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I have to agree with that statement. Moreover this increasing please-dont-confront-me-with-views-outside-of-my-peer-group is problematic. While we embrace tolerance and open-mindedness in society, services like Facebook and now Google Search are increasingly reducing the open character and often randomness of the web by creating separated friend-islands.
I think this is something we naturally do as humans. I've been thinking about "small world" connections lately. People that I know through disparate connections, sometimes via very different parts of the country. Then I think about the similarities... we're all probably in the same marketing demographics, age, wealth, education, ideology, etc... We've self selected to increase our probability of meeting. It's a small…
I'm not railing against recommendation engines. They just rely on fundamental assumptions about the nature of our interests that I'm not sure are right. I'd be interested to see a recommendation engine that had an explicitly different goal in mind than predicting your interests (e.g. an in-built bias to encourage you to eat healthier when giving you restaurant recommendations).