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Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

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Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#111

Post by diego_moita »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #109
diego_moita wrote: post #87

Now I am very confused. In theory it sounds like a very good idea. But when I tried this site what I got is a lot of books about religion. And I don't want to know anything about religion. I just can't bring myself to have intellectual respect for it. "Open your mind" can be healthy if you are stuck in dumbness but can be a bad advice if you have sound and valid core beliefs as in "a mind too open doesn't hold anythi…

I really hope the irony of this comment isn’t lost on you

Of course not. The irony is intentional.

Unlike what most people do in social networks I am not preaching or doing advocacy for a belief. I am just expressing my confusion and contradiction.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#112

Post by AntiImperialist »

kqr wrote: post #103
gcatalfamo wrote: post #26

I think there is a genuine need for escaping echo chambers but every attempt is usually aimed just showing the opposite side/narrative. If I am conservative I won’t be open to be shown the most leftist content, and viceversa, while instead I might be open to be shown more balanced views that might gradually carry me out of my echo chamber instead of reinforcing it. edit: this an OT comment more related to the echo ch…

I think in order for the opposite thing to work, you have to approach the material with the understanding that "There are people who believe this stuff as firmly as I believe the complete opposite. If you asked them, they say, with absolute conviction, that I'm nuts. How might that happen? What if they're right? What could I have missed?" This engages System 2, hard. And it's so easy to slip back into System 1 and co…

>There are people who believe this stuff as firmly as I believe the complete opposite. If you asked them, they say, with absolute conviction, that I'm nuts. How might that happen? What if they're right? What could I have missed?

After having read books on two sides of various things, I have found that most people don't have firm beliefs at all. Their beliefs don't even have anything to do with how they live. They have everything to do with what they're told will make them look good. So, just because someone says they believe something, I'm not willing to waste any more of my time on learning how it is justified on an intellectual or logical level (which is what books tend to capture). Even the believers most likely don't have any understanding of it themselves or how or why it matters to them. It's simply not worth it.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#113

Post by cgriswald »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #26

I think there is a genuine need for escaping echo chambers but every attempt is usually aimed just showing the opposite side/narrative. If I am conservative I won’t be open to be shown the most leftist content, and viceversa, while instead I might be open to be shown more balanced views that might gradually carry me out of my echo chamber instead of reinforcing it. edit: this an OT comment more related to the echo ch…

> I think there is a genuine need for escaping echo chambers but every attempt is usually aimed just showing the opposite side/narrative.

I think the idea that there only exists a single spectrum sorted into sides is itself a sort of meta echo chamber shared by people in echo chambers even as they disagree about everything else. In modern politics, even the idea that the opposed party holds opposite views (versus just opposed) is a meta echo chamber idea. In many left/right topics, the disagreement isn't 'pro/anti', but often more fundamental.

Some examples: While conservatives might be anti-abortion, liberals aren't pro abortion, they're pro-choice and that's not just a rhetorical device. While liberals are anti-racism and see conservatives as pro-racism, a conservative rejects the idea out of hand because of a difference in definitions. A third, more nuanced view might even see the average conservative as non-racist (as opposed to anti-racist) which many would still argue is not enough, but it's not 'the opposite' at all.

I don't think recommendations need to necessarily go to the extremes, but I don't think 'a shade to the left' is enough either, because without understanding the fundamental differences, you have a you-can't-get-there-from-here problem.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#114

Post by arminiusreturns »

tshaddox wrote: post #98
arminiusreturns wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people call stuff they dont like "delusional belief systems" while ignoring the truths, even if nuggets, behind those systems...

But don’t confuse that tendency with the idea that there are no delusional belief systems.

Oh of course, wasn't saying that at all. It's just that I have noticed an uptick in using this kind of phrasing when trying to dismiss other positions on things as a version of the "thought terminating cliche". Not trying to say there are no delusion belief systems.

That said, the bar should be very high for calling other peoples beliefs as such. I disagree with lots of people on lots of things, but one of the things I've learned is that by approaching topics with such a judgemental, holier-than-though attitude, one puts on blinders to truly understanding a persons position, and more importantly, how they got there. The power of empathy is strong in giving the brain more information to work with, but the power of harsh judgement is that it stifles the flow of information prematurely.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#115

Post by mercury_craze »

I enjoyed playing around with this and I got real value out of it as a discovery tool when I filtered to showing aclaimed fiction. I know its survivor bias, but I dont want to waste my time on something both terribly written and outside my echo chamber.

One usability tweak based on how I interacted with it would be to add a 'I already like this' button to suggested books to save me from re-adding them. It also suggested another H.P. Lovecraft novel despite me already marking At the Mountains of Madness as a liked book, I'm pretty sure that if you like one Lovecraft book, you'd like the rest.

The one recommendation I had a strong negative reaction to was by Jeffrey Archer which I guess means that its the book I should read next.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#116

Post by vuciv1 »

padolsey wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by pe…

hi! What service did you use to search the books? where'd you get your data from? cool project!

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#118

Post by frederikvs »

As an experiment, I gave it The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, and the silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. A pretty standard selection of well-known books in the Fantasy genre.

Out of the 90 books I get, 53 either have the word "Dragon" in the title, or a dragon on the cover of the book. Clearly, a majority of the results also fall in the Fantasy genre, so have my doubts this counts as escaping the echo chamber.

On the other hand, there are a lot of books in that list that I have never heard about, and that look interesting (insofar as you can judge a book by its cover). When I'm done with my current series of books, I'll have a good look at this :-)

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#120

Post by Freak_NL »

fao_ wrote: post #85

Weirdly, I keep getting books I like in the search. It would be nice if I could add more than three authors because my reading is already extremely diverse, like music listening there is very little that I dislike (According to spotify, I listened to over 500 genres of music this year -- although I'm not really sure how useful that is because of how every piece of music seems to be categorized into it's own genre). F…

This tool seems a bit nonsensical for anything that isn't as blatantly politically one-sided and polarized as Ayn Rand.

Just a random couple of highly appreciated titles from my collection:

    Hyperion, Gormenghast, Lolita
(Sci-fi, British gothic fantasy, 20th century American literature)

And it suggests The Farside (well yeah, if you want something completely on the opposite side of well-written prose), Tintin, and Shakespeare (huh?).

As for breaking any bubble I might live in: I grew up reading Tintin.

Interestingly enough it throws up Preacher as well, a comic written by Garth Ennis. Again not really breaking any bubble there: I love his works and have read Preacher, The Boys, Battlefields, and all his Punisher stories (that man is the only comic writer who truly groks Frank Castle).

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