I experimented with manipulating the filter bubble, and while I find noticing I am in a filter bubble a useful trick for avoiding unconscious bias, I don’t find it useful when deliberately thinking about a specific thing.
Consider bubble-hopping: I find a better way is to deliberately spend time inside each of the relevant filter bubbles instead. The central benefit is that this naturally pulls your perspective above the fray. If we entertain the notion that the goal is to get the problem solved, we’ll need to understand what the conversation is among the different groups anyway.
As a practical matter, my impression from doing this periodically is that most of the time the conversations are completely different, to the extent that it is hard to recognize they are talking about the same thing.
That has been my experience as well. I didn’t have a term for it, so I didn’t use ‘bubble-hopping’ in the OP. That term captures a lot of my experience as well. A tacit part of the process I didn’t include in the OP is what the experience of actually exposing yourself to different political worldviews is like. I was mostly trying to get the basic concept out. I might write another post about what it’s like.
I spend my time in new, different bubbles for about as long it takes for me to get a sense or feeling that I understand the basics of how they see the world. Doing so has in the past meant immersing myself in the communications and culture of the specific political niche online and through other sources for a month or two, or not longer. There are some groups I will dip in and out of.
I would have captured all this is I had written about how to do what I was talking about in the OP. There are a couple reasons I didn’t do that:
Like I said above, I wanted to introduce a basic concept without extra clutter.
A lot of the sources I consumed to understand how radically different political perspectives than the norm aren’t of great quality. Neither are lots of sources for more mainstream political perspectives, but the problem is political groups seen as extremist or on the fringe are controversial. So I didn’t want to unnecessarily rouse backlash by recommending some controversial sources I think are at best mediocre. I figured people could easily find sources that suit them by themselves.
I didn’t want my post to run overly long.
If the discussion here prompts interesting insights or questions, I might write a follow-up post.
I experimented with manipulating the filter bubble, and while I find noticing I am in a filter bubble a useful trick for avoiding unconscious bias, I don’t find it useful when deliberately thinking about a specific thing.
Consider bubble-hopping: I find a better way is to deliberately spend time inside each of the relevant filter bubbles instead. The central benefit is that this naturally pulls your perspective above the fray. If we entertain the notion that the goal is to get the problem solved, we’ll need to understand what the conversation is among the different groups anyway.
As a practical matter, my impression from doing this periodically is that most of the time the conversations are completely different, to the extent that it is hard to recognize they are talking about the same thing.
That has been my experience as well. I didn’t have a term for it, so I didn’t use ‘bubble-hopping’ in the OP. That term captures a lot of my experience as well. A tacit part of the process I didn’t include in the OP is what the experience of actually exposing yourself to different political worldviews is like. I was mostly trying to get the basic concept out. I might write another post about what it’s like.
I spend my time in new, different bubbles for about as long it takes for me to get a sense or feeling that I understand the basics of how they see the world. Doing so has in the past meant immersing myself in the communications and culture of the specific political niche online and through other sources for a month or two, or not longer. There are some groups I will dip in and out of.
I would have captured all this is I had written about how to do what I was talking about in the OP. There are a couple reasons I didn’t do that:
Like I said above, I wanted to introduce a basic concept without extra clutter.
A lot of the sources I consumed to understand how radically different political perspectives than the norm aren’t of great quality. Neither are lots of sources for more mainstream political perspectives, but the problem is political groups seen as extremist or on the fringe are controversial. So I didn’t want to unnecessarily rouse backlash by recommending some controversial sources I think are at best mediocre. I figured people could easily find sources that suit them by themselves.
I didn’t want my post to run overly long.
If the discussion here prompts interesting insights or questions, I might write a follow-up post.