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I think there is a genuine need for escaping echo chambers but every attempt is usually aimed just showing the opposite side/narrative.

If I am conservative I won’t be open to be shown the most leftist content, and viceversa, while instead I might be open to be shown more balanced views that might gradually carry me out of my echo chamber instead of reinforcing it.

edit: this an OT comment more related to the echo chamber topic than the submission itself. Interesting project, OP.

I think in order for the opposite thing to work, you have to approach the material with the understanding that "There are people who believe this stuff as firmly as I believe the complete opposite. If you asked them, they say, with absolute conviction, that I'm nuts. How might that happen? What if they're right? What could I have missed?"

This engages System 2, hard. And it's so easy to slip back into System 1 and continue to reject the evidence in front of you, as System 1 does so well when it doesn't like what it's seeing.

I have to constantly remind myself of the possibility that I could be wrong or have an incomplete view of things, but then that allows me to extract the valuable nuances and hidden assumptions that underlie the belief.

Even more importantly, it tends to cast a light on my unconscious biases and assumptions that underlie my beliefs.

The problem with delusional belief systems is that they tend to be coherent and self-supporting, just not rooted in reality.

Statistical aggregates make this worse. You can argue that on average X is more than Y, or you can cherrypick all the examples where Y is greater than X to make your point.

> I think there is a genuine need for escaping echo chambers but every attempt is usually aimed just showing the opposite side/narrative.

I think the idea that there only exists a single spectrum sorted into sides is itself a sort of meta echo chamber shared by people in echo chambers even as they disagree about everything else. In modern politics, even the idea that the opposed party holds opposite views (versus just opposed) is a meta echo chamber idea. In many left/right topics, the disagreement isn't 'pro/anti', but often more fundamental.

Some examples: While conservatives might be anti-abortion, liberals aren't pro abortion, they're pro-choice and that's not just a rhetorical device. While liberals are anti-racism and see conservatives as pro-racism, a conservative rejects the idea out of hand because of a difference in definitions. A third, more nuanced view might even see the average conservative as non-racist (as opposed to anti-racist) which many would still argue is not enough, but it's not 'the opposite' at all.

I don't think recommendations need to necessarily go to the extremes, but I don't think 'a shade to the left' is enough either, because without understanding the fundamental differences, you have a you-can't-get-there-from-here problem.

It seems like no matter what books I key off of, the results appear to be pretty nuanced and not even necessarily absolutely opposing. This is really cool.

I think part of the problem with just swinging to the absolute other end is, unless you're just interested in psychology, reading the "other side" is only of real value if you're reading quality, or at least good arguments made in good faith.

At the extremes there seems to be a much higher tendency for the authors themselves to be deep in the echo chambers of their respective ideologies, as well as a higher likelyhood that its target audience is more forgiving of poor content as long as it hits close enough to the mark. Blindly selecting content by a strict point of view would seem to result in lower value overall.

Not to say there isn't good reading out there in the extremes, but the level of chaff to sort through to find a decent seed is just too damn high.

The value is ultimately in finding good content and not just an opposing point of view. Whenever I can find both at the same time, those are the real keepers.

I think that it is hard to beat r/ChangeMyView (https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/), as the arguments are usually much more detailed than "left vs right".

However, there is one crucial prerequisite - someone needs to have an open mind, and courage to at least doubt one's own point of view. Compare and contrast with Change my View by Steven Crowder, which is full of fake openness + trolling, not genuine curiosity.

We have quite a few conversations here about how some issues aren’t on a continuum but on a plane. Maybe the thing to map out here is the extra dimension where things aren’t black and white. This person has read four books on the dark end of the scale? Let’s show them something in a forest green.
Actually this tool seems to solve that problem by showing you multiple books, and not just direct opposites in terms of content. If you don't believe me search for 'Mein Kampf' and something similar, it doesn't spit out books you would consider opponents of Hitler's worldview necessarily.

Now whether the books it spits out are even going to help you break out of your worldview, who knows, but I'm sure reading Shakespeare is going to loosen up a fascist to other ideas at least a little bit.

My own experience is that it works quite well for a certain kind of person: on Reddit I was simultaneously subbed to /r/The_Donald, /r/politics, /r/ChapoTrapHouse, /r/Libertarian, etc (while those were still around). I'd also drop by voat occasionally to get my weekly sample of virulently antisemitic takes.

I think looking at extremes is the most realistic path. Purportedly balanced sources are dangerous because their bias is subtle; extreme sources typically have very clear bias that is easy to keep in mind as you. You can read many extreme sources and sort of take the intersection of what they show you to guess at some minimal amount of what must be really true.

