[thr0w72594]

I don't think echo chambers are a bad thing. You can't verify everything yourself, so you can delegate some subset of your opinions to someone else, and be diligent about verifying that they're not leading you astray.

I've gone through a lot of different echo chambers in my life. From a traditionalist Catholic school to an ultra-liberal public university, and then spent time trying to orient myself and bouncing through a few different ideologies.

Some lines of thinking I've used to determine if I've found the right echo chamber, which, thankfully, I now have.

1. Is the world-view grounded in positive rhetoric? Do the practices and beliefs encourage building up both group members and the group as a whole? If not, there's a good chance you're being manipulated to serve someone else's purposes.

2. Does the group encourage you to think and reason for yourself? You're choosing this group so that you don't have to think about everything for yourself. But in the end you are responsible for your own life, so if a group is telling you to defer to an outside authority, tells you not to critically think about decisions, or tells you that certain topics on inquiry are off limits, stay away.

3. Does the world view accurately predict what will happen? Many ideologies are great at shoe-horning their narrative on past events, and many are great at coming up with logical arguments that are meant to be confusing and hard to refute, but the proof is in the predictive nature of the world-view.

4. Related to the above, when there's a failure in world-view, does the group have a mechanism of incorporating and learning from those failures?

[pythonaut_16]

I think the term echo chamber specifically denotes something bad.

An echo chamber happens specifically when a group's internal belief's enter a positive feedback loop and become insulated from any external (and often internal) dissent.

What you've described sounds more like a group with common belief's that has not devolved into an echo chamber. And that is what we should all strive for.

[clairity]

yes, this correlating effect is specifically argued against in the book 'wisdom of crowds', which discusses the conditions under which group decisions are better than individual ones. echo chambers are defined by their strong correlative impulse, which means they're statistically much more likely to significantly deviate from objectivity.

another relevant phenomenon derived therein is that a range of opinions, most of which are wrong, is completely normal and acceptable, as far as reasonable group decision-making goes.

but correlation of opinion is the core issue here, and human social dynamics constantly corral us into such correlations. only folks sufficiently and intrinsically principled have a strong enough will to incur the social costs of having truly independently-derived opinions from the herd (which doesn't guarantee objectively better perspectives either, but does help the herd hedge against catastrophic over-correlation).

[soco]

The standard rhetoric of some groups is "do your own research, don't trust the authorities". Does this qualify as thinking for yourself? They say yes, I see a problem.

[carbine]

The problem is their definition of “do your own research.” This problem is probably largely unavoidable because, human nature. But it’s made markedly worse by what has clearly been a long term, mass scale failure of the education system to teach most people to think clearly.

[BizarroLand]

It's become a thing because saying, "do your own research" is infinitely easier than investigating the current accepted body of knowledge to risk wasting months or years of your life only to find out that the current accepted body of knowledge was already correct.

"Do your own research" is the "trust no one" of the 2020's. Anyone who says it simply wants you to go away and isn't interested in debate and is unwilling to accept any information that might imply that they are wrong. If someone says "do your own research" to you and you are not both currently scientists working in the same field then it is safe to ignore them and everything they have ever said (and quite possibly everything they ever will say).

[thr0w72594]

If this is the only rhetoric, it fails all the other criteria I laid out. If it's not a useful, predictive, and positive worldview then this is not a good group to be in.

As for trust or distrust in authorities. There are many authorities that give you a good reason to trust them, namely a track record of telling the truth and acting in your best interest. There are also many authorities that give you a good reason to distrust them, by abusing their authority for personal profit, exposing themselves as an enemy, or selling out their built up goodwill to the highest bidder.

[ouid]

I don't think this is ideologically problematic. It's just that the people rejecting the authority have very little practice doing research.

[pstuart]

Not just that, but if one is researching for confirmation bias then said "research" is pointless.

If there's no willingness to accept that a belief is mistaken then there's no room for reason.

[charwalker]

Think for yourself but not like that.