> Lonelier individuals were also more likely to use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities and to describe them in ways that were not typical for their group.
How is that surprising? If they are lonely, they are not part of the group and intergroup communication (including shared values, opinions, gossip etc).
The text fails to define "unusual" in a meaningful way other than "not part of the majority". It's like saying "we found that the minority tends to vote differently than the majority".
Very unsurprising but perhaps still valid research that needs to be done to be known. A better conclusion might have been: increasing socialisation increases homogeneity of language use.
Indeed, I struggle to even imagine what "use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities" even means! Maybe like using "musician" rather than "artist" or some other combination?
edit: Ok, I've read through the paper, and still have no idea. Apparently the responses to questions were compared as semantic vectors using cosine similarity in Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder space. Or something lol.
"hello fellow Taylor Swift fans"
Read the whole article wondering how lonely people think differently.
But I now understand that it is just that: different. They do not conform to what the norm thinks.
Seen in that light: lonely people are lonely because they are weird. Right. Good to know.
I was a standup comedian in the 1980s and was occasionally asked why “my people” were so funny, and it’s odd because there are a lot of things that are funny about us, but not the real answer to this one. We had to be, for thousands of years, or we died. If we had humorless dumb ones (and we do, but not as many, again, because of what happened to them, as well as quite a number of our best) they didn’t do as well.
I was also a clinical psychologist for a few years, and could say more on this, but some other time.
Jewish humor, gay humor, autistic humor… they’re all more similar than they are different. You learn, from atypical experience, to see everything one degree off and you have a story that people will listen to and eventually they might even like you. You see things three degrees off and you shut up so no one else knows. You get six degrees off and even you don’t know, but everyone else does.
As they say, tragedy (or alternatively, adversity) plus time equals comedy.
Lonely people are also weird because they are lonely (and don't get the calibration from human interaction).
The article does not claim this nor support the claim. It merely says that loneliness is associated with being "weird". No causality.
It's possible to reverse this and infer the more mainstream your thoughts of these celebrities, the more popular you are / will be.
Well, exactly. Parents poster is pointing out that the cause is ambiguous. Actually, technically, they are attributing causality to the opposite direction, but in practice, I'd say it gets the point across.
My intuition is that it goes both ways and it's a feedback loop/downward spiral.
So they tested disconnected individuals against connected individuals in the perception of socially constructed objects (celebrities). And they found that people who don't socialise much don't share that socially constructed perception. What else did they expect? Seems quite obvious.
> The second study was an online survey conducted with 923 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, whose average age was 40 years.
So psychology is now the study of mice, college freshman, and mechanical Turks? I have not seen this before.
It is very common. There are whole lines of research on dealing with the shortcomings of using mturk this way.
Interesting premise but did this article _feel_ off to anyone else? Maybe it was me , but did it seem a bit redundant while also not saying a whole lot?
Feels like fancy neuroimaging being used to scientifically justify excluding people who don't conform to mainstream social norms. Classic case of using tech to medicalize being different. Also kind of makes sense from an evolutionary psych perspective - groups have always tried to identify and push out "others" for survival. But maybe in 2024 we can do better than using million-dollar brain scanners to shame people who see the world (oh sorry, “famous” people) differently?
Do you guys know who the most popular artists of our time are?
Reading this article and its mention of celebrities I was like "Who are today's celebrities anyhow?"? And typed
most popular artists 2024
into Google. It came back with:
Taylor Swift
The Weeknd
Lady Gaga
Drake
Karol G
Bruno Mars
Beyoncé
Eminem
Charli XCX
Harry Styles
I have heard 8 of the 10 names before. Never heard about "Karol G" and "Charli XCX".
I can only think of one song performed by one of them: "Paparazzi" by Lady Gaga.
Does that make me very disconnected with today's culture?
These artists are definitely popular, but I doubt they are the most popular. The list doesn't fully match up with the most streamed artists list on Spotify, for example.
I've heard of 7/10; I couldn't name one work of art by any of them except for Lady Gaga and Eminem. Pop culture is terrible and I avoid it as much as possible. I'm lonely btw. ;)
Meanwhile I don’t listen to anyone on that list except for Charli XCX because I arrived at her music from a rave/hyperpop background and then became a stan with her last album Crash in 2022.
I was tired of BRAT though about 2 weeks after release because I listened to the teasers so much… then it blew up and even attached itself to VP Harris…
There are many cultures. You’re on HN, so my guess is you’re connected with today’s hacker culture. I’ve heard of 6 of those names, but can’t name any song from any of them. It just means I have my own interests.
I don’t listen to 8/10 of these musicians, but I’ve heard of all of them except for Karol G. So yeah; I’d say you are very disconnected.
I thought they were saying they _had_ heard of 8 in 10? Strangely Karol G was also new to me. I'll resist searching for the name - I enjoy not knowing things sometimes.
People are strange when you’re a stranger.
> Loneliness corresponded with idiosyncratic [unusual, unique] neural representations of celebrities as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities
must be the best argument to date for being more lonely.
Could mean the opposite of what you might think. I imagine the mean perception of Zuck is weirdo, Bieber is 'no clue, I'm not a teen girl' and so on.
People who don't interact a lot with other people. Hrrm.
It would be really weird if they thought and talked in accordance with the current social pablum.
So many words used to convey so little meaning, what a waste of time. How do they think differently about celebrities, why, and is it a bad thing in and of itself?
I'm disgusted that they took celebrity gossip as reference point for healthy social behavior.
I don't think the article says that, does it?
This is a bullshit study. It is entirely based on trying to confirm a priori assumptions about ”lonely” people, who are seen by authors as pathologically abnormal.
> Interestingly, the study also revealed a particularly strong consensus among participants regarding the neural representations of Justin Bieber compared to the other four celebrities.
is this academic speak for “yeah…… that guy…… nope.”?
