I worry about the echo chamber effect. I have friends who are both conservative and liberal, but what I increasingly notice is that each group seems to mostly be friends with their own "type"; i.e. my conservative friends are for the most part only friends with other conservatives, and my liberal friends are for the most part friends with other liberals (there is always the possibility that my friends represent an anomalous sample, but I think that's unlikely. I generally avoid expressing my own political views to someone unless I am extremely close to them, so perhaps this is why I haven't alienated half of my friends yet...)
I think that only showing people news that agrees with their way of thinking leads to the dangerous situation where you end up with a positive feedback cycle of groups self-confirming their own beliefs, and the other side — "them" — is viewed as a deranged bunch that is incapable of irrational thought. While increasing groupthink may lead to higher advertising revenues, it also leads to interpersonal polarization and higher levels of animosity.
There was an interesting NY Times article that came out recently (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessio...) about how liberals and libertarians are far overrepresented in academia. While that in itself didn't surprise me, the comments on the article did. Here are a few of the NYT picks:
> "It's not that conservatives aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."
> "Conservatives are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order to learn facts, not fiction."
> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"
> "No scientist holds groundless beliefs to prove some kind of subservience to a deity."
What is interesting is that I frequently hear conservatives making the same comments — just swap out a few of the words:
> "It's not that liberals aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."
> "Liberals are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order to learn facts, not fiction."
> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"
> "How could any intelligent person possibly believe the universe came from nothing?"
What I generally find is that the further left or right someone leans, the more similar their personality becomes to their right/left-wing counterpart. In my experience, the "extreme" people are much more similar to each other than they are to the people in the middle of the political spectrum. I would argue that — born into a different family — many of the zealots would hold their opposing view just as strongly.
One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case.
"One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case."
Your filter bubble, probably. Telling whether that's true in an absolute sense would be difficult.
(Bear in mind that I believe it is not possible to "not have" a filter bubble, so no offense is intended in my first sentence; everyone has a bubble, the only question is the nature of it, not whether it exists, and it is not sensible to want to not be in one, only to ask how you might change it.)
I come from a very conservative circle, and I find that outside of my specific facebook feed (where that group is), the internet at large is a very left-leaning place.
HN is the most neutral place I can think of. I think it might just hide it well, as politics aren't a large topic here. I'm just glad to see that even political conversations here are largely rooted in facts.
I see his ideas spreading everywhere, directly and in derivative form.
I can seriously see him being studied in academia in XXIIth Century. Him and Satoshi and a handful of other radicals in our midst who should not be named. The Net is like a flower unfolding, the people who intellectually influence the beginning are sure to have some of their number be rockstars much later on.
HN is very libertarian, more than neutral - it tends to avoid most discussion of Government and social responsibility simply by saying that neither should exist in any large capacity.
Interestingly, I read an article today (found it on my Facebook feed, posted by a Facebook employee) that pointed out the exact same thing but from the other side's perspective, regarding the conservative meeting at Facebook the other day: http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/19/what-disturbed-glenn-abo...
>>One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case.
I live in Texas and I can definitely tell you that my internet experience is definitely not like that. In my neck of the internet, there are far more conservatives.
>One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case.
Demographics. Rural areas with worse internet access skew conservative. Older folks who can't understand the internet skew conservative.
Being a zealot from one side of the horse shoe or the other is not a reason to think their ideas are incorrect.
Evidently commonly held ideas today like democracy or social welfare or multinational corporations not explicitly backed by the mothership would have been outrageous daydreams, utter folly to believe in the 16th century.
The problem with centerist positions is that they seem so reasonable because so many of them are reasonable. That makes us too comfortable.
>conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals.
I wonder what metrics you might use to measure that? Number of poster on the largest 100 "message boards" that slant one direction vs the other? Or is there an independent measure of political leaning-ness, and you could track how many click they make on Yahoo? Number YouTube views for certain videos? Facebook likes of certain stuff? Something else?
I think that only showing people news that agrees with their way of thinking leads to the dangerous situation where you end up with a positive feedback cycle of groups self-confirming their own beliefs, and the other side — "them" — is viewed as a deranged bunch that is incapable of irrational thought. While increasing groupthink may lead to higher advertising revenues, it also leads to interpersonal polarization and higher levels of animosity.
There was an interesting NY Times article that came out recently (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessio...) about how liberals and libertarians are far overrepresented in academia. While that in itself didn't surprise me, the comments on the article did. Here are a few of the NYT picks:
> "It's not that conservatives aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."
> "Conservatives are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order to learn facts, not fiction."
> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"
> "No scientist holds groundless beliefs to prove some kind of subservience to a deity."
What is interesting is that I frequently hear conservatives making the same comments — just swap out a few of the words:
> "It's not that liberals aren't bright; it's that, for the most part, they are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers."
> "Liberals are entitled to their views, but they also must understand that young adults pay thousands of dollars to obtain a college education in order to learn facts, not fiction."
> "Is intolerance necessarily a bad thing?"
> "How could any intelligent person possibly believe the universe came from nothing?"
What I generally find is that the further left or right someone leans, the more similar their personality becomes to their right/left-wing counterpart. In my experience, the "extreme" people are much more similar to each other than they are to the people in the middle of the political spectrum. I would argue that — born into a different family — many of the zealots would hold their opposing view just as strongly.
One oddity that I haven't yet found an explanation for is that conservatives seem to be less prevalent online than liberals. I'm not quite sure why this is the case.