Can anyone relate? What do you do to break out of it?
This way, I always heard about the newest scandals, *-gates, dramas, etc and I spent a lot of energy and time thinking about them, discussing them with people on Twitter. I let every little piece of drama get to me. I felt exhausted. I felt angry most of the time. I was frustrated.
So, I just stopped. No HN, deleted my Twitter account, didn't attend any tech related event. I unsubscribed from most of the podcasts I was listening to, added some about the things that are going on in the world or other topics that interest me. Or simply didn't listen to anything at all. When I was walking home from work, listening to nature and interacting with the people around me helped so much getting out of this "oh my gosh, there's so much going on in the tech world, I cant' miss out on anything..." feeling. I also (re)started some hobbies that involved me getting away from the computer. Started building and flying multicopter/drone (well, ok, this is somewhat tech related, but not sitting in front of the notebook all the time), cycling, taking long walks, geocaching, ...
I started feeling better and I think that I found a good mixture of "both worlds". I usually look at the top page of HN once a day (before I was constantly refreshing the newest-section), have a new Twitter with a good mixture of tech- and non-tech-people. And I usually stay away from the computer in my free-time.
I don't feel like I'm missing anything. The important topics will reach me eventually (maybe through colleagues). So I might not be on the forefront of everything that's going on. But who really needs this? I thought, I did. Now I know, I don't.
edit: Added a sentence about the hobbies that I forgot to put there.
This way, I always heard about the newest scandals,
*-gates, dramas, etc and I spent a lot of energy and time
thinking about them, discussing them with people on
Twitter. I let every little piece of drama get to me. I
felt exhausted. I felt angry most of the time. I was
frustrated.
It's so easy to sit in a little digital universe that you are in the center of. You have to consciously move yourself out of that comfort zone.
Ride public transportation and strike up conversations with people. Go for a hike. Volunteer at the library. Sign up for a 5K race.
If you are in a filter bubble, it is of your own choosing, and you need to loosen the filter to let more things in.
Mix in editorialized content. Read the New York Times or another major, old publication rather than only sites that have user-generated and user-moderated content. There are certain things that will get upvotes all the time on Reddit, etc.
Similarly, read blogs that are outside your normal areas. For example, if you're into tech and work in tech, read the http://www.scotusblog.com/
Read new science fiction from the library, not the same user-generated recommendations from Reddit and HN. Anthologies of short stories are great for rebooting my brain with new ideas. Worms using tunnels in ice to form a sort of neural network over millions of years? Drag racing aliens? Tattoos that administer medicine?
Also with that, just pull random books off your local library's shelf from time to time. A book about the history of Target? A book about socialism and electricity? Why not?
> What do you do to break out of it?
imho the solution is not more news. Take a break from news sources. I don't use facebook anymore, since I realized it was a major source of unhappiness.
You could try to engage your brain with different inputs, like books. After cutting down my browsing habits, I have been reading tons of ebooks, from front to cover.
HN is very much a bubble. Not just that it's tech news based, but it's also very geographically centered around Silicon Valley and economically centered around the affluent.
To pick a topical example, I'd say that every American ought to know what is going on in Baltimore right now - HN is most definitely not the place to get the full view of a topic like that. And daily news sites don't just do daily news - by example, the Baltimore Sun has a great, in-depth piece that is directly relevant to what's going on right now:
A fair proportion of HN-ers are not from the States and we are not interested in local US news. Really, we're not.
(and just so that we're clear: I'm not suggesting that people should be talking about Baltimore on HN. I'm saying that they should broaden their reading sources to include news like Baltimore rather than just relying on HN for all their reading)
I'm working on a couple of things to attempt to combat it, but more ideas would be very, very, very welcome.
Since your profile invites pings, I'll ping you. I'm interested to learn about your approach!
Go to pub for conversation.
Don't listen to normative cunts like me.
rm -rf / that shit and get out there.