Agreed. I have long wanted to see a social network or recommendation engine that generated those arguments most likely to appeal to those who disagree. What Julia Galef calls steelmanning.
I think it works: I put in "Zero to One", "The Idea Factory" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" -- one of the top results was "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life." This was reviewed on Amazon as "Not For a White Male Forty-Year-Old Software Engineer."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1WB4G83DRI8PV/re...

Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by people who've also read the books entered?
I realize, the site's aim is to help you escape the "echo chamber". But I've recently been mulling over this other idea from Seneca (writing 2000 years ago!) on limiting the number of books you read, hard as it is, for an avid reader:

[...] Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. Food does not benefit or become part of the body when it is eaten and immediately expelled. Nothing impedes healing as much as frequent change of medications. A wound does not close up when one is always trying out different dressings on it; a seedling that is transplanted repeatedly will never grow strong. [...]

"But I want to read different books at different times," you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. [...]

  — Letter 2 ("A beneficial reading program"); translation by Long and Graver
I'll give you this, I had no idea how much Christian self-help literature I was missing out on.
Very interesting—I certainly wouldn't have expected the antithesis of Mein Kampf and Revolt Against the Modern World to be Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. Honourable mentions include the Bible (NIV) and The C Programming Language.
Love the idea! My one suggestion would be to add the ability to filter out children's books from the results. After I added Hitchhiker's Guide, Children of Time, and the Iliad, the majority of my recommendations were children's books. Or, maybe the tool is telling me something...
I remember attending a presentation from Pandroa many years ago and one thing struck me as very interesting. I am rephraizin from memory: "It is of little value to recommend obvious things. For example if you like Duke Ellington there is no point to recommend you Ella Fitzgeral d. You probably already aware of her. But if we recommend you a song by Madonna, whom you would not normaly consider listening, which happens to be very much in jazzy style you like, you will be pleasantly surprised." This is how you break a bubble.
Weirdly, I keep getting books I like in the search. It would be nice if I could add more than three authors because my reading is already extremely diverse, like music listening there is very little that I dislike (According to spotify, I listened to over 500 genres of music this year -- although I'm not really sure how useful that is because of how every piece of music seems to be categorized into it's own genre).

For example, I put in:

    Mort - Terry Pratchett
    Mortal Engines - Stanisław Lem
    My Lesbian Experience With
       Loneliness - Kabi Nagata
And Judith Butler was in the search results. So instead I realised that Mort and Mortal Engines are adjacent, genre-wise and tried:

    Mort - Terry Pratchett
    My Lesbian Experience With
       Loneliness - Kabi Nagata
    Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
and in the search results I got:

    The Far Side comics
    "This Book Is Full of Spiders"
    Douglas Adams
    Kurt Vonnegut
    Brian Lee O'Mally
    Calvin and Hobbes
All of these works I have enjoyed quite a lot -- I used to be able to quote the radio show of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy from memory, I own all of the John Dies at the End series, and I'm wondering about getting the special edition of Calvin and Hobbes because there's quite a lot I haven't seen and it's pretty timeless.

The rest, mostly consisting of PG Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde, are works that I consider myself interested in yet unexposed to, but they are hardly opposites of the books I put in?

So I'm not really convinced of the utility of this tool as it stands.

Perhaps it is tailored to a single type of reader that only reads books within their purview (Perhaps, political history books, or purely science fiction books) to the exclusion of many other interesting and worthwhile genres?

----------------------------

Edit : What is especially interesting about this is that when I enter only

    My Lesbian Experience With
       Loneliness - Kabi Nagata
    Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
I get a book by Sappho(!) and a literal deluge of mostly-feminist literature with only a handful of anti-feminist works -- with the touchpoint that those anti-feminist works are trying to sound and look feminist!

I'm not sure how Sappho is directly in opposition to Nagata's work, and it strikes me that anyone who has read both Nagata and Butler would also be familiar with the works of Sappho?

Interesting. I picked the software engineer sample link. Added the 2 books I have right next to me. And it's recommending my wife's taste in books.
Slightly unrelated but a little bit related.

Been looking for a similar tool but for music. I love Spotify's recommendations for the most part, but sometimes I want to dive out of my music bubble and explore new genres or new anything really. Basically what I'm looking for is a tool that can give me recommendations of the music that is the opposite of what I usually listen to, or something like that. Anyone know of any?

This is quite fun actually! Tried different philosopher combinations. Get Alcoholics Anonymous recommendations for quite a few until I add Schopenhauer. And if you are a Rand, Rowling reading techie, apparently, you should read more Eddo-Lodge, Baldwin and Chomsky... Brightened my day, thnx.

