Brexit was also understood as a ‘solution’ to immigration, so everyone stopped talking about it [for a few years]

Policy and politics are things you sometimes have to trade off, the idea isn’t to choose the absolute worst of both

'Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way' as a standalone is certainly a terrible line, but I feel like if all Ezra really means is 'it's good when people engage in argument in public spaces; too many people have given up on persuasion', then I think the piece is entirely reasonable

All fair questions! The effect is easily significant and the sample is carefully designed to be representative (but nothing is perfect), the B5 questions were very literal (see below), and smartphone use has (necessarily) increased since invention, meaning that it would correlate with the drop in C

Especially since loneliness is just a word, while the conscientiousness items used were very tangible traits. Circumstantial obviously, but if vowel shifts happen a lot, i’d expect to see one for loneliness 2010-2025

Last month I tested whether the increase in discourse has changed loneliness’ definition has changed, by comparing whether the demographic predictors of indirect vs direct loneliness measures have changed. Seemed like no – which made me take that finding a bit more seriously when i saw it

Despite claims to the contrary, social connectedness has no link to loneliness when you account for what until now we've been calling 'emotional loneliness'

'emotional loneliness' IS loneliness

Or: loneliness is an emotion, and can be felt even by people who are deeply loved

The headline is that indirect loneliness scales have no advantages over direct ones

The bad news: they, as expected, often also measure the wrong thing. The two most popular loneliness scales (the UCLA* and De Jong) assess a mix of loneliness and disconnection

(* preprint soon)

Well the problem is we've never checked if those indirect questions were actually good measures of loneliness:

And many of these Qs asked about support from other people, or what was called 'social loneliness'

So is that 'part of' loneliness? Or related-but-definitely-separate?

New preprint! We're all wrong about who's lonely – and about what loneliness is.

By failing to just be direct when we ask people if they're lonely, we've been worried about the wrong people🧵🧵🧵

Link: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Also it’s not even the whole CWC, it’s just the group stage (plus a bit of ‘settling in’ time)

I just ran these and realised I should put some (prettier) version of them in the paper - for Estonia, 18-25 by far the loneliest, with a sharp improvement til 50. Similar in our smaller UK sample, but with the peak at 23-24 and a wider range