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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

#41

Post by ChainOfFools »

b33j0r wrote: post #23
therobots927 wrote: post #4

During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild…

This doesn't resonate with me, but it strangely does because that timeframe just had these weird artifacts. I rejected the conspiracy theories and machismo-empowerment waves of 2016 and 2019, and found myself completely isolated. My conservative friends said "join us" and my liberal friends said I wasn't woke. Kinda thought that was a fever that would pass, but besides my closest friends and family, that restaging wa…

A big contributor to the problem is that the word conspiracy has become too broad to be useful as a test or label anymore.

Everything novel in the world arises as a result of a recursively self-propagating memetic function, one that could be characterized in its earliest phases as a conspiracy: namely that one, two, and then a handful of people settle on a common notion about something universal that needs to change, whether it's for the good or the bad of everyone else, and when successful that idea fans out memetically to others so that it accumulates the necessary physical mass and force required to cause real change.

By the time the impact of this force hits people who have no connection or even awareness of the original initiating group, it feels entirely exogenous and a search for the conspirators, those who triggered the initiation of this wave, is an understandable response especially if the change is unwanted.

As a recent example, one of the cleverest bits of social engineering in the Bitcoin project was the possibly intentional disappearance of its pseudonymous founder, conveniently removing the ability of those so exogenously impacted to identify the origin of the change with any particular individual, greatly complicating accusations of conspiracy. A much earlier example, curiously similar in form, is the origin story of the traditional founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, to whom was even ascribed authorship of that movements own founding "white paper," called the Emerald Tablet.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#42

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

b33j0r wrote: post #23
therobots927 wrote: post #4

During Covid I lived alone after I had moved away from anyone I knew. I didn’t mind it too much but one of the effects was that I fell down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Looking back on it I find it hard to understand what my thought process was. On one hand it makes sense but on the other it doesn’t anymore (because I don’t believe in it). Without anyone else around you can talk yourself into believing some pretty wild…

This doesn't resonate with me, but it strangely does because that timeframe just had these weird artifacts. I rejected the conspiracy theories and machismo-empowerment waves of 2016 and 2019, and found myself completely isolated. My conservative friends said "join us" and my liberal friends said I wasn't woke. Kinda thought that was a fever that would pass, but besides my closest friends and family, that restaging wa…

Lack of trust in institutions due to economic hardship imo

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#43

Post by Guthur »

So there is no such thing as individuals conspiring to achieve a goal; colonisation wasn't a thing, national socialism was just some random frat parties, communism was just a book club.

The problem is assuming that everything is a conspiracy just as much as nothing is a conspiracy.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#44

Post by rig666 »

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.

This is definitely true. I find there's a certain irony in society that we condemn people who aren't sceptical of anything until they are then we condemn them again.

Some of the worlds greatest thinkers and innovators suffered social execution from their peers and were deeply depressed.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#45

Post by dyauspitr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17
dyauspitr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the insecurity of being alone forces people to find something that makes them feel like they are not “sheep” and thus provide some modicum of validation for their existence. When you’re alone, you can also be as wild and wacky as you want because there’s no one to push back against it.

> 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…

Maybe but that perspective is more grounded and respectable. I think it’s cheaper, self serving and more pathetic like I postulated.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#46

Post by jojobas »

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.

"Randomly following people creates conspiracy paranoia".

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#47

Post by ikawe »

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?

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#49

Post by tasty_freeze »

krapp wrote: post #30
buildsjets wrote: post #24

Dale Gribble’s close friends Hank, Bill, and Boomhauer exist as a counterpoint to this argument.

They don't actually exist, they're cartoons. They can't provide a counterpoint to arguments about the real world.

It was a joke.

Re: Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

#50

Post by roenxi »

nsguy wrote: post #35
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…

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…

> 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 and they tend to not, in reality, refer to much science.

> If you look at vaccines ... they don't trust experts or scientists.

My mother just caught COVID last week. I was told - by people confidently claiming to speak for experts - that this wouldn't happen after she and the rest of the population were vaccinated because the spread would cease. I personally doubt the experts actually said that because they tend to be accurate in their field of expertise but good luck with that perspective around the time of the vaccine mandates.

I suspect even more than lack of trust that the issue is experts are so rare in politics that people don't recognise them when they do turn up. There are a lot of unexperts playing pretend on such topics and expert opinions are subject to misrepresentation.

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