limit our opportunities and make our lives worse. A very simple example is land management. Still in some parts of the world it is common to pour things into the soil or water which are harmful to the environment... the environment that the same people live in. Sooner or later this results in harm for the people living there. But their echo chamber, so to speak, knows that the way to dispose of something you no longer want is to throw it into the lake or canal. Unfortunately, that was also their source of water and possibly food. People get sick more often and die younger because they have remained ignorant.

2. See #1

3. People may not seek out confrontational meetings, but just by leaving your house you have natural opportunities to encounter people with different opinions.

4. True, but that has as much to do with limited time than having a predisposition against a book. If you were stuck in prison with nothing but books, you would probably read every book you could get your hands on, regardless of whether you thought you might disagree with it.

5. See #4. People have limited time. But there are occasions where a leader of a group may suggest people go explore alternatives (usually with the assumption that they will return with a stronger support of the original group and its ideas). One example of this is the Amish Rumspringa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa.

6. How do you know this? Do you know every athiest influencer? Also, is "athiest influencer" a thing!?

This expression of "echo chamber" is probably more recent in human history because we now are able to easily travel outside our original bubble, and of course because we have the internet. You didn't know you were in a bubble when neither you nor anyone you knew had ever been out of the bubble.

One could argue that school is bad because it teaches things that we don't need... because "obviously" anything we need could be taught to us by our parents or village leaders. See #1.

> If the world did not exist outside your echo chamber, then it wouldn't be a problem.

I don't think the Meta Quest Pro is there yet, but maybe one day the tech will get good enough.