#echo chambers

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

This is hilarious: an epicly-overconfident Kamala-supporting "political analyst" prematurely celebrates a Democrat victory by purchasing champagne on election night and lecturing a man. Did it ever get drunk?

Best comment:

[cazort]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joseph Abehsera (@thekingzletter)

This is a very compelling and disturbing experiment by an instagram user, who found that Instagram is showing very different top comments to different people, and that this difference ends up strongly reinforcing confirmation bias, creating an "echo chamber" effect.

I.e. the algorithm shows people more of what they already agree with.

This has many negative effects:

it causes polarization, dividing people into different camps in particular issues.

It tends to reinforce people's beliefs rather than challenging them.

It makes people less empathetic when talking to people who hold different views from ours, because we wrongly assume that they have been exposed to certain ideas or perspectives because we see those things voiced frequently, but they may have never seen them at all.

I find this super creepy. I want to start or join a campaign to force Social Media companies to do this. We can do this through regulation, i.e. we can pass a law forcing companies to allow users the choice of whether or not to sort comments in this way, and we could make the law require users to opt-in, so make it so that the comments would default to showing in the same order for all users. There are many different options. Another thing that I would like would be requiring social media companies to explicitly say right above the comments, whenever the order of the comments has been personalized.

These laws would be great for small companies because it takes active effort and resources to personalize comments, so by default, smaller companies probably don't do it. I.e. not doing it is the path of least resistance so this would not be placing an unusual burden on smaller, newer, and less-well-funded social media companies.

[whatbigotspost]

It’s only an 11 min listen linked but to summarize:

•we’re pretty much never changing people’s minds who don’t agree with us

•we’re in echo chambers of feedback for what we already believe

•we get addicted on people who think like us already liking our posts and that reinforces and expands what we already generally think and feel

•it’s happening right now like this is it occurring wheeeeeeeee 😂🔫

[enbyhyena]

I don't know if anybody will notice/care, but for posterity's sake I want to explain why I haven't had a DNI in my pinned post, and share what I've just added to it as a way of explanation.

I don't have a DNI because I believe asking people not to interact shuts the door on personal growth and fragments communities (making them easier to prey on by real threats), and the objects of a DNI rarely listen anyways, sometimes even causing MORE harassment than you might otherwise receive.

Without allowing in outside voices now and again, you remove the ability to think critically for yourself. It's all too easy for a bad actor to sow discourse while presenting it in a seemingly harmless way, and without anyone to fact check, it can spiral out of control and cause even more finger-pointing, confusion, and disinformation. It is my belief that the collapse of communication between every level of our society has singlehandedly become the ultimate root cause of every problem we currently have.

I hate that everyone is being forced into echo chambers lately and are treated with extreme moral prejudice if they try to crawl out of it without immediately and fundamentally changing their beliefs (and are talked down to/condescended towards if they just want to learn about the other sides in a critical way, or Hell, even introduce new ideas altogether). I won't have anything to do with it and tbh neither should you. (I'm looking at you, shipcourse-posturing minors. You're all just hurting each other and yourselves. Stop it.)

Also, all of this is not intended passive-aggressively and I say it coming from a place of genuine concern for the communities I've grown up in and love. There are people that don't care if you're proship or anti, there are people who don't care if you're pro-endo or anti-endo...there are people who don't care whether or not you, as a gay person (generally speaking) believe trans or asexual people belong underneath the LGBT label. There are people who don't care what language you use to describe disability. Hell, there are plenty of people in power who don't even care if you're repub or dem (for American readers). This isn't to say that these conversations shouldn't happen and that we shouldn't talk about it; but that's just the problem. All these DNIs are achieving is shutting down communication and creating invisible cracks in our communities. And when we stand so far apart, it will be that much easier for our oppressors to take ALL of us down. They don't care about the differences. They want ALL of us gone regardless of nuance. They don't think we should exist AT ALL. Period. We are stronger together and our oppressors know this, so they plant seeds to isolate us.

Oppression has no morality. Oppression is indiscriminate and affects EVERYONE.

So yeah. That's my take. Don't care who you are, don't care what you post. I still reserve the right to moderate my feed and block as I feel the need to; but don't feel like you can't talk to me. I don't do that whole purity/cancel culture shit that's been so popular online/in fandom lately.

TL;DR Interact or don't, just don't be an asshole.

