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Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

phys.org

211–220 of 245 posts

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#211
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety. And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.

> If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety Wide gulf between “people that share the same values and ideas as you” and Nazis.

Wide gulf between "far right" and Nazis.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#212

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

Most of the “lonlieness” epidemic is really an epidemic of young men not getting laid and not getting married. Simple as.

It seems salient to ask the follow up question of "Why aren't men getting laid and/or married?" Actually finding the root cause may be much less simple. Your response seems as hand wavy to me as saying "Most of the loneliness epidemic is really an epidemic of people feeling lonely"

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#213
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? I suspect that you've hit the nail on the head. It would also be interesting to see numbers on churn. How long do these many close friendships last? Do they last longer than before? Or, more likely, less long?

Boils down to the basics of proper science - how does one measure/quantify close friends?

Would they help you move a sofa bed into an upstairs room without hesitation?

That's my criteria anyways...

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#214
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT: As someone in the same camp, does anyone have any recommendations on where would be best to start?

You can start with his recent Russian apologia where he blames the U.S. and Ukraine for forcing Russia to invade Ukraine. That might provide some context when you read one of his books.

Chomsky did so much good in his past but when leftism comes up he becomes stupid. He only realized the Khmer Rouge and pol pot were evil far far far after the rest of the world did. Anti-authoritarian leftists getting baited into supporting authoritarian fake leftists: name a better combo.

Chomsky needs to STFU about politics and go back to linguistics - though he’s not popular in linguistics right now either.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#215
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? I suspect that you've hit the nail on the head. It would also be interesting to see numbers on churn. How long do these many close friendships last? Do they last longer than before? Or, more likely, less long?

I think longer is… possible, at least? The internet has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from elementary school. I’m, unfortunately, approaching 40 more quickly than I’d like, so these are around 30 year friendships. Although, I’ve also got some college friends that I’d consider close. So that’s more like 15 years. Also online mostly at this point.

We move a lot more than we used to. Not so long ago you generally didn't need internet to keep in touch because 50 years later your childhood friend would still live 10km away

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT: As someone in the same camp, does anyone have any recommendations on where would be best to start?

The Chomsky-Foucalt debate is a classic [0], as is Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent [1]. [0]: https://youtu.be/eF9BtrX0YEE [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

The sad part is that these days Foucault is on the same tier as Chomsky in regards to their quality as scholars - and Foucault is a pseudoscientific charlatan grifter.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#217
post #89

I noticed this when I studied abroad in the Netherlands — a highly educated, slightly more digitalized country than my own. Politics there splintered into micro-parties, each “hardly exchanging between bubbles,” as the study puts it. First impressions were warm, but dates always ended with splitting the bill. Friend groups felt just as closed off, except for Dutchies who had just as me lived abroad before, learned to…

When I was in Amsterdam I was with a group of acquaintances of a friend who lived there. One of them offered me an extra piece of pizza they had when I showed up. When the bill came, they asked me for the exact percentage of the bill that that piece of pizza cost. First time experiencing something like that. I also offered to buy several people a drink while I was there. This was received every time with suspicion an…

Nordic social norms like this get made fun of all the time by westerners and southern Europeans. A lot of people will take the crappy socioeconomic situations of non Nordic countries just so that they can have warm relations with their families and a culture that doesn’t hate loud noises.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) How involved they are in my life - are they people I turn to when I'm facing a problem, do they turn to me when facing their own problems? Do we have frequent deep conversations - not just surface level discuss the weather, sports etc. but stuff that matter. Quantifying this - length of friends…

>> Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) I think this one is interesting. If you saw them daily for 20 years and then transitioned to once a year are they automatically not close friends? Even if they satisfied the other criteria (like you could turn to them when you are facing a serious problem, you have deep conversations on that…

I'd say we need a more analog definition than a binary one.

The term 'close' friend at least to me means close. Either in physicality or depth and regularity of contact.

Only talking to them once a year, even in depth is more like a semi-close friend. They are not there to help you with the day to day issues that you may not even realize you're having.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government propaganda is used to rile people up so that they're willing to kill eachother in war. This is indeed a default throughout history but I don't think it's a good default and we could change it by making and then keeping the Internet a free place.

It doesn't have to be government propaganda, though. It can be everyone with enough money to broadcast, and in the Internet age that is basically everyone. We've spent most of the 20th century honing propaganda techniques to the point where its potency is like a nuke compared to a dynamite stick. And then we've spent most of the 21st century so far making that nuke cheap and easily available to everyone. I'm very pro…

Speech is not comparable to nukes. Not even close.

I don't want everyone building nukes in their garage because nukes kill people en masse in an instant, and I cannot counteract the effects of someone else's nuke by setting off my own nuke.

People want the government to do their work for them. But you can't expect someone else to advocate for your interests automatically. The only relationship where that happens reliably on a regular basis is that of a baby and a mother. The government is not your mother. The government's policies are the result of the intellectual output of its citizens in a democratic society. You are supposed to control it as a citizen, to serve the interest of yourself and other citizens. It is not an entity that you can delegate decision making to and expect no consequences down the line.

If you think someone else's ideas are wrong, put forward your own. I don't think we should ban propaganda, as that would require a central authority to determine what info is/isn't propaganda and thereby creating propaganda in the process. I think we should ban the mechanisms that encourage the formation and snowballing of intellectually/ideologically homogenous groups on the Internet, thereby making it a hostile environment for propaganda and similar heuristics in general, so that the best ideas may thrive in dynamic competition.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#220
post #57

The study linked at the beginning of this article, and the two listed under "More information" at the bottom all take me to a page with the error "DOI Not Found" Given that the main (only significant) fact cited in the article goes against everything else I've read, I would like to see the actual study and how it came to the conclusion that the number of close friends has doubled. Here are some sources that appear to…

This might be it? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1004008107

That's dated July 19, 2010
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