How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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.
.)"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 ;)
It also requires more work on the part of the writer, and introduces risk of turning out to be objectively wrong, so I'm not surprised they skip that part. It's the "safe" choice. :(
One might think online communities like Reddit would be perfect for hosting these kinds of debates, but sadly people tend to downvote opinions they disagree with, effectively silencing them and limiting the range of acceptable viewpoints. It would be great if there was a solid, popular platform for rational debate between people with opposing views... keeping it rational seems like the hardest part.
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.
Except, largely, they didn't/won't. Democrats listened to what their preferred news outlets were saying about George W. Bush-as-President for 8 years, and Republicans will no doubt listen to what their preferred news outlets say about Barack Obama-as-President for a similar length of time, but that's very different from actually listening to opposing viewpoints.
But for the most part they aren't even passively listening to the other side, much less actively listening to the other side and engaging with the positions presented.
> 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.
Major media "news" sources are almost completely dominated by opinion/commentary, so that's not why they leave off synthesis. They leave off synthesis because the narrative they are generally trying to sell is about the conflict not the underlying reality, and when they are trying to sell a narrative about the underlying reality it is the black and white story that one side is good and right and the other side is bad and wrong, not some fuzzy gray synthesis.
Discounting the questionable journalistic ethics of the 24-hr news cycle media, I am hard pressed to consider the other major news outlets to be as equally questionable.
CBS screwed up recently with the embassy bombing recently. That in of itself is bad. But the fact they admitted fault I think speaks volumes for their efforts.
Mostly, IME, alternative news outlets are as focussed on easy narratives as major news outlets, though they often have different preferred narratives. They also, IME, tend to be more overtly partisan in their narrative preferences than most major outlets. (Fox is somewhat of an outlier among major news networks in the consistency of the partisan slant of its presentations.)
If you are passively accepting any news outlets (or any narrow set of news outlets) presentation, your getting spoonfed someone else's preferred narratives. To get beyond that, you have to actively engage by seeking out multiple sources with different biases and, where possible, reaching past them directly to the original sources of information, and critically engaging with the information.
But that's work, and even most of the people with the skills to do it aren't going to bother wtih that for most issues.
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...
trying to argue for the "other" side can get quite complicated for complex topics, like religion.
One of the greatest thinkers of the Medieval period, Thomas Aquinas[1], honed this skill to a very fine point, and even in his own day was regarded as being able to articulate views which contradicted his own better than those who argued the opposing views in the first place.
His best-known work, wherein you can see this skill at work, is his Summa Theologica[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas
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.
Without the ability to think critically of an idea that one is endeared to though, none of that matters at all. Meanwhile, the ability to be challenged allows one to accept more variables as relevant than previously.
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.
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.
I am unlikely to have my mind changed, but I am more likely to understand my fellow human beings better than if I just dismiss all people who believe X.
I found myself in a number of discussions on G+ with 1) Libertardians and 2) climate denialists (among a few others).
What I came to realize in the case of both after a time was that both tended to exhibit very similar patterns of iterating through various logical fallacies and/or mythical arguments.
Your Logical Fallacy Is (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com) is one of many decent collections of common fallacies (tu quoque turns out to be one of the more common as it happens). Another is reiteration of tired old arguments.
Every so often I'd run into someone who actually had intelligent objections or arguments to positions (generally not on either of the topics above, I eventually used them simply as weeders for people not worth wasting my time on -- which I suppose is yet another filter). In particular there's the problem of what I'm coming to call "lies of distraction" -- various forms of argument and/or presentation which serve little purpose other than to divert your time and energy from stuff that matters. And yes, HN can fall into that category at times.
The roots in highly discredited laissez faire beliefs, social Darwinism, fascism,racism, and industrialist interventions, to say nothing of the utter rediculousness of Von Mises' Praxeology, the vast disinformation apparatus, and intentional misrepresentation of the foundations of economics only ice the cake.
There's ... a lot of history behind that term. As my follow-up indicates, there's a lot of ground to cover in addressing my criticisms, something that would probably take up a good chapter or two of a book (if not more). Which I may well write.