[rektober2024]

Rektober Day 4 - EchoChambers

The fun get-to-know-you minigame Rek created in his base in EchoCraft! I figured a great start to the EchoCraft based prompts would be that, as they're both a fun concept and looked really cool!

A below the ice cave/chamber with soul torches. The aesthetics are 10/10

For the video attached, Rek starts talking about creating the Echo Chambers around 4 minutes in :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ostromizing democracy

Friday (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor for my novel Red Team Blues; and this weekend (May 6/7), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

You know how “realist” has become a synonym for “asshole?” As in, “I’m not a racist, I’m just a ‘race realist?’” That same “realism” is also used to discredit the idea of democracy itself, among a group of self-styled “libertarian elitists,” who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn’t work — and can’t work.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

You’ve likely encountered elements of this ideology in the wild. Perhaps you’ve heard about how our cognitive biases make us incapable of deliberating, that “reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Or maybe you’ve heard that voters are “rationally ignorant,” choosing not to become informed about politics because their vote doesn’t have enough influence to justify the cognitive expenditure of figuring out how to cast it.

There’s the “backfire effect,” the idea that rational argument doesn’t make us change our minds, but rather, drives us to double-down on our own cherished beliefs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the Asch effect, which says that we will change our minds based on pressure from the majority, even if we know they’re wrong.

Finally, there’s the fact that the public Just Doesn’t Understand Economics. When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths as “we should only worry about how big the pie is, not how big my slice is?” These fools just can’t understand that an economy where their boss gets richer and they get poorer is a good economy, so long as it’s growing overall!

That’s why noted “realist” Peter Thiel thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the “science” of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldn’t starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people. Thus do we find ourselves on the road to serfdom:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Other realists go even further, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with orthodox (Chicago School) economists shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “[a]nyone who opposes surge pricing should be disenfranchised. That’s how we should decide who decides in epistocracy.”

Add it all up and you get the various “libertarian” cases for abolishing democracy. Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because “markets impose an effective ‘user fee’ for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

Others say we should limit voting to “Vulcans” who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists, and if this means that fewer Black people and women are eligible to vote because either condition is “negatively correlated” with familiarity with “politics,” then so mote be it. After all, these groups are “much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need”:

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/03/the-demographic-argument-for-compulsory-voting-with-a-guest-appearance-by-the-real-reason-the-left-advocates-compulsory-voting/

These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent Democracy Journal article by Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, and Melissa Schwartzberg (Mercier’s research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists to bolster their position):

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/

The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in American Political Science Review, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of political science, Analytical Democracy Theory:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/analytical-democratic-theory-a-microfoundational-approach/739A9A928A99A47994E4585059B03398

What’s “Analytical Democracy Theory?” It’s the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong. Because the libertarian elitists aren’t completely, utterly wrong — there are times when groups of people make bad decisions. From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.

This isn’t the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick. You’ve probably heard of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” which claims to be a “realist” account of what happens when people try to share something — a park, a beach, a forest — without anyone owning it. According to the “tragedy,” these commons are inevitably ruined by “rational” actors who know that if they don’t overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we’ve all experienced some version of it — the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic — he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn’t true. What’s more, Hardin — an ardent white nationalist — used his “realist’s account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.

After all, if the people who lived in these colonized places didn’t have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, then those commons were already doomed. The colonizers who seized their lands and murdered the people they found there were actually saving the colonized from their own tragedies.

Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of “lifeboat ethics,” a greased slide to mass-extermination of “inferior” people (Hardin was also a eugenicist) in order to save our planet from “overpopulation.”

Hardin’s flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons, who quipped “”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Hardin asked himself, “If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?” And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that’s what the other realists would do if he didn’t get there first.

Hardin didn’t go and look at a commons. But someone else did.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements, circumstances and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning. The economists’ term for this is microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a “macro” account of how to structure whole societies.

Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer some very big questions:

Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. It turns out that in most cases, people who are presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds — but not always.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

Rational ignorance: Contrary to the predictions of “rational ignorance” theory, people who care about specific issues become “issue publics” who are incredibly knowledgeable about it, and deeply investigate and respond to candidates’ positions:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650

Rational ignorance is a mirage, caused by giving people questionnaires about politics in general, rather than the politics that affects them directly and personally.

