> 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".
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.
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…
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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