I try to read opposing views often, as that pretty much fits my job description for running WUWT, but not everyone does this. Some people are so steeped in tribalism that they won’t even venture outside of their comfort zone to see what the other side is saying, and when offered information by “outsiders”, flatly refuse to even consider it or even become combative towards anyone that suggests it. They tend to prefer being surrounded only by people they like and content that they agree with, and consider giving attention to any other views as “false balance”. Joe Romm and his Climate Progress blog is a good example of this, which is why he has such few comments these days. WUWT often posts press releases generated by the opposite side of the debate verbatim, so that we can consider the merit, I also post articles where I disagree with some of the content, but we also have our own problems like any collection of like minded people. On the plus side, love it or hate it, WUWT is read almost equally by both sides of the climate debate, if it weren’t, it would not have so many blog spawn.
From MIT technology Review, h/t to Steven Mosher
How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” that Protects Us from Opposing Views
Computer scientists have discovered a way to number-crunch an individual’s own preferences to recommend content from others with opposing views. The goal? To burst the “filter bubble” that surrounds us with people we like and content that we agree with.
The term “filter bubble” entered the public domain back in 2011 when the internet activist Eli Pariser coined it to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world.Pariser used the example of two people who googled the term “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm.This is an insidious problem. Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like.
This is the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with.
And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society.
==============================================================
Read the entire article here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522111/how-to-burst-the-filter-bubble-that-protects-us-from-opposing-views/
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1311.4658 : Data Portraits: Connecting People of Opposing Views
Social networks allow people to connect with each other and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, users tend to connect with like-minded people and read agreeable information, a behavior that leads to group polarization. Motivated by this scenario, we study how to take advantage of partial homophily to suggest agreeable content to users authored by people with opposite views on sensitive issues. We introduce a paradigm to present a data portrait of users, in which their characterizing topics are visualized and their corresponding tweets are displayed using an organic design. Among their tweets we inject recommended tweets from other people considering their views on sensitive issues in addition to topical relevance, indirectly motivating connections between dissimilar people. To evaluate our approach, we present a case study on Twitter about a sensitive topic in Chile, where we estimate user stances for regular people and find intermediary topics. We then evaluated our design in a user study. We found that recommending topically relevant content from authors with opposite views in a baseline interface had a negative emotional effect. We saw that our organic visualization design reverts that effect. We also observed significant individual differences linked to evaluation of recommendations. Our results suggest that organic visualization may revert the negative effects of providing potentially sensitive content.
An interesting survey here would be: “What date (approximately) did you convert from liberal consensus views? Was the impetus initially internal or external?”
I’ll start:
1: 2000
2. External (blog comment challenge).
@ur momisugly _Jim — Thanks for letting me know you are okay. That is a HORRENDOUS situation. I’ll pray some more. Makes sense that someone as thoughtful and prudent as your WUWT comments reveal you to be was well-prepared. Take care!
@ur momisugly Brian H — fun idea. People might not be that eager to take you up on your proposal as you might hope, though, for around 600 of them described just such a “conversion” experience on a thread posted by a Mr. (Jonathan?) Abbott last summer. He share his story in this post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/25/my-personal-path-to-catastrophic-agw-skepticism/
I like your survey, though, for its conciseness. How about creating a multiple choice-type survey using software that does that — to prevent narratives (thus, no: “Other: please describe,” heh, heh)? Have to carefully plan choices of #2, though…
Larry Geiger says:
December 6, 2013 at 1:20 pm
Some folks are programmed to believe drivel. My wife had a conversation with a young lady who with her boy friend are really into Philadelphia Experiment and Indigo Children. Most folks that frequent this blog and googling this stuff will put it aside within 5 minutes. These two have been researching it and getting sucked in for months. My gently, quiet, librarian wife is carefully puncturing her bubble. My fear is that once off this they will find UFOs, Area 51 or Pyramids. Oh well. So, what color is your aura?
______________________
Last Spring, someone confidently told me that the rough tornadoes which struck Oklahoma City were the result of HAARP experiments. When I told her that HAARP had been shut down, after a moment’s reflection, she said, “They just moved it to someplace secret and started over again.”
