Bursting the Filter Bubble 136
Jah-Wren Ryel writes with news that a few CS folks are working on a way to present opposing viewpoints without angering the reader. From the article: "Computer scientists have discovered a way to number-crunch an individual's own preferences to recommend content from others with opposing views. The goal? To burst the 'filter bubble' that surrounds us with people we like and content that we agree with. A recent example of the filter bubble at work: Two people who googled the term 'BP.' One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm."
From the paper's abstract: "We found that recommending topically relevant content from authors with opposite views in a baseline interface had a negative emotional effect. We saw that our organic visualization design reverts that effect. We also observed significant individual differences linked to evaluation of recommendations. Our results suggest that organic visualization may revert the negative effects of providing potentially sensitive content."
Re:its more than just political sensitivity (Score:5, Informative)
Its even more problematic in areas like climate change where a large portion of the population appears unable to distinguish laymans commentary from actual research by climate scientists. If people spend a lot of time looking at conspiracy theory , creationist, or other similarly themed stuff on the net, google throws lots of denial sites at them, whereas people who have more analyical interests are more likely to get articles from science sites. The problem here is that folks with the conspiracy bent end up having no way to find information that might clear up their confusion if all they are getting is wattsup or alex jones or whatever. This just feeds the confirmation biases, and thats proving really harmful to science education right now.
Re:its more than just political sensitivity (Score:4, Informative)
When you really dig into the heart of this problem, IMHO it really comes down to the Scientists of the world being pretty dishonest in the first place. Although they're doing it with good intent, it's still wrong and it still causes a big part of the problem. The pattern goes like this: Scientists see a Big Problem for the World on the horizon in some of their data. They're not yet "standards of declaring new physics" sure of their conclusions, but the conclusions are so startling that they feel it's worth society expending effort to head off the possibility. Step two is when they say, "Well, most of the voting population isn't science-educated and/or doesn't understand probability and risk assessment, so they won't be able to rationally make the right call and join us in this effort, and we have to do something about that", and then they proceed to overstate their case and basically lie to everyone about the data and the probability of impact (not to mention the probability of the correctness of their assessments) in order to drum up support and dollars. Then when skeptics go on the attack, they find easy targets, because the case *was* overstated. Once you've started that cycle, there's no end to the debate over who's being dishonest about what.
Climate Change / AGW isn't the first time this has happened in Science, and it especially isn't the first time it's happened in earth/natural/climate -related sciences. Saving the whales (and every truly unimportant species of beetle), or the Global Cooling scare that preceded Global Warming are good examples. The public has been lead down the wrong path by the nose by natural scientists many times before, with big headlines in the pop science mags over the past several decades. They know what it looks like, and they're tired of it. AGW-response is as big a business as oil now. Think of all the dollars going into "renewables" and government offices and programs to oversee them and such. Most of those dollars are a complete waste unless they're pushing towards solutions like Space-based solar or Nuclear Fusion, because anything short of those requires we kill off most of the human population first to drop our energy requirements down to an acceptable level for the petty darling renewables of the green movements.
Back on point: this is obviously a list compiled by an AGW-denier, so take it with all the salt you want, but read the quotes and datelines. They *are* real, and they do make a point: http://www.examiner.com/article/arctic-ocean-warming-icebergs-growing-scarce-washington-post-reports
Re:its more than just political sensitivity (Score:5, Informative)
It is exceedingly unlikely that the results don't overlap after the first few, but if you can produce a copy of the two sets of results, I will forward them to someone on the Google Search team for debugging.
People hugely overestimate the effect of personalization -- it is a ranking tweak not a complete change to the search engine. It does not make economic sense to have personalized whole-web indexes.
Btw, if you don't like personalization ever, it is pretty easy to turn off:
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/54048?hl=en [google.com]
Just remove web history and uncheck private results.