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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

#71

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #68

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.

The submission has actually been flagged by undercover FBI sock puppets who want to disappear this kind of content. At least this thought just crossed my mind, so it has to be true. It's an attmept to stop us from discssing the matter. They could've just deleted this entire thread but obviously that would have been too obvious, so they do it the sneaky way. /s

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#72

Post by JumpCrisscross »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #38
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” It’s one deeper. It’s the anxiety of confronting the fact that nobody is in charge, there isn’t a secret cabal pulling the strings, it’s a bunch of competing, chaotic forces that you’re caught—somewhat meaninglessly—in the middle of. Replacing that with a puppeteer, even a horrible one, is relieving. (The fa…

Like the IDF? (Someone said that's who this account belongs to.) Also, did anyone ever tell you that you write like https://youtu.be/0s4sIY3bYEE sounds?

> Like the IDF? (Someone said that's who this account belongs to.)

We all live many apparent lives on the Internet. You’ve been on HN long enough, I’m sure, to have seen that. (My favourite was being accused of mind control. My least: someone decrying my Americanness, which as a naturalised immigrant was an unexpected sore spot.)

As an aside, it is somewhat fascinating seeing how online debate parameterises in this bipolar manner. My pet war is Ukraine, and I can remember polarising what I saw through a pro/anti lens.

> did anyone ever tell you that you write like [Mr. House] sounds?

No.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#73

Post by rnimmer »

crazydoggers wrote: post #65
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.

paranoia and conspiratorial thinking does not lend itself to trusting others, so could go either way. e.g. paranoid people do not feel safe getting close with people.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#74

Post by roenxi »

nsguy wrote: post #67
roenxi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That is a bold claim you might want to walk away from. 3 posts ago you were holding up vaccine conspiracy theorists as people who, and I quote, "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. They don't trust experts or scientists.".

Now a few posts later you're suggesting that That the public health officials aren't experts in public health and that their policies were not based on settled science.

When you are insulting a large group of people who's position was, basically, "we don't think public health officials are doing a good job, we aren't satisfied with the evidence you're showing us and we want freedom to make our own decisions" it is probably a mistake to suggest that the public health officials were doing a bad job, often not experts and caught lying with the purpose of stopping people acting in their own best interests. It makes the conspiracy-minded theorists seem pretty reasonable.

Of course in the pandemic, this is the point where people who were claiming to be following science bought up the fact that the vaccine was certain to stop transmission of COVID and it was basically advocating in favour of murder to say otherwise. Turns out that was not the case so they've had to stop doing that.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#75

Post by anal_reactor »

polemic wrote: post #36
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 is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.

The only difference between a genius observation and a conspiracy theory is whether it turns out to be true or not.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#76

Post by koonsolo »

anal_reactor wrote: post #75
polemic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one of the possibilities that are highlighted in the abstract, Amoung other theories, including that lonely individuals seek friendship within conspiracy communities. Humans are very good at post-hoc rationalisation.

The only difference between a genius observation and a conspiracy theory is whether it turns out to be true or not.

To be fair, most conspiracy theories are already proven obviously false.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#77

Post by koonsolo »

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…

Very insightful comment. Do you also came across info on how to pull these people (mostly older) out of it?

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#78

Post by incomingpain »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #68

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.

Looking at comments:

"Kind of a way of turning something obvious on its head and painting it as a negative."

"This research smells so bad. It does not read as professional science at all."

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

"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. "

Yep, all 4 i agree with. They all have similar foundations of complaint. That the quality of this study is nowhere near good. Therefore flaggable.

This isn't really a scientific study, it's a political statement. They went in looking for a conclusion and fit their data to it.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#79

Post by tim333 »

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?

I thought the first example they gave:

>Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic

was maybe ironic. Listening to the people at the start who said it was likely a lab screw up rather than dismissing them as conspiracy theorists might have led to better efforts to contain it.

(for those interested here's the then head of the US CDC talking about being blocked from going over to help contain it and similar things https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119)

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#80

Post by Molitor5901 »

The study parameters could use some improvement. People who are lonely have smaller worlds, and less access to social information. It's only a conspiracy worldview according to the observer, but to that lonely person, it's what they know. Something feels disrespectful about the analysis in this study but I can't put my finger on it.
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