Item — HN Reader

> Lonely individuals tend to think and talk in an unusual way, study finds

That's not really what this article finds... the title is "Loneliness corresponds with neural representations and language use that deviate from shared cultural perceptions", but even that title is too general when it's only talking about a handful of pop-culture celebrities.

And also, remember when a researcher says "loneliness" they mean "self-reported loneliness," I know a lot of people with very little companionship who might insist they are a 0 out of 10 on the loneliness scale.

There's so many different ways to interpret this data:

Perhaps people who are willing to admit they are lonely (usually something that's very mildly frowned upon in my experience) are more willing to break with social norms. Or perhaps having wild takes on reality results in you becoming lonelier. Or perhaps a few outlier individuals really pushed the average. Or perhaps people who are less lonely are generally more knowledgeable/well-informed about these individuals. Etc etc.

2 comments

> And also, remember when a researcher says "loneliness" they mean "self-reported loneliness," I know a lot of people with very little companionship who might insist they are a 0 out of 10 on the loneliness scale.

That seems reasonable. Lonliness is a subjective phenomenon. There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely. There are people who are desperate for interaction and get a lot but who are never satisfied. I can't imagine any other way to measure this than by asking.

But there are also people who believe they are fine alone but are negatively affected by it, and people who have lots of friends and interaction but nonetheless lack connection. People aren't very good at judging their own emotions.

Not having a better way to measure doesn't mean this measure is sufficient.

"People who self identify as lonely" is a different class of people from "people who are negatively affected". It's worth researching both groups. This study happens to be about the former.

> Not having a better way to measure doesn't mean this measure is sufficient.

It necessarily does mean that. Empiricists (such as scientists) must work with the tools with which they are equipped. Sure you're not going to get deductively-true results out of it (true for any scientific field), and certainly psychological findings are on the emphatically less-certain side of the scientific fields, but that doesn't imply that results aren't meaningful.

Granted, scientific reporting is so terrible the hedging the (good) scientists engage in to reflect this uncertainty invariably goes out the window. But c'est la vie.

"There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely."

Yet the difficulty about self-reported degrees of loneliness, is that it doesn’t tell you how resilient a person’s contentedness is. Put that person in a crisis situation, like a suddenly precarious financial situation or a serious illness, and they might feel that they desperately crave human contact and were masking it before.

All of what you mentioned looks like a possible contributing factor, but this one stood out to me:

> Or perhaps people who are less lonely are generally more knowledgeable/well-informed about these individuals.

I'd go as far as saying, people who are less lonely are more interested in those individuals in the first place. Celebrities are social objects. There's nothing inherently interesting in life or personality of any specific celebrity - what makes them interesting is that other people know about them too, so discussing them is a way to bond with others, have fun, etc. Lonely people do less of that, so they have less of a motivation to care about celebrities in the first place.

Yes, from the Discussion section of the paper:

> Prior work even finds that celebrities that generate common ground between strangers are disproportionately discussed in conversation, suggesting shared celebrity knowledge can provide a “foot in the door” to forming ties with others

Heh, I know that studying obvious things is the "bread and butter" of scientific study, but it's still funny to read sometimes...

"Hello, fellow coworkers! How about the local sports team, did you see them play last night?"