I tried to use the analogy of a flashlight and how its power to illuminate diminishes with distance and relate that to any power of HAARP and she said, “but they have ALIENS helping them with technology that we don’t know about.”
I’m not sure if we got around to Bigfoot that evening, or if that came later…
Here’s a test Type whale and dolfin beachings into your browser and then do the same and add the word military. Which one paints the clearer picture.?
I did things a different way…one night I heard Oceanographer Prof Nils-Axel Moerner totally debunk AGW and dangerous sea level rises. It was circa 2005. He also went on to say that the solar physicists were predicting cooling in the middle of his century and that we would notice a difference from 2007. I did not appreciate why he picked this year but noticed the change…it was the sun cycle.
In 2008 I came across the video of Professor Bob Carter’s lecture to some Australian colleagues and it blew my mind…empirical data…no nonsense…thousands and millions of years of earth history. So much learned in half an hour….I then became of aware Anthony and this website, Steve McIntyre, Dick Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy et al.
Intrigued I emailed some of them and became a kind of pen friend with Bob Carter.
I learned what to look for…the personal attacks because the pathetic warmers simply don’t know the basics of the science so as Bob would say…”Don’t discuss the science, attack the man, repeat the mantra”. I also noticed the BBC would not debate the subject…they simply informed us the “science was settled”. Politicians did the same and it became obvious that they had done no research themselves but simply watched or listened to the BBC or read the Guardian and Independent.
Once you are aware how little the AGW’s actually know it becomes amusing…to think they actually believe that we are the warmest ever is laughable. That they have no idea that sea ice is measured every day and the ice area is increasing takes their stupidity to new levels.
On BBC’s Question Time two weeks ago our Climate Change Minister said the sea ice was disappearing and another MP and a union leader nodded in agreement.
Mind blowing….funny, yet worrying.
Ignorance is bliss but not for us!
Well, the ‘filter bubble’ is just a special class of the ‘echo chamber.’ Where, now, Google and other targeted search engines are simply reinforcing echo chambers. Nothing shocking about that at all. If people didn’t get search results that confirmed what they already believed, they’d find a different search engine to use. Rationality and cultural validation do not have any necessary intersection with one another.
But as a generality, if you want to learn about a given ideological framework — what’s good and ill supported in it — then you don’t go swim in the culture that gave rise to it. All you’ll find there are reflexive tropes that and slogans that validate faith for the faithful. The best option, always, in looking at a cultural movement are to spend time with its most ardent detractors. Not that they don’t have their own culture. But because they’re the best odds for finding the weakest foundational assumptions in the culture you’re interested in.
eg. If you’re interested in AGW, then you hang here. If you’re interested in climate skepticism, you hang no where: As there isn’t an active community detailing the flaws of “Show me the experiment.” Which is a rather common and expected issue to be found in science. But it in other contexts, social or rhetorical it works just fine both ways. As each opposed camp usually proffers its own affirmative notions. Such as Libertarianism vs. Socialism.
“Some people are so steeped in tribalism that they won’t even venture outside of their comfort zone to see what the other side is saying”
During my time exploring the climate science complex I ventured more into places like the BBC, the Guardian or the NYT or Der Spiegel, to Grist, thinkProgress, DailyKos, TPM, the most abominable of places to see how the other side ticks than I would ever have cared to otherwise, and read all I could about the Fabians, Stalin, Voltaire, Plato, the UN, the CFR, Cecil Rhodes, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton to get the picture. Suntze said it best;
“If you know your enemy and you know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle.” (Sun Tzu)
Michael Craig says:
December 6, 2013 at 9:38 am
“Okay, how many of you Googled BP?
I got mostly finance stuff but it may be that the spill is now stale.”
What are you talking about? During the spill I BOUGHT them. I always buy stuff that has a problem. Problems get fixed you know. Somebody needs their product.
I got “Careers at BP Global”. I never had to look for a job — with one exception, and that one exception did not involve google. I presume even shooting in the dark can be profitable.