“Myside” bias: Even when people strongly identify with a group, they are capable of filtering out “erroneous messages” that come from that group if they get good, contradictory evidence:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237827

Majority bias: People are capable of rejecting the consensus of majorities, when the majority view is implausible, or when the majority is small, or when the majority is not perceived as benevolent. The Asch effect is “folklore”: yes, people may say that they hold a majority view when they face social sanction for rejecting it, but that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds:

https://alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppock_2020.pdf

Notwithstanding all this, democracy’s cheerleaders have some major gaps in the evidence to support their own view. Analytical Democratic Theory needs to investigate the nuts-and-bolts of when deliberation works and when it fails, including the tradeoffs between:

“social comfort and comfort in expressing dissent”:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/S0065-2601(05)37004-3

“shared common ground and some measure of preexisting disagreement”:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1080

“group size and the need to represent diversity”:

https://www.nicolas.claidiere.fr/wp-content/uploads/DiscussionCrowds-Mercier-2021.pdf

“pressures for conformity and concerns for epistemic reputation”:

https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/30811

Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, but what she meant was “stop trying to think of an alternative.” Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic, he claimed that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable — that we shouldn’t even bother trying to create public goods.

The Ostrom method — actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you — is a powerful tonic to this, but it’s not the only one. One of the things that makes science fiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

It’s a radical proposition. Don’t just ask what the gadget does: ask who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s the foundation of Luddism, which is smeared as a technophobic rejection of technology, but which was only ever a social rejection of the specific economic arrangements of that technology. Specifically, the Luddites rejected the idea that machines should be “so easy a child could use them” in order to kidnap children from orphanages and working them to death at those machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. Ruthanna Emrys’s stunning 2022 novel “A Half-Built Garden” is a tour-de-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

I like to think that I make a small contribution here, too. My next novel, “The Lost Cause,” is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies, between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it’s out in November):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A lab-coated scientist amidst an array of chemistry equipment. His head has been replaced with a 19th-century anatomical lateral cross-section showing the inside of a bearded man's head, including one lobe of his brain. He is peering at a large flask half-full of red liquid. Inside the liquid floats the Capitol building.]

[liskantope]

I see my post from last night again wringing my hands over the way the dating world looks got some reblogs (including reblogs-without-comment), and I do want to express something that I'm not sure I've expressed before but has been warranted on some level for like ten years, which is... I (and we who are commiserating and reblogging each other's posts on this topic) need to be careful not to be fostering an echo chamber of the "feeding into one another's helplessness and hopelessness" type. I've always been critical of this when it's done by groups of (often very online) people that share some common challenge or marginalization status, including particularly groups who seem determined to wallow in some possibly overblown fear or ever-more-loosely-defined mental illness or neurological condition. And the more I notice that my dating-related posts get a certain amount of engagement, the more I'm aware that I run the danger of veering myself and others too far into the analog of this for "oh dating is so awful and scary and impossible, especially for men seeking women!"

Of course the ideal remedy would be to foster discussions that are productive and help us move forward, and to be fair, I would do a better job of doing that if I had any idea what the productive way forward in this realm should be.

[engagepro-social]

The Dark Side of Social Media: Unveiling the Dangers of Homophily

In today's digital age, social media platforms have become integral parts of our lives, connecting us with others around the world. However, amidst the allure of connectivity, there lies a darker side to social media—one that perpetuates homophily, or the tendency for individuals to associate with others who share similar traits or interests. In this blog post, we'll explore the negative aspects of homophily in social media and its potential risks.

Factors Contributing to Homophily:

Homophily, the phenomenon where individuals with similar characteristics are drawn to one another, has long been a subject of study in social network research. As McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook (2001) elucidate, "the idea that similarity breeds connection has been a major theme in research on social networks, both formally and informally, for almost half a century."

The Role of Social Network Services:

In their analysis of social network services, Lee and Ahn (2012) dive into the homophily effect, noting that "individuals with similar characteristics tend to be attracted to one another and form connections." This underscores the pervasive nature of homophily in shaping social interactions online.

Risks of Homophily in Social Media:

While homophily may seem innocuous at first glance, it can exacerbate existing societal divisions and perpetuate echo chambers, where individuals are only exposed to viewpoints that mirror their own. This can lead to polarization, as individuals become increasingly isolated within their ideological bubbles.

