Remix clone Hacker News

This article reads like a sophisticatedly typeset data dump commandeered by the author's academic cachet.

The author's original blog posts look more interesting to me and appear to be less skewed towards whatever the interests of Asterisk are.

https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/an-epi...

https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/2023/09/27/an-epi...

My impression of his original thoughts after a cursory glance is that he isn't denying the phenomenon as much as he is questioning whether "loneliness" is the right thing to focus on. And that sounds like something worth considering.

▲

yesfitz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems all that he does is question. The closest he gets to proposing an alternative solution is in his first post you linked, "One caution is that, like talk of suicide, public talk of loneliness can spur more of it, as more people engage in what psychologists call 'rumination.'"

It's an interesting, threatening line of thinking after decades of mental health awareness campaigns.

What else would he consider a social contagion? Will we stop feeling lonely if we stop talking about how lonely we are, or is the cat out of the bag? How could we coordinate whether addressing future mental health issues will help or hurt?

	▲	tolerance 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The author of this article is a 76-year-old single institution career academic who's feel for the world is apparently constrained to academic journals, articles written by academics and legacy media, and a communiqué from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (which just so happens to cite the author as a reference throughout it). I say this and juxtapose it against my previous comment where I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt because the Asterisk article was so bad I couldn't get through it and the sentence above was my initial reaction to it, which to some may come across like an ad hominem attack. But I think the fact that this man has spent over half his life in the social sciences contributes to his inability to comprehend a human experience that emanates from the spirit (loneliness, social dispossession) and is not as easily expressed in data as what he thinks is more important in comparison (gun control, education reform, health reform, etc) and are more readily quantifiable. The act of questioning loneliness in relationship to other factors is interesting, I do think agree with you that his applied line of thinking is dangerous and dehumanizing. In fact, I think the kind of dehumanization that occurs when the human experience is comprehended through graphs, charts, numbers, polls and surveys, control groups, institutionalized methodologies and ontologies and obscure Greek letters in two-column PDFs has a lot to do with what the author is in doubt over.