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.
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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.
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barry,
The rest of us are not wrong.
If you have measurable scientific evidence connecting global warming to human CO2 emissions, post it here. You will be the first to do so.
Otherwise, try being a scientific skeptic for a change, instead of a True Believer in an unproven conjecture, for which there is still zero verifiable evidence.
barry
Thank you for your insightful comments. I don’t know your position in the climate debate, but this was not about that, as you have pointed out.
Some of the other comments here shows that there are people with closed minds on both sides of the debate.
It’s a good thing to find info from the “other side”.
That doesn’t mean one is morally obliged to expend one’s resources to publicize one’s opponents’ opinions.
Experience in many web-based and usenet discussions of “ramping up of hostility” has taught me that it is only after such ramping up that enlightenment is achieved. It is only those who stick with the discussion through the heat who learn the basis of the disagreement. Often, it arises out of subtle differences in a shade of meaning — a connotation vs. denotation — of key terms and phrases. And those who shy away from verbal disagreement, never learn, but remain stuck in their irrational bubbles.
When it comes to search engines, I prefer to clear out histories, caches, and cookies often, and switch among search engine sites. But it seems that recently they’ve been behaving ever more bizarrely. I now frequently get headlines that don’t match URLs or content. Upon searching again, based on the headline, I can only sometimes turn up the canonical on-line source. And it is educational to look, with their agreement, over a friend’s shoulder at their searches for the same terms, or even the differences in what they type as search specifications after a verbal request to search for a particular topic.
The truth is out there, … it’s just not readily apparent. If there were two web sites/blogs that would put up equally points of view from both sides of the argument I would probably read both. In the case of global warming WUWT is the only one I have found that willingly puts up reports from both sides. I get suspicicious when one resorts to name calling and censoring to promote thier argument. Which is the reason I ended up here as one of my regular goto’s. In my father’s lifetime and that of my own I had had enough first hand “evidence” to realize that the alarmists science and conclusions were bogus. The snow storms, temperatures and heatwaves of the north American prairies have not fallen outside of the weather norms. The snow storms and accumulations of the 30s the 50s the 70s the 2010s are all the same. The Summer heat waves of the 70s 80s 90s 2000s are all repeating cyclically. They are neither gaining nor declining. Bull Crap reports that tell me what I know not to be true at first make me laugh and then make me furious that we are spending fortunes on this IPCC farce. These money’s steal the economy from both us and our childrens future. We play dice funneling billions into bogus predetermined “science” where we could be saving lives feeding and building infrastructure for people to live through storms that happen and have happened for thousands of years. The human race progressed because we stopped our offerings to the gods for protection and actually designed and built habitat that allowed us to live in our fluctuating climate. But now these fraudsters want us to offer up our progress in the name of the climate god that will burn us up. If anyone has some extra global warming please send it my way, because oddly enough it’s been frightfully cold on the Canadian prairies the last couple weeks. I have been donating my fair share of CO2 to the atmosphere with warming my truck and running the furnace to prevent my pipes from freezing but so far no warming. Thanks Anthony for a wonderfully balanced yet biased site. Thank for admitting your bias publicly and defending your point of view without resort to insult defense. You rock, send climate change soon, please.
Bah! I can barely keep up with my own opinions, I have not got any time to read the opinions of people who are wrong.
I use http://duckduckgo.com as my search engine as they explicitly do not bubble you.
I, too, want diverse and novel information that challenges. Maybe that is a skeptic trait…