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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

#181

Post by badtuple »

torben-friis wrote: post #171
lambdatronics wrote: post #93

I think it works: I put in "Zero to One", "The Idea Factory" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" -- one of the top results was "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life." This was reviewed on Amazon as "Not For a White Male Forty-Year-Old Software Engineer." https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1WB4G83DRI8PV/re...

The problem is, there's a line between "things I don't consider because they're out of my comfort zone / I don't even know they exist" and "things I don't consider because I consider them to not have quality". You give me a novel from a niche author from the middle East, I'm game; you give me a cash grab book signed by a teen youtuber and I'm probably out. I'm not sure this site can tell the difference.

I guess one question is if you can tell the difference. Without reading the book from the youtuber, how would you know you wouldn't like it and it's not just prejudices getting in the way of you giving it a chance? If we can't tell then I'm not sure whether the site being able to makes any difference.

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

#182

Post by chordalkeyboard »

kevinpet wrote: post #137
kqr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tried to read "The End of Policing". I got half way through chapter 1 before the author stated, as support for his argument, that The Bell Curve was "overtly racist". Now, you could argue that lots of racists like that book, that the authors might be motivated by bias, etc etc, but no credible reviewer at the time it came out would call it "overtly racist". This is retroactive moving of the goal posts, and the word…

> So I tried to read the tripe, but the arguments are not persuasive unless you already believe what they are trying to convince you of.

What the gp describes only works if you are tolerant of other people's errors to some extent. You can't let a few things like you describe derail you. Remember your own beliefs, it may be the case that you are right and the inaccuracy you discovered is a linchpin in their incorrect system of ideas. Or it might be some little piece of information that is accepted as a truism in their bubble so people throw it around when it seems appropriate, but its not an essential part of their argument.

The main thing is that you want to understand the author's perspective. why did they consider the bell curve to be overtly racist? perhaps they are defining racism differently than you (this is almost certainly the case [0]).

It does you no good to read books by people you disagree with in order to understand them better if you're gonna get derailed when they say something that seems obviously false to you.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

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

#183

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #174
kqr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is generally good to try seeing things from the other person's perspective, but it is also possible that sometimes the other person is simply wrong . Just because an idea is wrong, that doesn't magically prevent millions of people from following it.

the idea here is to understand why people believe something that is (consider by you to be) wrong.

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

#184

Post by chordalkeyboard »

tshaddox wrote: post #102
isogon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is valuable to read a hundred convincingly-written arguments in favor of one point of view, become convinced, and then read a hundred opposing arguments and again become convinced. This maintains my awareness of the fact that I'm a terrible judge of veracity of arguments. Since I want to know what happens in the world, I must be exposed to arguments, so I think it's very important to be viscerally aware th…

This seems to presume that these points of view you’re talking about have no objective truth value, and that the only worthwhile exercise is constructing “convincingly-written” rhetoric to support one side or another.

I don't take that from the gp at all. My perspective is that he seems to be saying you're not going to understand a position on an issue until you internalize it "as if" it was your own belief. By internalizing one belief and then another that contradicts it, you can truly compare them on the merits and perhaps become aware of the objective reality that they both share.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis

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

#185

Post by hinkley »

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…

We have quite a few conversations here about how some issues aren’t on a continuum but on a plane. Maybe the thing to map out here is the extra dimension where things aren’t black and white. This person has read four books on the dark end of the scale? Let’s show them something in a forest green.

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

#186

Post by torben-friis »

badtuple wrote: post #181
torben-friis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, there's a line between "things I don't consider because they're out of my comfort zone / I don't even know they exist" and "things I don't consider because I consider them to not have quality". You give me a novel from a niche author from the middle East, I'm game; you give me a cash grab book signed by a teen youtuber and I'm probably out. I'm not sure this site can tell the difference.

I guess one question is if you can tell the difference. Without reading the book from the youtuber, how would you know you wouldn't like it and it's not just prejudices getting in the way of you giving it a chance? If we can't tell then I'm not sure whether the site being able to makes any difference.

I think it would make a difference, in that if the user is somewhat convinced that the site is able to handle that issue then they will be more willing to take a leap of faith.

My point being, I'm perfectly capable of finding books I'd never read by myself - I just have to enter a library or bookshop and grab the first title that makes me frown.

There's only value in giving me books out of my circle of comfort if there's an implication that I might like the book or get something out of it, with more likelihood than mere chance, isn't it?

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

#187

Post by kgarten »

Also for me it didn't seem to work well. I entered "Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray and "12 rules for life" by Peterson ... I would have expected something of the likes of "Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini" or "How to argue with a racist by Adam Rutherford" to pop up, as both of them present well reasoned arguments against the world view depicted in the previous ones. (Reading recommendation for both btw. ).

Yet, I got Go Forward with Faith: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley" and a lot of religious books. I can understand why this happens. Yet, a bit disappointing.

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

#190

Post by bshanks »

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…

Neat, thanks for making this! Another tool I would like: find books that I am unlikely to read, but, if I did read them, likely to rate highly.
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