This is one of a few possible descriptions of racism, which is a common animal instinct. One special case of our preference for being surrounded only by people we like (does anyone else see a tautology here?) is that we mate only with people we like. The true fans of biological diversity know that this instinct is one of diversity’s primary drivers. If that were not the case, each continent would probably be filled with one single form of animal live.
An interesting aspect of racism is that it tends to assign inordinate importance to small differences and can create and fix new traits where none existed before. Thus we get adjacent or even overlapping bird populations where females in one subpopulation mate only with males singing one particular variant of their otherwise common song. People in those countries where the difference in skin colour is unheard of and everybody looks the same are still able to find subpopulations that are more to their liking, as well as those worthy of contempt.
Didn’t we read here earlier this year about a girl relating her horror of accidentally trying to mate with a “climate denier”? Or, look at them Indian Indians and their caste system. Or football fans in Europe. I feel that even though we are pretty much excused from natural selection, there are other powerful means of selection still in effect, so our evolution is not complete.
@_Jim
I see you are asking for me! Happy to oblige!
“What are we to do, stand there with megaphones shouting across the moat?”
If you look at history you will see that if you manage people to get out on the streets and do just that, then you may actually achieve something (no guarantees though).
The answer to popping this supposed filter bubble is right here under your noses. Well moderated blogs with very limited censorship.
Note that the study this thread discusses looked at Twitter users, not blog users. To understand the differences between blogs and other social media a comparison of debate in salons as opposed to coffee houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is useful. Salons where rules of debate were set by the hostess and guests were selected for a variety of viewpoints are most comparable to blogs. The rowdy debate with group-think and crowd participation of coffee houses most closely compares to Twitter and Facebook.
Look what happened to the astroturf blog sites like RealClimate set up by Soros through Fenton. They failed. SKS became a joke by censoring and post editing of comments. They posed as salons but functioned like a coffee houses.
Sites like WUWT, Climate Etc. and JoNova have proved successful because they did not censor ideas, just inappropriate language. RealClimate, Climate Progress and SKS tried to censor ideas and opinions and let the bad language flow when it supported their consensus.
The filter bubbles of Twitter and Facebook are not the danger they seem. The collapse of global warming will have many benefits, discrediting institutions, political parties, ideologies as well as communication methods prone to group-think and vulnerable to Alinsky methods.
The big picture is that blogs such as WUWT successfully popped the biggest filter bubble in human history. The Internet has become a powerful force for freedom and democracy. A handful of bloggers challenged the massively superior numbers of the environmental NGOs, the lame stream media and governments from one side of the globe to the other. Against an army of millions funded with billions, the bloggers still won. All Soros’ money and all Fenton’s men cannot put AGW back together again.
Sisi says:
December 6, 2013 at 3:54 pm
“The big picture is that blogs such as WUWT successfully popped the biggest filter bubble in human history. The Internet has become a powerful force for freedom and democracy.”
The Xerox machines in Russia
Where as closely guarded
As the missile sites.
DirkH says:
Almost true. There has always been some sloppiness in everything Russians undertook, however seriously. When the guards went out for a smoke, women used the “Kseroks” machines to copy knitting recipes from German fashion magazines.
Janice Moore says:
December 6, 2013 at 12:53 pm
…..I’m afraid I don’t see how the Rand quote logically follows from the selected words of mine you quoted. And if you can’t BELIEVE how dumb someone could be not to get that …. lol, look upon explaining that connection to me as a fun intellectual challenge!….
Janice,
The fault lies with me! I read the post and the comments on my lunch break and ‘hurried’ a response that mayhap lacked sufficient clarity. Let me explain.
Your comment stirred thoughts of a recent conversation with a couple of engineers that I work with. My company had recently provided free flu shots to all employees. One of my teammates had come down with the flu the day after receiving the flue shot… and was certain that the flu shot caused his flu infection. A 2nd engineer chimed in that this had happened to her 2 years ago. I pointed out that simple correlation did not establish causation, something every engineer should know and agree with. I also pointed out that the flue shots use only ‘dead’ virus, making initiation of a bout of flu from the shot highly improbable. Yet, this only stimulated greater assertions that the shots had caused their cases of flu.
