Posted by geox 1 day ago
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 genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.
Social media has taken over a lot more of young people's social life than it used to. Parents don't want young people to leave the house and play outside, so kids spend the time online. These patterns may persist into adulthood - hard to say.
We've become a family
We have never met
This is life inside the machine
Give me another hit of dopamine
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?
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.
I dunno. It isn’t well defined I think. We come with built-in accelerators for social interactions, right? It runs some weird proprietary language I guess, the rest of my brain can’t make heads or tails of it.
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 annual meeting because you are comfortable with them, etc)?
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.
That's my criteria anyways...
Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
On the other hand, I can buy all those services on an app for the most part. People I enjoy talking to for hours on end aren't available for $20 anywhere.
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
So I think it’s not about “internet bad” but more about how much harder it is to make ends meet / how much more intense capitalism has become.
Again, friendship takes many forms and there are countless ways to express it. You're judging others for valuing these expressions differently than you do.
Also the loneliness epidemic has been growing worse since the 1990s. There’s a well known book about it called Bowling Alone. COVID made it worse of course but it didn’t start the trend.
The biggest article about the loneliness pandemic was one in the New York times and oh just to happened to mention said book. Countless articles followed on from there. If the book were sound, it would be less sad, but the studies it cites have problems so this is all built on a huge heaping of confirmation bias.
The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical.
There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization.
1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization
2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about
3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth)
4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance
5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals?
6. Several more maybe??
So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
So people simply don't understand 'the other side', but ironically think they do - which is a rather toxic combination. For instance the more news somebody follows, the less accurate their assessments of 'the other side.'
I can't help but wonder if the polarization in the media is deliberate (e.g. foreign state sewing division) or accidental (second order consequence of attention economy) or organic (the claims of the paper, and/or other psychological effects of anonymity, etc.) or maybe all of the above?
And then with every sort of algorithm and feedback mechanism (e.g. upvotes, likes, etc) based on maximizing "engagement" you then get this stuff spreading everywhere and even further drowning out any sort of rational discussion. So people who regularly follow it are going to be living in some sort of alt-reality all the while convinced that they are the most informed about the latest happenings in the world.
Polarization could instead be because there are fundamental differences in how people see the world and what is right. And now that we've tangled ourselves through all the wars imaginable to dispel the old division lines, this is what we're left with. This is what we have, now that information has become available for the masses; the real differences which split people. Not based on phony dividers of the past.
Polarization also means that if you disagree with the ideology of your family or of your village, you have millions of friends on a national or international level who think like you, instead of being ostracized for life.
That said, 3) I think possibly best explains both: the increase in average number of friends due to influencer dynamics skewing the distribution, and the increase in polarization due to the tactics in social media.
However there seems to be no chance it is a durable or reproducible link, as it depends on the novelty of polarization techniques which wear over time and become known and integrated in education, reducing their effectiveness
And reported loneliness does not always imply an absence of close friends, although I'd agree that that is a major factor.
Seems like median would be the much more relavent measure for this.
I can't find more information on the actual distribution, but I think looking at the _average_ number of close friendships is a red flag. It's perfectly possible for some social groups to be growing, while others are shrinking.
Just because Jack and Jill know a bunch of details about each others' lives owing to facebook updates or group chats, that doesn't necessarily mean they share a strong connection, at least not in the traditional sense. But I suspect they might still feel a certain connection and belonging to each other.
It used to require frequent, active, quality communication to know someone well. Now it just requires a few clicks.
This has to be it. I’ve got guys I would die for, and I don’t know their birthdays.
Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody.
I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones
I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
did it dry in the end?
Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble.
It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
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.
Wide gulf between “people that share the same values and ideas as you” and Nazis.
Not really, and I say this with genuine surprise.
The folks who support January 6th are also incredibly quick to support ignoring courts, suspending habeus, concentration camps (sorry, extrajudicial domestic detention explicitly based on probable cause that begins and ends with race, followed by attempted exfiltration from protection from the law), and, like, straight up admitting to revering Nazis [1][2].
Democracy works with left- and right-wing elements because there is a lot of heterogeneity in those sets. That makes compromise possible. Far left and far right groups across history are remarkably similar in their policies, messaging and even colour schemes for reasons I don’t get. (There is autocorrelation due to the heavy lifting homage does in their branding, of course, but why do the far right and left always embrace tariffs and trade wars? Like, going back to the Roman Republic.) This uniformity and quasi-religious zeal basically makes them poisons to democracy.
The moment someone is arguing why their far right position is actually quite different from being Nazi (or far left from its worst elements), you’ve already lost.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2y94xe397o
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-...