[1] EVIDENCE IN WHICH I PRESENT THE NOVEL AND FAR FETCHED IDEA THAT BOOKS ARE GOOD (tm): Last night I read some shitty paperback about some traveler following the route of Marco Polo through Afghanistan, written for a 1980's audience. Cool, I get to find out what Iran / Afghanistan / Pakistan was like in the 1980's & what Marco Polo thought about the 3 wise men & the possibility of how this related to a myth in Zoroastrianism & that there was a parallel myth in a small town in Iran, and that Mathew may have been writing for a Zoroastrian audience, which presented the interesting idea that Jesus may have been a prophet of the Zoroastrians in a way that it was said he was for the Jews. I'm not religious or anything, it's just interesting.
I should probably revise "some shitty paperback", what I mean is, I picked it up for $2, creased and it's a "travel writing" genre page turner. Time reading it has been time well spent :)
News sources are just a symptom. If you don't have a diverse social life, friends and peers who live and think differently from you, you won't have a why when encountering new ideas and information. You won't have the perspective of someone who lives what you just encountered. You'll lack perspective. Without perspective, it's easy to reject and ignore things that contradict what's already in your bubble.
The meme of 'self knowledge' has been viral through the centuries, probably for a good reason. I struggle with it myself, obviously, always seeking the correct explanation, never certain whether I've found it, whether others have found it too.
I like to pretend my brain is a machine designed to process information and it auto-optimizes the way it stores that information. This may not help, but maybe what you have to do is feel like you have to fight your mind to gain control over it, and once you have it, you might be able to destroy the auto-pattern construction mechanic, or at least make yourself more skeptical of it, in that it doesn't see the pattern meaning directly, but sees how it is constructed through a process you designed a long time ago.
I think you have to examine what you mean by 'ideas'. If you already know the answer, then does that not demonstrate to you why the pattern continues to repeat?
You may feel especially weird if you intentionally spend a month or two in an artificially created filter bubble opposite to the ideology you hold now. Feeling anti-cop after the most recent string of incidents, for example? Try making an effort to ignore anything critical of the police and read only sources from or sympathetic to the police for a month or two - you might be very surprised how much this changes your point of view, and find yourself in a better position to see the full picture of an issue.
Have faith that if an opinion really is nonsense, you will be able to realize that on your own, without taking somebody else's word for it. On the other hand, you might find that yourself and the people you agreed with are wrong, or biased, or missing an important perspective.
You are. I run a small MSP, we work with end-users all day long, small and medium-sized businesses and home users alike. The recurring topics on HN are completely irrelevant to them. Very few new services or products on HN -- maybe a couple per year -- are something we can recommend to them. GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Quickbooks, and Microsoft Office still rule their world. The only YC product that has become ubiquitous in their lives is Dropbox. HN tech topics often reflect small pockets of bleeding-edge techies talking to eachother.
Also, a lot of the opinions expressed in software development here are the diametric opposite of what users want. "Move fast and break things" -- users hate that. "Release early, release often" -- users really hate that. "Don't optimize" -- users are sick of that, we hear about that just about every day, usually in the form of, "why should I bother getting a faster computer, it will still feel slow".
Occasionally I try to relay users' opinions back to software developers and usually it doesn't go over very well. My life is a lot easier if I don't communicate with software developers, and instead tell users that software developers aren't an easy group to work with.
> What do you do to break out of it?
I use a custom news reader that helps me stay off HN. I focus on building things and working with users. I spend more time out in the world, instead of reading about it. I remind myself that news is actually not very valuable, that most of the things I read about aren't anything I can take any action on or will impact me directly.
I haven't owned a television in years and have never been a cable television subscriber, and when I get a glimpse of TV at the gym or restaurant or someone's house or elsewhere, it doesn't look like something I want. Online news is gradually falling into the same bucket for me.
Thanks for the ideas.
1: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
Non-tech hobbies have helped me meet people from a wide variety of classes, which means I have at least some exposure to a variety of viewpoints. It's worth getting out and off the internet every so often.
But the internet is a cornerstone of our lives no matter what, and every major service (search, social networking, e-commerce, etc) has made personalization part of their core strategy.
If you express your opinion and almost everyone thinks you're an asshole, then you're either a genius, or an asshole.
