Shock Your Brain to Escape the Information Echo-Chamber
What can we do to avoid information bias, activate cross-pollination of ideas and prevent consuming more of the same?
During the USSR era, my grandma eagerly awaited a book she got a coupon for to hit the shelves of government-operated bookstores. The wait could take several months. She had to collect and deposit at least 15 kilograms of used paper for one coupon. The more famous the author, the more kilos were expected. If you wanted to read, you had to work for it and be creative. Many teachers were hijacking the system by forcing students to bring weekly loads of old newspapers in exchange for good grades. Those lucky enough to get a coupon could buy a pre-selected book for several times its official price, but only if they had the necessary connections. My grandma would wait in a queue for hours with others, desperate to get their hands on any kind of read. It looked like a Soviet version of today’s Apple Store. We used to have a problem: access to information was limited.
Fast forward to a century later, and we live in an age of information overload. Long before Google Search and personalised news feeds, technologists speculated about the future importance of information curation tools. Their predictions were spot on. Like many innovations, though, it is a double-edged sword. It's commonly understood that the technology of that ilk is geared towards feeding us more of the same, also known as the "echo chamber".
If I may venture into making predictions, too, mechanisms for combatting excessive curation might be the next step in data-consumption innovations.
You might have noticed that YouTube periodically suggests videos labelled “looking for something new?”. This introduces an element of mutation into the recommendation algorithm, helping it prevent the "local maximum bias". It shakes things up and potentially improves future results. Although I rarely click on those thumbnails, they move in the right direction.
You don’t have to wait for the manifestation of such technological trends. One way to counteract AI bias is to proactively venture outside your comfort zone like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recommends overcoming stagnation by shocking the muscle.
Curiosity led me to ask my peers to showcase their bookshelves or audio and video streaming accounts, which confirmed that reading the same book genres, listening to soundalikes and watching similar shows is universally comforting. Swimming against our inner tide requires effort, as our brains are wired to seek the path of least resistance.
An Interview of
by . The video will start playing when they agree that non-fiction readers rarely switch genres and vice-versa.It's also where most of the creativity comes from — unusual suspects. Cross-pollination of ideas, one of the most efficient recipes for innovation, begins with different species.
Seeking comfortable content is something I’m guilty of, too. Interestingly, consuming something unusual almost always results in a handful of backlinks to my common areas of interest. Things I think about a lot magically pop up in entirely unexpected places.
Reversely, when reading books from familiar categories, I routinely notice references to those exotic sources, further solidifying the bond between the knowledge’s remote standalone fragments.
I try keeping those titbits in the knowledge vault as they're one of the most valuable tricks to understanding the mechanics of the Universe and explaining deep concepts using simple household analogies.
I use Tools for Thought (TfT) to track these connections and take Literature Notes. In this publication, we'll be talking about these quite a bit. If you want to organise your knowledge, let’s geek out.
Special thanks to for reading the drafts of it.