My experiences in both dealing with present-day defenders of Libertarianism and in going to its roots, foundations, and the considerable machinations behind it have lead me to conclude that most of those who defend the tradition 1) fail to understand it and/or know its roots, 2) lack the ability to do so, 3) are paid for their opinions, and/or 4) fully understand the inherent contradictions but find it convenient and in their interest to promulgate a false philosophy for their own benefit. The upshot is that the debate simply isn't an honest one. At which point the respect I show rapidly dwindles.
David Brin's one of the more eloquent critics I've run across of late (he's written a number of pieces on G+ and his blog in recent months). James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed goes into foundations of Libertarian philosophy with Sumner and Spencer. Episode 8, "Fit to Rule", I'd recommend the whole episode, but you can skip forward around 30 minutes to pick up the meat. Studying the evolution of economic thought reveals that laissez-faire was considered all but discredited by the early 20th century (ironically, it was Keynes whose book on the subject seemed to most revive interest, judging by the Google Books Ngram viewer). RationalWiki's page on Austrian school economics is another good starting point.
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=0wqS7FXrEUQ (TDTUC - Episode 8)
"There's ... a lot of history behind that term."
There is practically no history behind the term "libertardian": https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=libertardian - there is arguably history behind libertarians being wrong (which is what you go on to talk about), but that does not in any way motivate the specific term.
"My experiences in both dealing with present-day defenders of Libertarianism and in going to its roots, foundations, and the considerable machinations behind it have lead me to conclude that most of those who defend the tradition 1) fail to understand it and/or know its roots, 2) lack the ability to do so, 3) are paid for their opinions, and/or 4) fully understand the inherent contradictions but find it convenient and in their interest to promulgate a false philosophy for their own benefit."
And considering those people, which of them are going to be inclined to "see the light" because you called them a "libertardian"? How many are just going to stop listening to you? How many non-libertarians are going to start ignoring your criticisms of libertarianism because you are being disrespectful and offputting?
"At which point the respect I show rapidly dwindles."
And the point at which you stop showing respect is the point at which I start calling you out for it on HN.
I should have clarified: personal history.
That said, I thought I was being original when I coined it and found (with some satisfaction) that I wasn't.
Convincing people of their follies isn't my primary goal. Understanding their follies and the dynamics behind them are. While I generally don't launch into discussions spewing "libertardian" (present instance being an exception), I do use the term. More often in referring to the philosophy and those who claim adherence to it (itself fraught given the lack of cohesion it and they exhibit).
Of the four cases of adherents I describe, only one is likely to be persuaded by facts and/or reason anyway, typical of any other faith-based religion which puts belief over evidence. So my success rate would of necessity be quite limited.
And the point at which you stop showing respect is the point at which I start calling you out for it on HN.
As I said: the lack of respect for facts and reason (of which there's a long personal history), and the tedium in repeatedly plowing that ground, is why I've resorted to a memetic shortcut which encapsulates if not elucidates the fundamental flaw. That said, while acknowledging your call out, it doesn't in the last bother me for the reasons stated above.
https://plus.google.com/116665417191671711571/posts/1dqQKTz8...
Three points in particular to call out:
1. Brin is absolutely correct in noting that Libertarians don't read or understand Smith (neither do most economists, but that's another story, see Gavin Kennedy for detailed scholarship on the "invisible hand").
2. Theodore Minick exhibits a very frequently encountered tactic of redefining well-defined terms to suit his argument (and failing to provide those definitons). When I pull out a half dozen or so dictionary definitions that discredit his use, his response is "the accepted definition also conflates 'market' and 'marketplace'". Sorry, but if you can't agree on base facts, you've got no grounds for discussion. You've just got a Lewis Carroll "glory".
3. Another respondent claims that Reason.org references Smith often. So I search for references ... and find that most are blithe (and inaccurate based on scholarship) references to the "invisible hand" and little else. Which is to say: the leading Libertarian publication similarly gets its facts and relevance almost entirely wrong.
And as I said: the experience is far too frequently repeated. Any respect I had has long since been extinguished.
As I said: my usual goal in those discussions is to see if there's any merit at all to either the arguments of, or discourse with, a specific person. I've yet to be convinced.
