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Comment by sol_invictus | Hacker News Reader

Put some of my own favourite books (maths, business and Japanese fiction) onto the engine and got recommended african-american and feminist literature (and a cookbook.)

Then I sampled three of these recommendations and put them into the engine (Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou and Carol Anderson) and again got recommended feminist, african-american and anti-capitalist literature.

One does not simply escape the leftist bubble it seems.

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Indeed. It's a real struggle as the nature of how this operates on intersections ("people who like Foo also like Baz") mean that escaping a "bubble" really just means moving to its fringes. The more inward and consolidated a bubble is, the harder it will be to escape it (with the current approach) because there'll be almost no intersections that reach beyond its borders. :/ And grabbing random books from beyond its borders is as useful as walking into a bookstore and pointing blindfolded at a shelf.

Ah, that might explain some strange behaviour I had. I entered a few fairly disparate books including "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson and was recommended an Asimov compilation, which is not worlds apart. Though I guess if one iteratively reads at "the fringes" and uses this tool they'll gradually move out of the bubble?

Cool tool though, I think I might try doing just that ^

Martin Luther King was quite sexist himself. So feminist literature would antithesis to some of his convictions.

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