It had some meaning maybe 10 years ago but now it's washed out terminology. Keep thinking that you're surrounded by nazis, if it keeps you warm though.
But I intentionally picked example that makes it clear that shared values are necessary for that trust. You may have differences on the edges, but it wont work without them.
I feel like GP was probably not referring to the latter.
However, what strikes me as interesting: Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Because I have a feeling, many people don't. Why do I think that? I recently read on Planet Debian: "Conservatives tend to be criminals". That sentences struck me as the core of the problem. People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis". There is a clear difference, but some politically active people seem to fail to see that.
That was not always true and I hope it will not remain true. But speaking at this specific time in history, this fact represents a genuine threat to life and liberty.
The difference between right and far right is, in a nutshell, endorsement of insurrection and militarism.
The GOP was a right-wing party. MAGA is bona fide far right. There are plenty of conservatives (or pissed-off idiots) who voted for Trump but aren’t MAGA. There are also lots of folks who believe in MAGA to the core. The latter are far right, probably fascists.
> democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy
It’s a multidimensional pendulum. There is no natural partisan swing to group dynamics; it’s why parties fail and are remade or replaced, even in two-party systems.
Also, Democrats should embrace Trump’s precedents next cycle. But the results will uglier than before for those on the other side. (To port prior policy goals, you’d cancel student debts by literally shredding the documents, thereby undermining the government’s ability to collect even if it wants to. And you’d pursue environmental policy by dismantling coal power plants and mines. The courts may get mad later. But it wouldn’t be rebuilt.)
Come on, a lot of people in MAGA outright support J6. That is the dividing line between far right and right.
If you want to put that the dividing line between right and far-right as militantism for today then that makes sense. But the MAGA movement hasn't been using militant tactics, and they'd be more alt-right than far-right under that standard. They've been pretty consistent at working to win power through increasing their vote share and base of popular support. They've been dumping vast amounts of time, money and effort into it.
For the sake of argument, say that J6 riot was a planned thing. Compare the logistic efforts to get a crowd settled at a major Trump rally to the organisational support that resulted in an insurrection with less than 100 armed people. The oomph just isn't there.
Some on the right are far right, some are not. Many people on the right will prefer far right over center and vote accordingly. They just do not like the aesthetic and historical associations.
> Because I have a feeling, many people don't.
That is because right radicalized itself much more then left. And moderate right spend too much time excusing, enabling to and defending far right then by anything else. They loved to pretend far right does not exist, actually, until it turned out they ended up undistinguishable.
> People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis"
Problem is that "conservative values" is more of an euphemism that sounds good when you want to pretend a group of people have much better motivations then they actually have. That is how it was used for over a decade now. People with conservative values rarely object to far right values, but they straight up hate the center (which they claim to be practically communists).
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
And the various articles found seem to agree. The GP claims to have combined 30 surveys. I wonder if they wound-up with one of those statistical paradoxes where a combining of data sets points to something different from each individual data set. But something probably isn't true 'cause the individuals sets are well curated and the combination isn't.
I don't think I have had an IRL friend let alone a close one for 20+ years. So since my mid 20's
Happy for you all though!
This seems like a hot-take. IMHO one does not and cannot cure loneliness by having more online friends.
Example: long-distance relationships vs. in-person. My wife and I started off as long distance before moving to the same city together. Obviously we established a very real relationship digitally, but it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself, and the real-world date nights and so on are so much deeper and richer than Facetime calls.
What most people describe as Loneliness is a specific form of loneliness that represents the degree of disconnection they feel from others. When you don't feel seen and heard in a friendship, you are more likely to feel alone. More people "proving" they don't want to know you or see you, reinforces the idea.
Having more shallow friends is actually much more isolating than having fewer deep friends.
I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
Yes. People nowadays spent 8 hours per day chatting to someone online and they call it close friend even if they never met in real life.
Also, people nowadays are notorious for being unable to have friendship that is not a [insert activity here] buddy.
NOTE: I did NOT read the article.
If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend.
We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
Related:
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...
In my view, if someone is reading text for stuff they disagree on that's already a win. It's better than the default.
Which I can't necessarily argue is a wrong thought process to follow. I used to be able to pretend that the average person on the right was merely a brainwashed idiot. Now, with the internet and rise of fascism, I have to contend with the fact that they know they're brainwashed idiots and are happy about it.
The article that sticks in my mind is "Internet of Beefs": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ - ironically I have vague memories of the author being on the wrong side of various beefs, but the description of the phenomenon is spot-on.
