Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear_people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t _trust people from the other side.

Current usage has blurred this crucial distinction, so let me introduce a somewhat artificial taxonomy. An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview. But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests. When we take networks built for social reasons and start using them as our information feeds, we tend to miss out on contrary views and run into exaggerated degrees of agreement.

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.

As Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015), modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every member of that chain. Ask yourself: could you tell a good statistician from an incompetent one? A good biologist from a bad one? A good nuclear engineer, or radiologist, or macro-economist, from a bad one? Any particular reader might, of course, be able to answer positively to one or two such questions, but nobody can really assess such a long chain for herself. Instead, we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable. Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on that vulnerability, taking advantage of our epistemic condition and social dependency.

Source: Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays

If you are anywhere at all on the autism spectrum, you have anxiety. It seems to come with the territory. It’s easy to find things about which to be anxious, but in truth the feeling seems to just be there, as background noise, never ceasing.

One thing that causes us anxiety is not working on our project, whatever that project may be. Most of the time, we are our work, and that means when we are working on a project, we almost don’t know what to do with ourselves when we are not working on it. When I am working on a project–whether it’s a novel, a poem, a play, a paper, a nonfiction book, or some other project–I am always thinking about that project. I am anxious when I am not working on my project. When I am working on it, I am anxious to finish it. It drives me, but it also drives me a little crazy. I seem to be absent-minded, but I’m always thinking about my project. It never ends, until the project is over.

And then I start on the next project, and the cycle of anxiety starts all over again.

These frustrations/anxieties are part of our daily experience in dealing with other people and the the world in general that constantly imposes on us and prevents us from working on our projects, which is really all we want to do.

So there are certainly many things that make us feel anxious. The fact that we identify with our work, and not working on our work makes us feel anxious to work is part of it, but it’s hardly all. Sometimes, you just feel anxious. And it may not be caused by anything in particular. The fact is that most of the time, we simply feel anxious because we feel anxious. We can look for causes, but how often will that be simple justification of the feelings? The fact of the matter is, anxiety is co-morbid with autism. Sometimes it just is. It is the background noise of the world when you are autistic.

Source: On Anxiety – An Intense World

Technology has always existed in a social context, and evaluations of the risk or reliability of a tech platform have always relied on social indicators. But the acceleration of these patterns, and the extending of the social networks around code to include the majority of working coders, means that institutional indicators (like “which company funds its development?”) now come second to community-based signals.

Similarly, top-down indications of technical maturity like documentation (often an artifact of outside investment in making a technology accessible to a new audience) are complemented, or even eclipsed, by bottoms-up indicators like how many people have bookmarked a framework, or how many people answer comments about a toolkit. Even purely social factors like the number of participants in a Gitter or Slack chat room about a project, or the number of people who follow a project on social media, are all weighed when we look at new technology.

Source: What if JavaScript wins? – Anil Dash – Medium

A philosopher named Owen Flanagan quoted someone as saying that “A good human life is lived at the intersection of the true, the good, and the beautiful.” It seems that we all come equipped to determine what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful as part of our basic makeup, so if the aphorism is true, we all have the capability of living a good life. But if you ask a Christian apologist what is the true, what is the good, and what is the beautiful, they will respond that God/Jesus is the truth, only He is truly good, and He and His love are the beautiful. Humans, on the other hand, are depraved, sinful, and unworthy, and that none of those three (truth, good, beauty) come from anywhere but their god. Humans can be saved from their sinfulness, but only through faith in their god or at least obey the gods directives as interpreted by their gods servants.

The religions in this country favor depicting potential believers as being unworthy, sinful, even abominable, before offering the “cure.” They describe the world around us as being filled with temptations and dangers, for which they have, of course, solutions. They refer to their followers as docile animals, as their “flock,” as “lambs and sheep,” and as children, with priests referring to their parishioners as their children (My Son, My Daughter, My Child) and accept the title of “Father,” all of which disempowers the parishioners and puts them into the pliable state of a child, ready for indoctrination.

As a teacher I was taught that my primary goal was to provide a “safe learning environment” for my students, so they could learn free of coercion, bullying, sarcasm, and humiliation. I taught college kids, adults, so was that requirement because all of my students had already been safely religiously indoctrinated as children and it was now not okay to coerce them? Why does this “safe, learning environment” requirement not apply to religions, which terrorize young children with images of their loved ones burning in Hell. (Please don’t tell me this doesn’t happen, I have spoken to too many people who have confessed their nightmares regarding their grandparents or other loved ones roasting in fire.)

Why do not we use, as a theme for educating our children the simple phrase “a good human life is lived at the intersection of the true, the good, and the beautiful” and operate as if we believed that?