When I repeatedly call out an individual's failings (Noel Yap would be another G+ instance) and they never once apologize or admit error ... again, any last shred of respect has been lost. In his case I'd largely taken to deleting his idiotic comments to my own posts, and finally just blocked him -- the idiocy was too much to take. The icing in his case was repeatedly failing to read or comprehend the text directly before him to which he was responding.
When I make a glaring error, and am called on it, I admit it and appreciate the correction. I don't insist on being wrong.
What is it you perceive your job as?
Learn from others, help them learn from me, and together approach truth in our understandings of the world. When people feel attacked, they shut down. Associating arguments with attacks does poor things to human wetware.
Sometimes the truth I arrive at is that someone is an idiot (deliberately or otherwise) and that a belief system is wrong.
I've already noted several of the problems I've encountered (non-intellectual motivations / tactical stupidity). The other is the sheer volume of crap most Libertarian's I've run into believe (or at least profess). As I said, I may (and likely will) address it in written form. But it's akin to dealing with climate denialists, creationists, flat-earthers, and others who are vested in an illogical and counterfactual belief system. Very simply not worth the effort.
Trust me: in cases where this gets used it's already a lost cause.
Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" showed that sometimes ridicule is precisely the right tool for the job. No, he didn't change the minds of those he was portraying, but he clearly demonstrated to everyone else the reality. Stewart and Colbert continue his tradition.
I disagree. In noting that a doctrine has no foundation, bearing, or interest in the truth or verifiability, you're saving a lot of wasted time and breath.
As for collectives, last I checked most humans were collectives of a few trillion or so individual cells, comprising multiple gene lines and species.
Do you want?
Do you want?"
When we say "want" we are, when not speaking metaphorically, speaking at the level of the individual. Call this want1. Want1 is not constructed from a collection of want0s of my individual cells, but follows from specific constructions of cells designed to want1. The existence of a want2 was something I wanted to limit my stipulation of - I make no strong claim of its absence. Constructing it from collected want1s often leads to things like circular preferences, though, so there are clearly at least some caveats.
You are forgetting that you're dealing with actual people.
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
Edit: I dunno what came over me. I had the address transposed in my head. I meant to post a link to debate.org.
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.
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.
That said, I'm not greatly convinced that this model is better. It's more efficient, certainly, but I regard this in the same way that a nutrient paste is more efficient than eating regular meals. Walking as a part of daily life strikes me as something that has a lot of positive externalities.
They are better for some things and worse for others. They are less efficient per passenger-mile, so they are worse for high-traffic arteries. OTOH, they are cheaper per mile travelled, so they are better for connecting the endpoints to the well-travelled arteries, and in some cases (where relatively little of the trip is on a well-travelled artery where mass transit is efficient) for end-to-end services.
Single-occupant vehicles simply occupy too much lane space, especially at peak use hours. Transit routes are most efficient when structured as point-to-point. I've seen several commuter systems in which buses collected riders over a small area, then travelled to a (preferably concentrated) business / commercial area where riders disembarked. You limit loading/deloading and dwell times, and maximize time-in-motion (which increases net average speed). Most urban transit systems achieve net speeds little over a walking pace (10-15 MPH isn't uncommon) due to frequent stops and congestion.
The real killer with transit systems though is transfers. Having to wait 5-10 minutes (or 20-30) for a connection really extends your commute time. Realize that at highway speeds, that translates to 5-30 miles of commute distance, and even at urban speeds, 3-10 miles of lost travel distance. To say nothing of the stress of wondering where the bus/train is and when / whether it will arrive.
So: with an autonomous self-driving multiple-occupant vehicle, passengers could flag a ride, the dispatching system would match requests with livery by start and end points, and route accordingly.
I agree that transit is ultimately the most important.
Then it won't be a question of mass transit vs. bikes but both together - that'd make a bunch of more commute options workable for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The stuff I don't know I don't know is exactly that which is most valuable to broaden my horizon.
- 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.
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.
I also had a discussion with a friend - tried Googling to find his viewpoint - anything I'd get was heavily biased towards mine
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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."
The number one use case for commenting systems is the expression of opposing views, isn't it?
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.