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Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

nature.com

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Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#61

Post by roenxi »

nsguy wrote: post #59
roenxi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. Yeah but you're basically describing ideologues here. This is how the vast majority of political activists approach the world where, last time I checked, parties even pretending to do things by scientific consensus are rare…

This is partly why I said science isn't truth. Science evolves. And the virus evolved. I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some t…

You'd be unwelcome on a lot of social media platforms back in 2020-2021 for those vaccine conspiracies you're spreading. The issue is, all that was true for the entire pandemic. The science didn't "evolve" on the vaccines, where we ended up was the most likely outcome from the start. The scientists knew that, but the people who trusted experts didn't manage to figure it out. They were too busy panicking to listen to anyone.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#62

Post by nsguy »

HyulianGrader wrote: post #53
nsguy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't actually such a big difference between flat earthers and other conspiracy theories. The common theme is that it's the opposite of science or the scientific process. Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is fla…

[flagged]

9/11 deniers can tell you in great detail how it's impossible for airplanes to have brought down the towers and all sorts of other nonsense. The conspiracy theorists ignore the actual reality while making stuff up. It's not that the other people have never heard of stuff made up and would suddenly change their minds if they have. It's really about what version of reality explains the totality of known facts, and then ofcourse the evaluation of what's fact and what's not using some sort of standard or rational thought process.

What is true is that the sense of trust has been eroded.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#63

Post by krapp »

linearrust wrote: post #58
roenxi wrote: post #16

The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?", because there is a big difference between people who think the world is flat and people who think there is something fishy about, say, the Jeff Epstein saga. In this case we seem to be talking about the conspiracy mentality questionnaire [0]. So they've found a correlation between loneliness and what seems to be a 5 question survey. To me, this says th…

> The question I ask with these studies is "what is a conspiracy?" Everyone here seems to be missing the 'essence' of the study and article. Do these conspiracy theorists influence global pandemic policy? Do flat earther conspiracy theorist affect global climate change policy? That's what the article and the 'study' is ultimately implying. That lonely conspiracy theorist flat earthers are controlling global policy. S…

No one is claiming that "lonely conspiracy theorists living in their mom's basements are secretly controlling the world." But it is obvious that some conspiracy theories such as replacement theory, the trans "groomer" panic and COVID conspiracy theories have become mainstream within certain political demographics. QAnon actively hampers real efforts to combat sex abuse with their phantom fears of leftist sex-slave cabals. People within the Pentagon who believe in alien abductions and Skinwalker Ranch are interfering with legitimate counterintelligence work.

Pretending all conspiracy theorists are just "lonely" and harmless people who have no real effect on the world is simply naive.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#64

Post by Animats »

ikawe wrote: post #47
Animats wrote: post #21

It's hard to tell the real conspiracies from the fake ones. Suggested reading: The Texas GOP 2024 platform.[1] [1] https://texasgop.org/official-documents/#platform

There’s a lotta links to a lotta documents in this world, and this one is a few dozen pages longer than I can quickly peruse. Anything in it you want to highlight?

No. I'd prefer that people read what they actually wrote, without emphasis.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#65

Post by crazydoggers »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #3

“results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almost three decades, from adolescence into midlife (N = 2215).” Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning. The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.

There’s correlation, but not causation. It’s also possible that people who are already conspiracy minded tend to be lonely because those personality traits are off-putting to others.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#66

Post by [deleted] »

mrtesthah wrote: post #55
vitehozonage wrote: post #51

This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all. It is incredibly politicized and permeated with political judgements regarding which worldviews and demographics are 'problematic' to society.

Would you mind citing any specific passage that you perceive to be "incredibly politicized"? Can you cite one of these "political judgments" from the paper?

[deleted]

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#67

Post by nsguy »

roenxi wrote: post #61
nsguy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is partly why I said science isn't truth. Science evolves. And the virus evolved. I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some t…

You'd be unwelcome on a lot of social media platforms back in 2020-2021 for those vaccine conspiracies you're spreading. The issue is, all that was true for the entire pandemic . The science didn't "evolve" on the vaccines, where we ended up was the most likely outcome from the start. The scientists knew that, but the people who trusted experts didn't manage to figure it out. They were too busy panicking to listen to…

I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.

I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.

Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#68

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Why does a submission like this get flagged. One can only guess. Maybe HN users with flagging privileges do not like the conclusions of paper published or summarised in Nature so they flag it in an attmept to stop others from discussing the submission.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#69

Post by sudshekhar »

The term "Conspiracy Theory" itself needs more scrutiny, IMO.

The range of arguments which may be called "conspiracy theories" is far and wide. And the truth about many theories only becomes clear after a lot of time.

What the author might have discovered instead is the tendency of lonely people to seek new belief systems starkly in contrast to the group they feel alienated from.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#70

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

mrtesthah wrote: post #52
bananabiscuit wrote: post #9

Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative. When you are interacting with people, there is pressure to conform to consensus reality, regardless of the merit of that reality. Anybody who goes against the grain, wether they are wrong, or correct and eventually vindicated, first has to face negative social pressure from their peers.

That's not really the mechanism at work here. Lonely people don't turn to conspiracy theorizing because they somehow happen upon "secret knowledge" that, in the absence of any external social pressures, spontaneously becomes apparent to them. Rather, for these lonely people, conspiracy theories are how they project their own unmet emotional needs outward onto the perceived world around them -- as a coping strategy. T…

Thanks for highlighting the role of "secret knowledge" in fringe theories (I say "fringe" not "conspiracy" b/c when you look at the "lost Atlantis" thing it may be just a story (Plato probably thought so?), or a plot by the establishment to gaslight the sheeple, or else something in between—a "true" story about a forgotten civilization that few know of (well actually no, but anyway) and still fewer believe in, for reasons that don't necessarily constitute a conspiracy).

While I'm at it I might just as well recommend David Miano's YouTube channel World of Antiquity, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU to his video "LIES told by Atlantis proponents" (accidentally had this tab open. Coincidendence!??!! I don't think so!).

BTW another red flag that occurs across all these Ancient and/or Alien Civilization fringe theories is that the argumentation of the believers disparages certain groups of people, mostly non-Europeans—"they could've never achieved this level of precision, they were much too primitive".

> move straight from the "thinking" stage [...] into the "knowing" stage

I've seen this time and again, people who talk, argue and act as if it's enough for a thought to cross the mind, and it's already almost taken for granted, accepted as fact.

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