Some corners of bluesky are resisting this with trying to form the habit of aggresive blocking of clickbait and anyone who comes into your mentions to beef. But overall it's gone horribly mainstream, everyone is just promoting themselves by whom they have beef with.
It's tough on the internet being a skeptic or generally thoughtful about the world. It's not even worth debunking stuff anymore. Much healthier to not engage entirely.
It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment.
The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address this was Community Notes on X.
Curious for the source? To my recollection, Chomsky talked about distraction, i.e. repurposing attention. OP is talking about the pool of attention as a whole drying up (versus being misdirected).
I think you have to start with his criticism of Skinner (papers that criticize other papers are often the best and the most informative ones) and his theory of UG, then Everett's claim and Chomsky's rebuttal (sightly weak, but interesting to understand his views on UG). I know UG has been rebuilt (basically his theory was falsifiable, was falsified on the field, then UG people worked on another similar theory that corrected some mistakes), but it was post 2011 and i stopped followed humanities around that time, and never got back into linguistics, so you might want to read about that.
[0] Something similar happened in France with Furet, and the fact that Furet's school of thought still somewhat exist and the debate lasted decades on polite terms without ad hominem is a compliment to historian's values and practice. Saying "critical thinking" and running away from correct criticism is shameful.
Chomsky needs to STFU about politics and go back to linguistics - though he’s not popular in linguistics right now either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial
https://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/ (Chomsky defending the decision to write a foreword for a book denying the Rwandan genocide)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair (Chomsky signed a petition supporting a Holocaust denier he felt had been mistreated)
Regarding Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge coalition was pushed out in 1979 and the US began arming the KR coalition, providing UN support for it etc. You would think the US and Reagan arming the Khmer Rouge coalition more heinous, if you don't like them, than Chomsky saying the US should not bomb Cambodia in the 1970s etc.
The UN and every human rights organization in the world says the US has been and is involved in a genocide in Gaza. The denial of this in the US has been incredible, but now that the first stage is done the Press is more forthcoming about it. Something Chonsky opposed, the establishment supported.
> If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? > For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)?
... are not quite as applicable to left-wing populism (for the latter --- at least, at the surface). post-colonial, _left-wing_ populism tended to be of international character, or at least of wider appeal than the nation (e.g., nasser). the "distrust of central banking" is of wildly unique impetuses for left- vs. right-wing populism.
the common-sense point is quite poignant, at least for me in the u.s., where each party paints their own solutions as explicitly "common-sense", for solutions as unique as harsh border control ("solutions") vs. city-owned grocery stores & free childcare.
there are certainly issues i imagine i don't hold the "elite" view on. many people don't consider the "elite" view at all --- anti-punitive justice, for example, is rejected for particular types of crimes, despite provenly worse outcomes if we simply punish these crimes. the rise of anti-intellectualism doesn't help :D
But increased polarization around the world isn't because of this. There's the typical environmental factors: an increase in changes (or challenges) to traditional values increases polarization; an influx of migrants increases polarization. But then there's also social media, where mastery of "engagement" by businesses for profit has been adopted by political groups looking to sow division to reap the benefits of polarization (an easier grip on power). The rapid rise of polarization is a combination of both.
It's nothing new of course, political/ideological groups have been doing this forever. We just have far more advanced tools with which to polarize.
I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.
Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.
That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
Now there are big social media mobs. The number of independently-thinking entities have gone down drastically over the past 2 decades. We're ranking, filtering, and moderating ourselves into authoritarian governments ran by Internet echo chamber mobs.
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-free-speech in general and I don't think censorship is a solution, but in order to argue for free speech in good faith we have to acknowledge the problem. The reason why people want government to censor is, in many cases, the same reason why they want government to crack down on someone who is building a nuke in their garage (but are okay with the government itself having the same nuke).
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.
In any case, I don't think moderation isn't a factor, because moderation is for commenters. Something like 90% of people just lurk. And that's where ads, influencers, comments, and everything else, are targeted.
How can we get more people viewing TikToks, or YouTube Shorts? How can we get more people to sub to our Patreon? How can we get more followers, or likes? This has nothing to do with moderation. It's the math of "what can we post that will make people "engage" with their eyeballs and their clicks?" That's what matters. Partly because eyeballs equal ad dollars; but also because eyeballs equal influence. The science of manipulation is getting you to see what I want you to see, and you coming back for more. The more you come back, the more you're part of my in-group.
