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by IncreasePosts 558 days ago
"internet bubbles" don't exist solely on the Internet, they exist in the minds of people spending a lot of time on the internet on certain sites. They manifest on the Internet commonly. But they also manifest in the "real world" when those people communicate with others.

Go ahead and deceive yourself that you're not in an echo chamber.

I'm sure that will help you understand reality better.

1 comments

You imply that you have access to some unvarnished truth, unlike the other commenters who are trapped in their bubbles. What is your justification for this belief? Is it possible for other people to have access to this higher truth, or is it something innate to you?
My justification I guess is repeatedly seeing various commenters on certain sites espousing the same things in almost the same language. Then some event happened in the real world and they all start asking themselves "how could this happen", again, commonly in similar language. Meanwhile, I'm shocked that those people didn't see X.

Sure, it's possible to acquire my magnificent skills, by just going out and interacting with a wide swath of people in the real world.

Even, instead of thinking that you're getting any kind of signal about society when you read the same meme comment on Reddit/Twitter or whatever, just imagine you actually have no idea, even if you've read the 5000th tweet expressing the same idea

But you could say that about anything including the opposite.

I see a bunch of people who say that "CEO-killing is wrong. Therefore they must be in an internet bubble." I think we should both admit that the consistency of a message isn't actually a good signal for "bubbleness" and that something like randomized polling on personal beliefs and perceptions or a similar study actually would be.

Bubbleness isn't about the viewpoint, it is about the difference between bubble perception vs global perception.

If you read reddit/twitter, a common statement was something like "The police will never be able to find him - no one will cooperate". "Must be hard to find someone when there are 150million suspects". Basically, treating him like a modern day robin hood.

When, back in real life, the news of the day seems to be that he was caught at a McDonalds after two random employees noticed him and called the police on him.

If you want to make a statement about bubbles, then you have to ground it in global perception which is operationalizable and empirically verifiable - speculation isn't epistemologically responsible.
I'm not particularly worried about verification or epistemologically responsibility when something is manifestly obvious. The same reason I'm not jumping out of an airplane without a parachute even if I haven't read a study on the relative effectiveness of parachutes vs no parachutes when jumping out of an airplane.
It's easy for other people to have access to this higher truth, and most people do. Basically by definition, the sentiments which are truly "overwhelmingly shared" are the sentiments you can talk openly about with strangers without fear that you might leave a bad impression. I think the vast majority of people supporting the CEO's murder would immediately understand that they should not bring it up when meeting their in-laws for the first time or something.