He is specifically attacking the claim that loneliness is a new and quickly accelerating trend.
even the best numbers we have on these phenomena are problematic and incomplete Sure but he does not say this. He says "In the 1980s, 20 percent of Americans said they were often lonely. Now it’s 40 percent. "
Don't think that communication and discussion at a national levels becomes more difficult when people can just make up any numbers they want to support their point, and never have to correct them?
90% of the article is about the stats being wrong.
Indeed. It should be clear that measuring loneliness is quite difficult given measuring any feeling is hard and given people may define "not lonely" relative to whatever they've experienced as that rather than some absolute criteria.
Certainly, one might attribute the growing epidemic of opioid addiction and suicide to loneliness - or to despair but it seems reasonable to attribute it to something like that.
And there's no reason loneliness, inequality and etc aren't connected problems. Once, one could point to those with lower incomes still having the vibrant social life of "the streets" but the poverty of those in outer suburbs does not necessarily generate that same situation.
The problem with that idea, in addition to it being morally repugnant and utterly disdainful of human life, is that there's always a worse problem. Oh, you want to talk about polio? Malaria is a worse problem! Oh, you want to talk about income inequality? Access to abortion is a worse problem by far!
It's a perfect way to shut down any discussion, simply by shouting "HEY, LOOK OVER THERE! WORSE PROBLEMS!" and claiming the moral high ground.
This is mostly confirmation bias since no one individual has the bandwidth or resources to look at every single story produced on every single topic on a single day. I tend to see people complain "this tragedy happened today and I don't see it being reported by the news!", implying that the media has something to hide or they value certain groups of people over others, but this is not a claim worth its salt.
There are many reason, both from the organization's standpoint and from the individual's standpoint, why this claim isn't true. It's a weak argument that only serves the purpose of distracting from topics at hand.
It doesn't change anything though. Media is still not going to focus on important problems. It exists to influence people, not to report on all the right things. And it's worth pointing this out.
A layperson might ask, What difference—besides diss’ing social scientists—does it make if these interesting articles about loneliness growing are off a bit? First, they are off a lot. But more important, they are a critical distraction. Chatter about feelings (of mainly affluent folks) distracts us from the many real crises of our time—say, widened inequality, children growing up in criminally and chemically dangerous neighborhoods, the dissolution of job security for middle Americans, drug addiction, housing shortages (where the jobs are), a medical system mess, hyper-partisanship, and so on. That’s what makes the loneliness scare not just annoying but also another drag on serious problem-solving.
Ahh the cruelty of science. I would agree that the claim Brooks, an op-ed writer, made is overblown and sensationalized a bit in order to get readers interested, but that doesn't make those who are indeed lonely, and those who the NY Times article focuses on, any less lonely or visible.
It seems like the post's author is dismissing that there are lonely people out there because Brooks wrote something that overstates their numbers. As any social scientist would tell you, even the best numbers we have on these phenomena are problematic and incomplete.