Still, whenever I do run across an online or offline community where people are capable of civil debate and discussion without getting all red-faced, it can be incredibly valuable. It's how I've refined or changed many of my opinions as I got more info and perhaps I've informed the opinions of some other people as well.
40 years ago, you can express political views in america without worry of being shamed (called an asshole) or denigrated for it, unless you were being really hateful--- like joining the KKK.
Now people are able to effectively paint large swaths of people who are not assholes as "hate groups" or "terrorists" or "rape apologists" and the like.
Now merely disagreeing with the president makes you a racist. (Which is very ironic, given that those making the accusation of racism are doing so only because the president is black.)
Political Correctness has radically changed our society, and 1984 is seeming more real every day.
If you're getting accused of "fostering rape culture", I strongly suggest that rather than feeling victimized, you ask some women what they think of your position on a situation, and listen to them. Don't lecture, and don't whine. Ask trusted female friends, not strangers. And if you don't have women in your life that you can talk to about it, that's probably part of the problem.
Always have an open mind and be willing to change your opinion based on deeper understanding and better facts. It's possible to express even radical views without offending, if you are openminded and respectful. People react poorly to dogmatism and distrust.
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/03/offended-by-everything
So if, say, someone is getting called out on "rape culture" language for demanding "full disclosure" from someone talking about sexism... instead of retreating into the comforting arms of "victim culture" and "1984" references, try asking some women what they think. Don't tell, don't lecture, just ask.
Have you heard of the Bechdel Test? It's a simple feminist film critique. In a movie, is there at least one scene where two women who have actual names and roles have a conversation that is not about men and what the men in the movie are doing? It's shocking how few movies pass that test (as Playboy just pointed out, The Avengers doesn't pass Bechdel Test, and a lot of the sexist language directed at Black Widow can be traced to that).
I think there's a corollary to Bechdel somewhere... does a man have multiple female friends with whom he can openly and honestly discuss their experiences of sexism as women? I'll bet a lot of men don't have that at all. Their opinion of women's experiences is formed almost entirely from their own experiences, and the observations of other men. No wonder they don't get it.
When it comes to propaganda and the media, however, this method doesn't work. Sensationalism and click-bait rule, and that calls for conflict and sound-bites.
Some times this conflict is manufactured, sometimes it isn't...but it's always sensationalized.
I'd argue this trend has played a significant role in the destruction of our collective abilities to tolerate negativity, and it's also (in some remote way) been a factor in creating these filter bubbles we're discussing right now.
TLDR: why do a proper, level-headed discussion exploring why women feel a certain way, when you could have a high-stakes, emotional, back-forth debate with highly-quotable 1-liners?
For your average white middle class suburbanite, they don't go to black neighborhoods, don't experience black culture, don't have friends who live there. It's an alien experience. It might as well be in Timbuktu for the relevance it has to their experience. But suddenly, everyone has smart phones with cameras and internet access, and this stuff is being filmed and published everywhere. Now, we can't not know about it. We can't pretend it doesn't exist. We have to talk about it - something immoral and wrong is clearly happening, and as a society, we have to face that.
This really started with Rodney King, back 20 years ago now. That was a home video camera, with footage given to a tv station, but the result was the same. Now, it seems almost weekly. And I have no doubt that things will change. Brutality will be reduced, and justice will become fairer.
Propaganda is much harder to do when contradictory facts are right there in our faces. It's become much more subtle. Now, it's not about just pushing an official version, but crowding out alternative views in a noisy environment. The trick isn't to prevent other points of view (that's how propaganda works), but rather to drown them out.
Click bait will always be a problem. We can't help but rubberneck at violence and sex. But undeniable facts are coming to the fore faster and easier than ever, and the way of fighting those facts, right now, is to try to drown them in reverse-victimization arguments (Gamergate, #notallmen, etc). It won't work, not in the long run.
Propaganda is less valuable now than it's ever been.
Listening uncritically amounts to accepting the other person's worldview uncritically; it's a very bad practice that will lead to believing a lot of nonsense (e.g. it makes it easy to fall victim to a religious cult). If an idea or ideology is sound, it should be able to explain itself in plain language to an actively skeptical listener.
