> The thing is... it's entirely probable that most of the people who agree with you do so because of low quality garbage.

So?

> So you're very much comparing yourself to a large group of other people and coming out that you read things above their level - not very hard.

Not sure I understand. I'm not comparing myself to anybody. I'm simply stating that I can't find a reason to go out of my way to read garbage.

Your last point is absolutely correct, and it probably summarizes why I believe the whole "filter bubble" thing is irrelevant or at least vastly overstated: the criteria that I use when deciding whether to read or not read something are entirely orthogonal to what "side" it comes from.

The criteria that you use is that you come across the material in the first place. Most likely, that is subject to a filter bubble. I really doubt your bubble consists of all good information available.

Your fallacy is assuming that there is nothing outside your bubble that isn't garbage.

I don't think that's a very fair reading of what I'm saying.

First, whether something enters my filter bubble or not is not the same thing as the criteria I choose to look for new things, or to decide whether something stays within my filter bubble (say, a website I would add/remove from my RSS feeds). There's a passive/active dichotomy here.

Second, I don't think I've claimed there was nothing outside my bubble that wasn't garbage. Now, I do assume that 99% of the stuff out of it is, because that's the nature of the SNR on the internet. Note that all of that is of course entirely subjective, and I'm only talking about the value I derive from it personally.

Certainly, there are things that would be interesting that at a given time live outside of my filter bubble. But actively looking for them is not necessarily the best way to find them, as I might have to expend a lot of effort going through lots of junk before I get there, and other sources within my bubble might percolate that information faster, with less effort from me (say a link post on SlateStarCodex will give me a bunch of links to stuff I would have never found by myself).

Finally, I never said my bubble consists of all good information available, precisely because as I stated, all that information could not fit in anybody's bubble due to the limited nature of our attention or available time. So that's just a straw man.

The fact is that there's a game being played between what's inside my filter bubble and what's outside, and that game is not zero sum: most likely, actively trying to add more information from other sources will decrease the utility I get from it. It could be a temporary/local minimum (going through a bunch of garbage to find some hidden gem), but it could also be a more stable, lower utility state.

Personally, my bubble tells me untruths about communities and belief systems I'm not part of - I suspect that yours likely does, too, because it seems to be human nature to distill one's "opponents'" beliefs into something easy to attack. Even when the beliefs are abhorrent, and I'm likely to continue seeing them as abhorrent, it's useful to know what people are actually saying, instead of what my bubble says they're saying.

And the only way I can find to do that consistently is to actively seek sources of information on specific subjects from the "opposing" point of view. The articles my filter bubble send me are generally going to be emotionally-fueled rubbish, because it takes time and effort and a very good understanding of the subject matter to take apart an argument otherwise, and for most people, their time on the Internet is time they don't want to be spending mental energy.