P.S. Are you sure this thing isn't pushing people from one echo chamber to another?

I enjoyed playing around with this and I got real value out of it as a discovery tool when I filtered to showing aclaimed fiction. I know its survivor bias, but I dont want to waste my time on something both terribly written and outside my echo chamber.

One usability tweak based on how I interacted with it would be to add a 'I already like this' button to suggested books to save me from re-adding them. It also suggested another H.P. Lovecraft novel despite me already marking At the Mountains of Madness as a liked book, I'm pretty sure that if you like one Lovecraft book, you'd like the rest.

The one recommendation I had a strong negative reaction to was by Jeffrey Archer which I guess means that its the book I should read next.

As an experiment, I gave it The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, a Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, and the silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. A pretty standard selection of well-known books in the Fantasy genre.

Out of the 90 books I get, 53 either have the word "Dragon" in the title, or a dragon on the cover of the book. Clearly, a majority of the results also fall in the Fantasy genre, so have my doubts this counts as escaping the echo chamber.

On the other hand, there are a lot of books in that list that I have never heard about, and that look interesting (insofar as you can judge a book by its cover). When I'm done with my current series of books, I'll have a good look at this :-)

This is interesting. I put in a handful of books on my shelf that I have read and enjoyed, and the results that it returned seem to be largely: a) religion of all kinds but largely Christian apology, and b) civil rights and apartheid. Both topics I wouldn't go out of my way to read about but I might if it the book seemed particularly interesting and was well reviewed (so pretty much the point of this project).

One interesting note is that there are several books on the list I absolutely would read, I just didn't know they existed or hadn't sought them out. One of Stephen Hawking's books, some American military books, a few biographies, etc.

I put in The Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The Test of the Twins by Margaret Weis, and On Libert by Mills. I got back a collection of literature by women of color and books about colonialism. I had no idea my book preferences were so conservative.
I put in SevenEves (my favour book) by Neal Stephenson and Leviathan Wakes by JSA Corey and the recommendations include:

Game of thrones, Bernard Corwell books Isaac Asimov

I've read these and I would put them in the same camp as the input books so I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

Nice idea but, unless I'm missing something, not the expected behaviour.

I would more have expected "the old man who climbed out the window and disappeared", Clarkson's biography and maybe a Jack Reacher type stuff (which I also enjoy but on the other end of the spectrum from the input books)

This site always works well for me to broaden my literary horizon:

https://www.literature-map.com

I found some of my all time favorite authors this way.

I think this could be more impactful if it focused on short form/summary/critique recommendations.

Recommending someone from the left to read a book by Solzhenitsyn, or someone from the right to read a book by Maya Angelou is a hefty time commitment with little promise of proportionate intellectual gain for the time invested.

But to have recommendations on good counterpoint short form content (short stories, journal articles, essays) might get someone who is busy with life and career to spend a few minutes. Harder to ultimately monetize, since the business model for the online book market is pretty mature at this point but no one directly directly pays for that single essay. So where are micro transactions?

Anyone who has been in the position where their time was truly valuable instinctively protects their free time from “long form” intrusions. It the book is worthwhile, the essays on the essence of the ideas will be even more valuable (per minute). Most pop books or ideological rants might only need a paragraph. Condensing into short form might lead to the embarrassing disclosure that the emperor has no clothes.

The idea that you have to read a long form text to understand a different perspective sets off alarm bells in my head. I seem to remember that cults would always want prospective recruits to stay at the Center the whole weekend.

Great to see a new type of recommenders (long overdue).

A related problem is of exploitation vs exploration (being recommended something one likes vs recommended new but with high uncertainty if it will be enjoyable or not)

some of my work on this related topic of active learning in recommender systems:

presentation: https://www2.slideshare.net/nrubens/active-learning-in-recom...

book chapter: http://machinelearning202.pbworks.com/f/Rubens-Active-Learni...

a more basic primer (aimed at startups) https://www2.slideshare.net/nrubens/1-of-40-recommender-syst...

am happy to answer any questions

One great way to find books to read is to see what people you look up to recommend. I've built a service that scans twitter for book recommendations from ~2000 thought leaders. https://www.readthistwice.com/people
Tangential, but I’m on the far left of the American political spectrum and recently learned about https://www.newsmax.com/ and have been actively reading it to try to understand the current political schism because fox wasn’t cutting it anymore
Interesting tool. I put Intro to Algorithms by Cormen & Surely You're joking Mr. Feynman and got lots of autobiographical books that I wouldn't really pick up :). Though there are others which pique my interest somewhat.

Out of curiosity, what kind of recommendation system has been used here?