Another example is astroturfing. I can't remember if it started for commercial or political gain, but the point is the same. Post some fake shit to make people believe there's a grassroots opinion, in order to get them to back it, with them assuming it's really a grassroots movement. Whether you're Vladimir Putin or DuPont, you benefit the same way: manipulation of public perception, through the science of social media disinformation.
When I say "group", I don't mean an actual Facebook group or subreddit (it could be, though). I mean a group of intellectually/ideologically homogenous people. They may be distributed across many subreddits and comment sections. Forums/subreddits/servers can be separate entities in form, but not in substance. Two Discord servers that moderate content the same way are the same group in this context.
Moderation is not just for posters. It also affects lurking viewers because it changes what they will see. If a post is deleted by a moderator, then that moderator has decided for the viewers what they can and cannot see.
Up/down voting (aka likes/dislikes) is a hidden form of moderation as well. People's likes and dislikes are deciding what other people are more likely to see because upvoted posts get to the top of the feed. Recommendation and ranking algorithms do the same thing.
I'm not making a statement about who has nobler goals, be it the ad companies or Putin or the US gov or the people here on HN. I'm saying that the concept of centralized moderation on the Internet is itself the problem. Regardless of what or whose goals these tools serve, they're bad because they coagulate people into intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups, and there is no group size limit due to the practically infinite connectivity of the Internet. This will create nasty real-world consequences in the long run. But we can defuse this by moving all moderation and ranking to the client-side.
You can see it in small friend group Discords vs large public ones
Social Media getting big → larger perceived friend groups
Social Media getting big → more polarisation
larger friend groups → more polarisation
People say things on social media they wouldn't say directly to your face. It's normal to be shy in front of real people and shyness is a social feature not a bug. Even those who don't shy away from taboo topics, are more likely to be convincing in real life than with text.
Less shyness = more differences of opinion expressed
More convincing = less division
Social Media getting big → larger perceived friend groups
Social Media getting big OR
screen time increasing OR
phones preferencing more limited forms of communication OR
… → more polarization
It could be due to a change in the PEW polling or the polling questions staying the same but the definition of terms shifting over time which caused the perceived increase in polarization. Or even the researchers’ definition of polarization which was stated as an increase in people stably identifying as either liberal or conservative. It is worth noting the article did say the PEW polling is supposed to be a stable source of data.
I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
But, how is moving from a circle of 2 close friends to a circle of 4 close friends a significant enough jump to "fuel polarization" on a societal level? There's also a 10-year gap between USA (and other countries' data points too) that covers the span of the whole alleged "aligned trend". It feels a little bit like the authors just went "Look! Two data trends moving in the same direction! Causal?!"
More seriously, I would love to see a much deeper dive on:
- Technological and associated psychological trends that might be causing greater polarisation (plenty of existing data here)
- How an increase in close friends can co-exist with an apparent loneliness epidemic (plenty of existing data here too)
You add 2 close friends and to fit them in, axe 10 weaker ones.
I did this after Covid. Consciously started declining invitations from acquaintances, and instead making time and travel to see close friends. Would never go back.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
Funny how humans evolved such to have such a predilection for finding these few charismatic people to uplift and throw their whole lot behind damned any other logic. While also having a small subset of people preferring to take the reins themselves and be the charismatic leader either for good or ill intent. And it has been that way in our species since long before recorded history.
Almost like queen bee to worker bee dynamics in terms of population structure but perhaps less rigid. The mutation rate of charismatic leaders vs followers happens to be “just right” by some mechanism. Too many of either case and group dynamics fall apart.
If we think of the whole population as a meta organism up a few levels of abstraction from the genetic level, but still bound by its laws generally, some mechanism must have evolved to carefully regulate dosage of these varying neurotypes in the population much like how genes evolved downstream, upstream, or midstream dosage control mechanisms to modulate protein levels in the cell for biological function. Perhaps social structure is self reinforcing through incentives and entropy.
As is it's hard to evaluate if there is anything substantial to get out of these claims.
First time for me to meet with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_Science_Hub
Is that cause or correlation?
Like, if people are more polarized, there are more likely to have wider ground to sympathize. Less throttle in opinion divergences, so they can deal with more social exchanges as the only interactions are endless smooth easy agreements within their social bubbles.
The DOI in the article is being reported as invalid. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2517530122
Perhaps the article is yet to be published.
Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).
I get why social media could possibly be the cause but what makes you so certain it is the cause or the largest contributing factor?
When did algorithmic recommendations (by which I mean injecting content into your feed to maintain attention, rather than an attempt to rank by quality) become commonplace? ISTR Youtube was being criticised for pushing conspiracy theories in the late 2000s, but I could be misremembering the timeline.