Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Echo chambers, not bubbles, trap us
Bubbles and chambers
An epistemic bubble is a gap: people lack some piece of information, and once they are exposed to it, they take it in. Bubbles are fairly rare. In an echo chamber, whether people have the information makes no difference, because anyone outside the group is not a trusted source and whatever they say gets dismissed.
Epistemic closure
Tribes also tell their members what counts as true and trustworthy knowledge, which is called epistemic closure. That hands motivated reasoning an easy tool: when information disagrees with you, one of the quickest ways to discredit it is to attack the trustworthiness of the source.
Universalism
The check is a norm called universalism, which separates the person delivering the news from whether the news is correct. It doesn't matter whether Copernicus or Mussolini or your mom tells you the earth is round, because the roundness of the earth is independent of the source. In practice, you can imagine the claim arriving from someone you do trust, or from nobody at all, and see whether your reaction changes.
Where do echo chambers and bubbles come from?
The distinction comes from philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in a 2020 paper in the journal Episteme. He argued that an epistemic bubble leaves out voices by omission, and that the gap can close when people hear what was missing. An echo chamber works differently, because it actively discredits outside sources so that new voices carry no weight. Nguyen's paper has been widely cited in discussions of online media.
What is universalism in science?
Sociologist Robert K. Merton listed universalism among the norms of science in a 1942 essay. It holds that a claim is judged by impersonal criteria, regardless of the nationality, race, or status of the person making it. The other norms Merton listed were communism, meaning shared findings, along with disinterestedness and organized skepticism. The four are often remembered together by the acronym CUDOS.
More from Talks at Google
