<story><title>How to Burst the &quot;Filter Bubble&quot; that Protects Us from Opposing Views</title><url>http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522111/how-to-burst-the-filter-bubble-that-protects-us-from-opposing-views/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s that simple.&lt;p&gt;People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore&amp;#x2F;hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama&amp;#x27;s pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds.&lt;p&gt;The real issue is &lt;i&gt;integrating&lt;/i&gt; opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that&amp;#x27;s where actual understanding takes place.&lt;p&gt;But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting &amp;quot;both sides&amp;quot;, they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;re known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present &amp;quot;both sides&amp;quot; in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Burst the &quot;Filter Bubble&quot; that Protects Us from Opposing Views</title><url>http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522111/how-to-burst-the-filter-bubble-that-protects-us-from-opposing-views/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bmelton</author><text>I see this as, perhaps, the most important thing I&amp;#x27;ve seen on HN this year.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;ve reached that conclusion though, we become very bad scientists.  We discard data that doesn&amp;#x27;t fit with our conclusion, or if we can&amp;#x27;t discard it, attempt to minimize its significance and promote things that do fit our conclusions as more important.&lt;p&gt;The media panders to their audience, constantly surveying their audience and reactions, and serving up more and more of the news that we&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;re supposed to get the idea that Will McAvoy is the smartest man in whatever room he&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Despite that coloring, we see in every off-air scene that he&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Back on topic, because I&amp;#x27;m rambling terribly, but the brain rewards itself when it finds facts that agree with its pre-existing beliefs.  A chemical &amp;#x27;high five&amp;#x27; 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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;This might kill us in some other way, and it&amp;#x27;s possible that the brain will just refuse to allow this, or that we&amp;#x27;ll all become blathering idiots as a result, but i&amp;#x27;s at least a step in the right direction of preventing a vicious cycle of arbitrary self-affirmation.</text></comment>