> Lonelier individuals were also more likely to use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities and to describe them in ways that were not typical for their group.
How is that surprising? If they are lonely, they are not part of the group and intergroup communication (including shared values, opinions, gossip etc).
The text fails to define "unusual" in a meaningful way other than "not part of the majority". It's like saying "we found that the minority tends to vote differently than the majority".
Very unsurprising but perhaps still valid research that needs to be done to be known. A better conclusion might have been: increasing socialisation increases homogeneity of language use.
Indeed, I struggle to even imagine what "use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities" even means! Maybe like using "musician" rather than "artist" or some other combination?
edit: Ok, I've read through the paper, and still have no idea. Apparently the responses to questions were compared as semantic vectors using cosine similarity in Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder space. Or something lol.
"hello fellow Taylor Swift fans"
Read the whole article wondering how lonely people think differently.
But I now understand that it is just that: different. They do not conform to what the norm thinks.
Seen in that light: lonely people are lonely because they are weird. Right. Good to know.
I was a standup comedian in the 1980s and was occasionally asked why “my people” were so funny, and it’s odd because there are a lot of things that are funny about us, but not the real answer to this one. We had to be, for thousands of years, or we died. If we had humorless dumb ones (and we do, but not as many, again, because of what happened to them, as well as quite a number of our best) they didn’t do as well.
I was also a clinical psychologist for a few years, and could say more on this, but some other time.
Jewish humor, gay humor, autistic humor… they’re all more similar than they are different. You learn, from atypical experience, to see everything one degree off and you have a story that people will listen to and eventually they might even like you. You see things three degrees off and you shut up so no one else knows. You get six degrees off and even you don’t know, but everyone else does.
As they say, tragedy (or alternatively, adversity) plus time equals comedy.
Lonely people are also weird because they are lonely (and don't get the calibration from human interaction).
The article does not claim this nor support the claim. It merely says that loneliness is associated with being "weird". No causality.
It's possible to reverse this and infer the more mainstream your thoughts of these celebrities, the more popular you are / will be.
Well, exactly. Parents poster is pointing out that the cause is ambiguous. Actually, technically, they are attributing causality to the opposite direction, but in practice, I'd say it gets the point across.
My intuition is that it goes both ways and it's a feedback loop/downward spiral.
So they tested disconnected individuals against connected individuals in the perception of socially constructed objects (celebrities). And they found that people who don't socialise much don't share that socially constructed perception. What else did they expect? Seems quite obvious.
> The second study was an online survey conducted with 923 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, whose average age was 40 years.
So psychology is now the study of mice, college freshman, and mechanical Turks? I have not seen this before.
It is very common. There are whole lines of research on dealing with the shortcomings of using mturk this way.
e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
Interesting premise but did this article _feel_ off to anyone else? Maybe it was me , but did it seem a bit redundant while also not saying a whole lot?
Feels like fancy neuroimaging being used to scientifically justify excluding people who don't conform to mainstream social norms. Classic case of using tech to medicalize being different. Also kind of makes sense from an evolutionary psych perspective - groups have always tried to identify and push out "others" for survival. But maybe in 2024 we can do better than using million-dollar brain scanners to shame people who see the world (oh sorry, “famous” people) differently?
Do you guys know who the most popular artists of our time are?
Reading this article and its mention of celebrities I was like "Who are today's celebrities anyhow?"? And typed
into Google. It came back with: I have heard 8 of the 10 names before. Never heard about "Karol G" and "Charli XCX".I can only think of one song performed by one of them: "Paparazzi" by Lady Gaga.
Does that make me very disconnected with today's culture?
These artists are definitely popular, but I doubt they are the most popular. The list doesn't fully match up with the most streamed artists list on Spotify, for example.
I've heard of 7/10; I couldn't name one work of art by any of them except for Lady Gaga and Eminem. Pop culture is terrible and I avoid it as much as possible. I'm lonely btw. ;)
Meanwhile I don’t listen to anyone on that list except for Charli XCX because I arrived at her music from a rave/hyperpop background and then became a stan with her last album Crash in 2022.
I was tired of BRAT though about 2 weeks after release because I listened to the teasers so much… then it blew up and even attached itself to VP Harris…
There are many cultures. You’re on HN, so my guess is you’re connected with today’s hacker culture. I’ve heard of 6 of those names, but can’t name any song from any of them. It just means I have my own interests.
I don’t listen to 8/10 of these musicians, but I’ve heard of all of them except for Karol G. So yeah; I’d say you are very disconnected.
I thought they were saying they _had_ heard of 8 in 10? Strangely Karol G was also new to me. I'll resist searching for the name - I enjoy not knowing things sometimes.
People are strange when you’re a stranger.
> Loneliness corresponded with idiosyncratic [unusual, unique] neural representations of celebrities as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities
must be the best argument to date for being more lonely.
Could mean the opposite of what you might think. I imagine the mean perception of Zuck is weirdo, Bieber is 'no clue, I'm not a teen girl' and so on.
People who don't interact a lot with other people. Hrrm.
It would be really weird if they thought and talked in accordance with the current social pablum.
So many words used to convey so little meaning, what a waste of time. How do they think differently about celebrities, why, and is it a bad thing in and of itself?
I'm disgusted that they took celebrity gossip as reference point for healthy social behavior.
I don't think the article says that, does it?
This is a bullshit study. It is entirely based on trying to confirm a priori assumptions about ”lonely” people, who are seen by authors as pathologically abnormal.
> Interestingly, the study also revealed a particularly strong consensus among participants regarding the neural representations of Justin Bieber compared to the other four celebrities.
is this academic speak for “yeah…… that guy…… nope.”?