[spacemanaki]

I'm really curious to read any discussion about this on HN, because I think the other times Eli Pariser's TED talk and book have been posted there haven't been much discussion. It's been circulating in my family (mostly by non-technical members) and there was some amount of alarm stirred up. I'm skeptical of this just because the evidence doesn't seem that damning.

Has anyone read the book? Is there significant evidence that this is a serious issue? I completely believe that this is beginning to happen, and would believe that FB does it since I don't spend enough time on the news feed to notice if it was happening, but the example in the TED talk and in the NYTimes column linked to by mhb is a Google search for "Egypt" earlier in the year, and two people seeing drastically different results: "Two people who each search on Google for “Egypt” may get significantly different results, based on their past clicks."

Aren't there other reasons for two people being served different results by Google? I've often read that they do heavy A/B style testing and stuff like that, which seems like it could explain some discrepancies.

So what does HN think? Is there stronger evidence here than comparing a few Google searches?

[jerf]

The problem with the problem is that it just... is. You can't consume all the information you possibly can come into contact with. You must filter it somehow. All filters will induce biases. Any filter that claims to somehow be unbiased just means that it matches the biases of whoever created the filter so thoroughly they can't see it, but it's still a filter. If you decide to periodically randomize things, that's part of your filter. If you give up, that just means you're filtering everything.

You can discuss desirable characteristics of filters, but you rapidly run up against the twin problems of how your characteristics are subjective, and the fact that you don't really fully understand how filters will affect you anyhow so it's all speculation. Perhaps that later point will go away as we have more experience but it's going to be hard to share those experiences with each other; they serialize into English poorly.

I think it seems like an interesting problem at first, it's something you should know about and it's worth upvoting the occasional mention of it... but there is really very little to say that isn't really about some other topic entirely (epistemology, ethics, validity of other philosophical or political viewpoints, etc.). There's not all that much interesting stuff to say about it, in the end.

[spacemanaki]

I guess I was approaching it from a technical debunking perspective, but what you say makes a lot of sense. I'll ponder this.