I dunno. I seem to see a lot of the same titles for different searches. Non-fiction books are also more difficult to read than fiction; so these types of books tend to be a big time investment (a lot of them feel like extended essays).

There are a couple of books I've read in the past few years that I actually didn't fully agree with. Sometimes they were badly sourced or made some arguments I didn't think were sound, but there was also a ton of interesting and good material in them; which I think made some good points. Based on that, I guess my recommendations for breaking bubbles would be:

"The Strange Death of Europe" (Murray, Davies, et al.)

"The War Against Boys" (Sommers)

"The Fountainhead" (Ryand)

Also for me it didn't seem to work well. I entered "Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray and "12 rules for life" by Peterson ... I would have expected something of the likes of "Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini" or "How to argue with a racist by Adam Rutherford" to pop up, as both of them present well reasoned arguments against the world view depicted in the previous ones. (Reading recommendation for both btw. ).

Yet, I got Go Forward with Faith: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley" and a lot of religious books. I can understand why this happens. Yet, a bit disappointing.

The concept is intriguing. One thing I would do is trying to find books orthogonal to my tastes rather than opposites.

I do not want to find books I know I will hate, I want to find books around axis I have not even considered.

I like the idea a lot. In terms of the results, it seems to me that many more data points are needed. My bubble escape route contained a lot of authors and titles I know of, I've read, or I'm very familiar with.

FWIW my sample trio were Dune/Starship Troopers/Sword of Destiny and results included a bunch of graphic novels (Preacher mostly) and mangas that I consumed in the past, a Harry potter series and a bunch of crime books that I also tried (and, often, didn't find interesting). But there were some genuinely interesting picks too so, again, more data will probably help.

I always thought that recommendation engines should be customized and adjusted by the user. It seems that social platforms are forcing what they think is relevant on me, and I have stopped using some social platforms for this reason. In some cases, I wrote scripts to fetch content (e.g. tweets, rss feeds) and apply my own methods to track topics, or bust the bubble. When the timeline started to show irrelevant topics to my interest (that changed over time), or non-eye opener topics, I usually start leaving the platform as a user.
I like this tool a lot. I wouldn’t mind having a similar concept applied to YouTube. If you actively try and watch videos from a different viewpoint then your recommendations are all over the place.
Well, apparently the Bible is going to help me break out of my bubble.
I provided two books as requested - an old favourite (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams) and a recent fantasy novel (The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin). My recommendations were... unhelpful? Lots of children’s books and comics (including Calvin & Hobbes), peppered with the occasional P. G. Wodehouse.

The latter is particularly strange to me, since Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Wodehouse, used very similar humour, and even wrote forewords for Wodehouse re-printings.

What if self-help (or "personal development") is itself an echo chamber? Seems it's not helping to get our of this one.
This keeping recommending books I have read or books very similar to books I have read. I've added some of the books that show up to try to force that kind of book out, but it brings in more things that are proximate to my reading.

I don't know if I've just confused it or I don't have an echo chamber.

I did find some proximate reading that I hadn't heard of that sounds interesting, though!

I've always thought that recommendation services would be better of this logic were layered in. E.g. I'm on YouTube and 1 in 10 recommendations are popular/trending videos that the algorithm doesn't think I'll enjoy.

Aside from the obvious necessity of bubble-breaking, it has the nice side effect of retraining the recommendation engine without rampant confirmation bias.

Hi, thanks for this website, I'm goinng to use it a lot I think!

I'd like to add a suggestion, when we pick a book, you propose two links, one is Amazon and the other one is Goggle. Could you replace those links by DuckDuckGo and maybe Goodreads (or any other website that doesn't almost control the market)? It's just to avoid those big companies.

Interesting idea.

Assuming this is still under development, I thought my experience might be of use.

I input The Three-Body Problem (Cixin), Sapiens (Harari), Leonardo da Vinci (Isaacson), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Bluebeard (Vonnegut), and On the Shortness of Life (Seneca) and received in return...children's books!

Age-gating the recommendations might be something to look into.

"The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure"

This book perfectly describes what caused radical leftism to seep into Bay Area (Portland, Seattle, etc.) software culture. If you have leftist activist employees or coworkers, I highly suggest this book for them.

So my initial thought when it said anti-recomendation was the idea that you give it a list of books and then it removes the ones that are "too mainstream", or "written by a journalist" or "proven false". In a way kind of want that more than what's proposed.
When I put:

- "The Sovereign Individual" by James D. Davidson

- "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" by Harry Browne

I got suggested The Bible NIV and a bunch of other Christian books. Is it trying to tell me that the western totalitarian tendencies come from their Christian heritage or am I reading too much into it?