from Hacker News

Burst Your News Filter Bubble with Read Across the Aisle

by anexprogrammer on 1/31/17, 8:02 PM with 55 comments

• by AndrewKemendo on 1/31/17, 10:17 PM

  I feel like this is the type of thing that people say they want and know they should do, but won't work at wide scale because it flies in the face of our biology.

  "Filter bubbles" exist because we seek them by default, it's proven to be cognitively expensive to challenge your beliefs, so the people who actively seek out challenging information are outliers.

  I don't see anything here that takes cognitive science into account to truly change behavior, which I think would be required.

  Good idea but I think we need to fundamentally change biology for this kind of thing to work.

• by moomin on 1/31/17, 9:52 PM

  Liberals read across the aisle all the time. Feels like it's half the shows on Comedy Central.

• by jbmorgado on 2/1/17, 1:27 PM

  Sincerely, I don't think the answer to the problem is to read stuff that's clearly biased from the other side as well, but to rethink journalism in the modern age so that it can go back to actually be more moderate, factual and professional as it was 2 decades ago when reputable journals wouldn't go for the clickbait.

  I'm not saying they were perfect back then, but there was a clear sense of professionalism and fact checking in journalism even in the recent past, that now is difficult to find even in major journals.

• by haversine02 on 2/1/17, 9:11 AM

  There should definitely be an additional axis for alternative, non-mainstream sources. It doesn't really work if you're just lumping everything together as either Democrat or Republican.

• by stevefeinstein on 1/31/17, 11:43 PM

  This project seems flawed before it starts. It just continues the bad tradition of giving the loudest voice to the ones with the most money. That's not how to get all sides of an issue.

• by gnicholas on 1/31/17, 9:53 PM

  founder here — I'll be checking in on the thread in case folks have questions!