I then asked them if they remembered I was not at work the day the flu shots were administered. Yes, they remembered. Why? I was sick with the flu! Obviously, an unadministered shot could not have caused my case of the flu but, if the fever had waited one more day to express itself, I would have had a similar correlation event paralleling their experiences. As I had contracted the flu in the same time frame without the ‘benefit’ of the shot, I thought it highly likely that we had both caught the flu from a common carrier at work.
My one coworker responded “Bullshit! That shot caused my flu!” OK then. I guess, when reason flew out the window, in-flu-enza, eh? I walked away from my coworker thinking of that Ayn Rand quote.
Your comment “One need not intentionally associate with those who hold irrational views to be aware of what those views are. elicited that specific memory… and the Ayn Rand quote “Reason Is Not Automatic…” sprang to mind immediately after.
Whew! That was a lot of words for a simple recollection, but that’s what spawned my thoughts and response.
The way I see it is this: I used to be a Warmist until I realised I was being misled. For decades we have had an endless stream of propaganda directed at us and well funded to the tune of billions. Guerrilla warfare took hold and so it becomes a little difficult to look ANY MORE at an opposing viewpoint. I know I should look at it, which I do, but I approach it is scepticism, which is the right thing to do. 90% of it is horse dung speculation about the future or misdiagnoses.
References.
Climategate, Himalaya gate, failed surface temperature projections, the standstill, Antarctica sea ice extent, the return of that thing from the past, Pachauri forms Glorioil, Peter Gleick criminal activities, Dana Tetra Tech Double Standards Oil Company, green investments and money motives, green hypocrites flying and living like there is no CAGW, continued FAILED predictions, liars, misleading assertions, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, co2 is a greenhouse gas and so is water vapor. There are also other greenhouse gases as well as soot. Many story lines have been offered over the years.
Here is one for the naive Warmists at the Guardian.
Um, no, sorry, I really wasn’t.
But, since you’re here, are you 10 (not “a” 10, but rather, are you 10 years old)?
.
Reblogged this on Head Space and commented:
Social insanity and popping the bubbles – good post
Mac the Knife, et al
Enjoyed your discussion and quote. Reminded me of . . .
“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.”
—William Gibbs McAdoo (Secretary of the Treasury)
DirkH says:
December 6, 2013 at 4:25 pm
This was from Konrad’s comment.
How?
How does ‘air’ respond to 3 through 10 MHz RF energy?
Can you supply a first principles link?
Are you aware the H A A R P array was a 12 x 14 element planar array capable of directing its beam no more than roughly +-30 deg from directly overhead?
.
Myth.
Mythology.
It’s what (you?) the people want (an unsung ‘hero’ to worship). It sells books and magazines, supports various Keepers Of Odd Knowledge websites.
I take it the ‘hard sciences’ or application thereof are not your ‘thing’.
.
Brian H says “All part of the application of Harley Evolutionary Theory: Survival of the Fattest.”
Thanks, Brian …
That’s why I am still here. Will be for a lot longer, in my 6’3″, 140kg frame ….
Another burger for my bubble please!
re: John Morpuss says December 6, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Want to come out of your ‘bubble’ John? Read up on Steinmetz, the REAL father of AC:
http://edisontechcenter.org/CharlesProteusSteinmetz.html
His original work is available too.
https://archive.org/details/5edtheorycalculatisteiuoft
Zeke says:
December 6, 2013 at 5:30 pm
—————————————–
In a country where the state controls all media including printing, photocopiers can be very dangerous. People could begin distributing disinformation such as real tractor production figures or actual harvest results. They could make many permanent records of what the state published last week, seriously compromising the valiant work of comrade Winston Smith.
Even more dangerous, they could distribute knitting patterns. Workers exposed to the seditions styles of West German bourgeois fashionistas may not longer feel a warm glow from the latest seasonally adjusted tractor production figures. They may start demanding luxury goods like knitting needles, or worse, actual wool. After that it’s a slippery slope to demanding blue jeans, colour TVs and the free market democracies that produce them.
In a world where AGW propagandists control the lame stream media, government bureaucracy, schools and academia, the Internet can be very dangerous…