Preventing the Negative Effects:

To mitigate the negative effects of homophily, it's crucial to actively seek out diverse perspectives, engage in respectful dialogue with those who hold different viewpoints, and critically evaluate the information we encounter online. By cultivating a sense of curiosity and open-mindedness, we can combat the harmful consequences of homophily in social media.

In conclusion, while social media has the power to connect us in unprecedented ways, we must be cognizant of its potential pitfalls. By understanding and addressing the negative aspects of homophily, we can foster a more inclusive and diverse online community.

References:

Lee, E., & Ahn, J. (2012). An analysis of homophily effect on social network service. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7235, 245-252.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415-444.

[jbfly46]

Lol at the trans/LGBTQIA echo chamber of basing serious life decisions on pure emotion, apparently not knowing anything about crowd psychology, sociology, and peer pressure. I've met plenty of reasonable trans/LGBTQIA people, these are not reasonable people.

[whimsidreams]

People who only speak to you when you say/do something they disagree with is a red flag that they never cared about you as a person to begin with. They just want to be around carbon copies of their own minds and that's boring as hell and if you so much as have an individual thought that goes against theirs, you're exiled from their echo chamber.

Surround yourself with people who recognize the nuance in others and embrace flaws and differences in opinon while calling out the genuinely harmful ones.

It's outright abnormal and unhealthy to feel constantly on edge around "friends" because you might set them off with one little disagreement. Get rid of the toxic mindset that you have to agree with every little thing someone says or else friendship over. Sounds less like friendship and more like a cult to me.

Just. Imagine a world where every individual on this mud ball had the same exact brain with the same exact thoughts and feelings. How depressingly boring would that be???? Diversity of thought????? Ever heard of it???????

It's okay to have different opinions and it is totally possible to correct or disagree without being a patronizing ass. Please, guys. Let's promote open and educational discussions without the urge to stroke your ego with a "witty" comeback. Imagine all of the rewarding conversations you could be chasing away and the potential friendships that could manifest from them. It's just a lose-lose for everyone.

[medicinalblacklocusts]

PINNED POST.

howdy hey name's echo

they/them and it/its pronouns for me please and thanks

tone indicators would be appreciated, especially if you are making a joke as i have a difficult time deciphering intentions via text, i will also be using tone indicators when necessary or if i feel that my own tone could be misinterpreted

posts will mostly be about ieytd/ieytd2/ieytd3, but there will be the occasional oc spy posting (if i feel brave enough to do so)

there will be infrequent posts from me as my motivation levels are very inconsistent but i am up to chat so send in asks :)

all personalized tags used will be stationed here, including chat tag, art tag, oc tag, etc etc... more will be added as time goes on

if there's something that needs to be tagged as tw/cw that i forget, do notify me and i'll add it

here's the obligatory dni, do NOT interact if you are proship/MAP/NOMAP, homophobic/transphobic, exclusionist, racist, terf, etc, i'm not gonna fucking baby you about this and will block you immediately

[salamanderinspace]

husband is very intelligent, very educated, and very online, however, he had never heard the word "polycule"

[evaluationvault]

Inside the Machine: How Algorithmic Bias Fuels Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles

Inside the Bubble: How Media Shapes What We See and Believe Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and algorithmic bias are critical frameworks in understanding how digital media influences information dissemination and consumption. These concepts address the narrowing of perspectives and reinforcement of pre-existing beliefs facilitated by modern media systems and algorithms. The term echo chamber…

[messy-does-cosmology]

Honestly I think the "echo chamber" criticisms of people are a real problem, because the kinds of people who would feel bad they're in an echo chamber are not the kinds of people who really need this advice.

I think that the people who really need this advice are those who genuinely refuse to be around people for not only reasons the general public wouldn't agree with, but reasons the general public wouldn't even understand.

To be clear, I am not advocating people hang out with people who they believe they have incompatable political views with, I'm just saying that if the general public doesn't even know what you're talking about when you explain this, you should probably chill out a bit.

[azure-sorceress]

I find it really curious how people who say they don't trust traditional media any longer because they don't know who owns them or who finances them never actually start consuming independent journalistic projects that tend to be incredibly transparent because they are financed mostly by crowd-funding. No, they rather consume their news from random people on twitter/tik tok/youtube/etc who probably know close to nothing about journalism or journalistic practices.

It's never been about whether or not the traditional media is to be trusted. It's not about transparancy. It's not about good journalism. It's about having someone telling you exacly what you want to hear, be it truth or not.