Source: The Basic Problem with Our Religions | Class Warfare Blog

Why should this effect prove so helpful to the depressed, addicted, and anxious? As Pollan explains it, these disorders are the result of mental and emotional “grooves” in our thinking that have become, as the DMN’s name suggests, default. We are how we think. The right psychedelic experience can level out the grooves, enabling a person to make new cerebral connections and briefly escape from “a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive.”

Source: LSD research: Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, reviewed.

The Trump administration following through on moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has made it more imperative than ever that Americans understand evangelicals’ apocalyptic beliefs and their concomitant politics of Providentialism. The extreme influence of white evangelicals in the Trump administration is having a serious, destabilizing impact on foreign relations and geopolitics. For a primer on evangelicals’ apocalyptic beliefs in relation to Jerusalem, see this piece on growing up with ends times beliefs and this one on evangelicals, Israel, and Trump. For more details, get ahold of Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm’s Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Politics and Apocalyptic Visions.

Source: Update and Exvangelical Miscellany: Academia, Exvies, the Evangelical Reckoning, the Columbia International University Scandal, and Jerusalem – Not Your Mission Field

most folks treat their blog as if it were some kind of glossy headshot of their thinking, whereas the beauty and freedom of blogging was that it was by design a networked tool. Blogging provides a space to develop an online voice, connect with a particular network, and build a sense of identity online in conjunction with others working through a similar process. Scale in many ways became a distraction, one which was magnified to such a degree by the hype around MOOCs in edtech that anything less that 10s of thousands of “users,” “learners,” “participants,” followers,” etc. was tacitly considered somehow less than optimal for effective online learning. It was, and remains, a symptom of the capital-driven ethos of Silicon Valley that places all value on scale and numbers which is rooted in monetization—a reality that has infected edtech and helped to undermine the value and importance of forging an independent voice and intimate connections through what should be an independent media of expression. When scale is the endgame the whole process becomes bogged down in page views, followers, and likes rather than the freedom to explore and experiment with your ideas online. It’s a uniquely web-based version of Hell where the dominant form of communication online is a Medium think piece written by your friendly neighborhood thought leader.

Source: blogging | bavatuesdays

Through my own work I’ve come to believe the most important thing we can do to help students develop as writers is to allow them to write on subjects of interest and write for audiences that matter.

It’s not surprising this is de-motivating when it comes to writing. As I have said and will continue to say until everyone agrees with me, writing is thinking, and it is significantly more engaging to spend your time thinking about things you’re interested in.

Auto-Scoring of writing assignments should be abandoned if we are genuinely interested in students learning to write, rather than training them to pass assessments.

Source: No One Cares What You Think, And What You Feel | Just Visiting

The most salient feature of the United States Public School System – both yesterday and today – is naked, unapologetic segregation.

Whether it be in 1954 when the Supreme Court with Brown v. Boardmade it illegal in word or today when our schools have continued to practice it in deed. In many places, our schools at this very moment are more segregated than they were before the Civil Rights movement.

That’s just a fact.

But what’s worse is that we don’t seem to care.

And what’s worse than that is we just finished two terms under our first African American President – and HE didn’t care. Barack Obama didn’t make desegregation a priority. In fact, he supported legislation to make it worse.

Charter schools, voucher schools, high stakes standardized testing, strategic disinvestment – all go hand-in-hand to keep America Separate and Unequal.

Social segregation leads to institutional segregation which leads to generational, systematic white supremacy.

If there is one unstated axiom of our American Public School System it is this: the worst thing in the world would be black and white children learning together side-by-side.

Source: The Different Flavors of School Segregation | gadflyonthewallblog

As an adult who knows she’s autistic, and who has come to understand the role these habits play in my life, I’ll defend the validity and necessity of so-called “special interests” with the (over)zealous fervor I usually save for shipwrecks and spies. I’m vehemently opposed to any ideology that recommends discouraging them in autistic children—or guiding them toward areas of focus that might make them more employable in the future, as if an autistic person’s curiosity is only valuable if it’s profitable—in an effort to make us appear “less autistic” and thus more palatable to neurotypical people.

I believe special interests have the ability to bring a sense of order and control to a world that is often baffling to us. I appreciate the escapism they provide when things get too overwhelming. And I love the sheer joy people take in them for their own sake—the rush of wonder, fascination, and accomplishment that comes from hurtling down obscure rabbit holes and grabbing hold of every piece of information you can find about something you love.

Embracing my special interest didn’t solve everything. But I was able to take all of that energy I had been wasting on constantly policing myself and my enthusiasm, and put it toward other things. Consequently, I didn’t hate life so much.

But one of the things that I love about special interests—or at least the way that I experience them—is how they tend to intensify just as you need them to.

Source: Catapult | When the Way You Love Things Is “Too Much”; or: Why I Went to Portmeirion | Sarah Kurchak