Posted by luu 1 day ago
> Over and over again, studies[0] find that people think that their past conversations went worse than they actually did and that future conversations will go worse than they actually do. But when you just make people talk to each other, they end up having a nice time and feeling more confident[1] about their conversational abilities.
[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15298868.2020.18...
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002210312...
Repeatedly processing memory, recursively calling the same function without a limit or exit condition :)
Annual sales of antidepressants in North America are about $8 billion.
Not sure what the point of closing your eyes and plugging your years is
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q781
FTA:
> Some 57% of US doctors received more than $12bn in payments related to medical drugs or devices from manufacturers between 2013 and 2022, an analysis has found.1 “Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such payments remain pervasive,” says the letter in JAMA.
> People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to. So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?
Okay but the data examined for "more alone" is US data with unclear age range (most likely adults). But the data examined for "not feeling much lonelier" is UK data and US school teenager data. I feel like there's a massive blind spot with the fact there's no US adult data...?
As stated in the article, we do have evidence that people are more alone than ever, and there's a correlation between being alone and loneliness. It's perfectly reasonable to ask whether (but not assume) people are more lonely than ever.
I think this "social scurvy" thing is completely spurious, though. Some people get anxious when alone, probably including the author, hence this post justifying socializing as something everybody else needs to do. Because after all, being unsociable is socially unacceptable. But what's this based on? Being alone is correlated with ill health - well, people will tend to stay far away from you if you have the plague. One study found that people's desire for company rose hardly at all after a mere ten hours, is that surprising? I mean, make it a month, ask me again. This isn't evidence for socializing being necessary. Then we have tribal New Guineans chattering constantly about "who urinated when and where", but just because they're a model of a close-to-nature society doesn't mean the things they do are right, or healthy, and it doesn't mean we have to. (I might also wonder how close together people in tribes are in terms of genes and houses. If they count as "household", that's disqualified from being true socialization in this theory anyway.)
My gut feeling says: don't ask me, I'm a gut.
There is an interesting phenomenon called "the Firehouse Effect" that is similar but on a group level.
The idea is that if you take a group of humans and isolate them, they will begin to believe wilder and wilder ideas and communicate those ideas amongst themselves. This happens because the group is not routinely "reconciling" with broader society which in turn is slower to adopt new ideas.
It's named after firemen who would spend a lot of time together in firehouses.
https://absoluteengagement.com/blog/are-you-stuck-in-the-fir...
I'd enjoy it for fun, to pass the time, to read a dozen follow-up articles. But as a one-off post to learn and inform myself? Ugh.
Unrelated, but two of the many links have ChatGPT referals. I'm not sure what to think of it. I guess it's fine?
Funny, I absolutely do develop a hankering for citrus whenever my body needs vitamin C. After a workout, and after getting sun at the beach, or just whenever I've gone a couple days without getting enough vitamin C, I absolutely develop a sudden craving for oranges/grapefruit/pineapple/orange juice/Emergen-C. And it doesn't go away until I have enough.
I assume that this is a kind of learned association, that you can recognize the feeling of vitamin C depletion and your body quickly connects that that goes away when you eat certain foods.
But my body absolutely tells me when I need vitamin C. And whether it's at a level of "it would be a nice idea to have some now" or "you need a LOT more vitamin C RIGHT NOW".
Even a cursory amount of research will reveal to you that people who engage in athletic activity require higher amounts of vitamin C, and your assertion that these people get enough vitamin C just from common servings of vegetables is flat-out wrong. And keeping in mind that cooking vegetables reduces and sometimes outright pretty much removes their vitamin C, depending on the cooking method.
And the fact that you think I wouldn't notice that e.g. Coca-Cola equally satisfied my need, and that this desire for citrus or Emergen-C has just been a mistake, that's the insulting part.
So you will understand why an insulting comment like yours does not deserve a full explanation of a reply, but I'm going out of my way to provide one anyways. In the hopes that you can learn from this and not leave such knee-jerk dismissive comments in the future.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but author, you just spent the article up to now complaining about people asserting that people are more lonely without evidence.
[0]. https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/pet-ownership-sta...
People don't even answer text messages and emails, as if they are coming from Mars and there's a surcharge on long distance calls.
Who here wakes up, looks at the phone and there are zero dots?
Geez, I send messages, really nice photos, encouragement, invitations. Growing old ain't easy.
- texting has given me the ability to stay in touch with lots of my friends
- being a suburban dad with 3 kids who have activities has made it VERY difficult to see other dads in person
Couple this with a lot of the other families having two working parents, spontaneous "let's go hang out, dude" is effectively zero.
What's more common is having to either:
- have a routine scheduled "dads hang out" event
- scheduling a hang out 2-3 weeks in advance (which also sometimes gets cancelled due to "sick kid", "wife got stuck in traffic" etc)