> Have you heard of the Bechdel Test? It's a simple feminist film critique. In a movie, is there at least one scene where two women who have actual names and roles have a conversation that is not about men and what the men in the movie are doing?
I've never understood what this is supposed to indicate. I tend to watch more animé than western cinema, and you'll often see cases that would fail the reverse Bechdel Test - i.e. a movie or series that never has two men having a conversation that's not about women. But Japanese culture is if anything more sexist than western culture.
(Heck, I can think of more than one borderline-porn piece that contained several women who had substantial conversations with each other, but one or no male characters.)
Someone is viewing the past through rose colored glasses. In 1975, plenty of people were be shamed and denigrated for expressing political views -- both left and right -- that were nowhere near the order of hatefulness of joining the KKK.
There being some people that would attribute disagreements to certain prominent person's of non-white descent to racism certainly isn't something that wasn't happening in 1975 and earlier. It might be somewhat more likely that such an attitude will get noticed and magnified by both those that agree with it and those that are offended by it in the age of the internet, so more people will be exposed to the response. But that doesn't mean its actually any more common.
I'm not sure what that's a sign of, exactly, but I feel like if it were a filter bubble there would be less of that.
The only places I can stick with are the large, old, mainstream media sites: BBC, the Atlantic, the National Post (in Canada). Each of them has biases and a definite editorial policy, but they are all still making some kind of attempt to be objective about the news they choose to report, where by "objective" I mean "they don't ignore obvious facts, flat-out lie about stuff, or deliberately cast stories in terms of abstractions that make them look like something completely different from the way they'd look if you focus on the concretes." They also tend to provide background pieces to major stories that look at multiple perspectives on them.
These organizations all have some notion that what they are doing involves helping their readers understand their world. Most other places see their mission primarily in terms of either entertainment or influence.
Maybe I'm just old, but keeping those sources for news and following a diversity of people--including a number of mainstream media print reporters and several academics, particularly economists--on Twitter to get personal views of events and ideas seems to be working OK.
With regard to "new content", there are only a few new ideas in the world. Every startup story on HN is going to have some similarities. Every science story likewise. Tech stories even moreso. Our ability to communicate has increased by... how much? A million-fold?... in the past thirty years, but our ability to find things to say has stayed the same. It follows from this that most of what we find online is repetition and drivel (including, likely, this comment).
They aren't perfect, but contrarily to newspapers that are incentivised to pander to their readers, news agencies have a business incentive to be neutral: they want to be able to sell the same article to all sides of the issue.
To try to avoid it, I'm ignoring anything political or opinion based on my Facebook account. I've added opinion blogs in my RSS reader that are obviously intelligent and thoughtful but completely infuriatingly different from my own opinions. Once in a while I read them and try to force myself to keep an open mind. It's tough.
I'm trying to avoid using Reddit for anything but stuff that relates to hobbies. Unfortunately a lot of them are starting to get depressingly political. I might have to cut Reddit off entirely if it keeps up.
I get my news from news agencies. Their stuff is significantly less biased than newspapers and news blogs.
I'm starting to read more new litterature. Rethreading the same old stuff that's sure to reinforce my opinions is unhealthy in the long run.
The filter bubble is definitely there in the non-tech subreddits.
I realised later it ws no different to my constant refreshes of my favourite sites.
My dad was a school dropout and I theorised this was his attempt to remain informed and that gave him a sense of achievement.
I haven't figured out my addiction to the news, maybe I am taking after my Dad.
I have tried to set limits at it and when I am away from the computer, I have no problem missing the news but when I am close, self-discipline is my only answer for now.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
Factor down your Internet reading, trim news feeds to no more than 3. The cream should rise to the top.
Most of all create something; craft beer, a novel, an App, mow the lawn, fix a squeaking gate. You'll get a clearer head from a menial task and a sense of something more.
Read something else? It's not rocket surgery.
Also, read on paper with your phone in your pocket.
It validates your world views, makes you feel smart for agreeing with all the other "smart" people. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it triggers the same positive feedback loops as other psychologically addictive things.
Once you're thoroughly filtered and addicted, opinions that disagree with your bubbled opinions are painful to read. They feel like agressions.