Kind: Reads

reading a book, magazine, newspaper, other physical document, or online post

New Jersey has a traffic congestion problem

In any direction you drive, New Jersey's roads are too congested | NJBIZ

According to Titlemax’s 2017 Congestion Index, which divides the number of registered vehicles by the total miles of roads in each state, New Jersey’s 176.1 score ranks third only behind Hawaii and Washington, D.C. as having the most traffic congestion – that is, for every mile of road in the Garden State, there are over 176 cars.

According to a study by the Auto Insurance Center, two cities – Hoboken and Weehawken – ranked among the top cities in America in terms of the most #roadrage Instagram posts. In 2015, a study by the American Highway Users Alliance listed the portions of the NJ Turnpike leading up to the Lincoln Tunnel and Fort Lee to be among the Top 10 most congested roads in the entire U.S.

Wow! Just wow! I am sure that this is worse now that New Jersey Transit trains have become unreliable with some lines being temporarily shut down to meet deadlines for federally mandated safety improvements.

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles

Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult – C Thi Nguyen | Aeon Essays

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.

Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber.

Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult – C Thi Nguyen | Aeon Essays

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.

I suspect we are all guilty of doing this to some degree. It's not just "other people" or "them" that are the problem. The question I ask myself is how do I combat this in myself? How do I ensure I don't fall prey to either of these ways of "being"? To me, the epistemic bubble seems like a case of "strong beliefs, loosely held". Sufficient facts can destroy the bubble. The "echo chamber" is more like religious fanaticism.

I think I want to read some of the books mentioned in the article, Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017), to get more understanding on this subject.

Barnes & Noble Disrupted

Opinion | Save Barnes & Noble!

Barnes & Noble is in trouble. You hear that, in worried tones, when you talk to people in the book business. You feel it when you walk into one of the chain’s stores, a cluttered mix of gifts, games, DVDs (DVDs?) and books. And you really see the problems if you dig into the company’s financial statements.

Revenue from Nook, the company’s e-book device, has fallen more than 85 percent since 2012. Online sales of physical books have also plummeted. At the stores, where business was once holding up, it’s down about 10 percent over the past two years. Several stores — like my local one, in the Washington suburbs — have closed, and many have reduced staff.

I remember the day the Borders in West Windsor closed. It was sad walking through the isles with empty shelves.

But I’m torn because I’m part of the problem. I shop a lot on Amazon. Price is only part of the reason I shop on Amazon. A small part. I shop at Amazon mostly out of convenience. I don't like malls. I don't like shopping.

With Amazon I can look through a catalog of products, read the reviews, make a purchasing decision, and expect delivery within a few days via Amazon Prime.

I don't do all my shopping with Amazon. I still shop locally. I look for items with local shops first. I want to support the people who live in and own businesses in my neighborhood. I tell myself that when I shop locally, I am supporting the local economy. The money spent at local stores helps support the very kids my kids sit next to in class.

But my town has no local bookstore. We used to have a used bookstore. We don't have any electronics stores. The Radio Shack closed.

But I don't shop at Best Buy either. I don't shop at Target. Amazon has more variety and convenient and quicker shipping. Via an app on my iPad.