> Another change in topic: bubbles. I’ve written before about how 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, and how strongly that fails to square with my personal experience. I’ve met young-earth creationists once or twice. But of my hundred closest friends/co-workers/acquaintances, I think zero percent of them fall in that category. I’m not intentionally selecting friends on the basis of politics, religion, or anything else. It just seems to have happened. Something about my personality, location, social class, et cetera has completely isolated me from one particular half of the US population; I’m living in a non-creationist bubble in the midst of a half-creationist country.
If you told me 4.6% of Americans answered a poll that they thought humans were created in roughly present form within the last 10K years, I’d have thought that figure was high and barely believable.
Yeah, I honestly think this is an overly complex analysis that’s genuinely simple in reality:
You get out what you put in.
We spend attention bandwidth to those we relate to. Those that don’t, we naturally let those text messages go unattended. We don’t think about it, we just naturally decline to foster any meaningful connection or development of one to those we don’t relate with.
It’s not all that smart sounding list of reasons, it’s simply subconscious behaviors that have created this reality.
I wonder how much of that is people not expressing opinions that run contrary to the group consensus. Maybe you have young earth creationist friends who don't want to be mocked, and hide that belief.
I’m a Christian and I’d put myself in the young earth creationist category. It never comes up and even if it did, I don’t feel the need to defend or justify it.
When it comes down to it, how God created the world is an implementation detail and arguing about it is missing the forest for the trees.
I have family that are young earth creationists, and the only way it ever came up is from a Noah's Ark with dinosaurs picture book they had around their house when me and my cousins were kids. It just isn't a topic that comes up often; especially not with co-workers or acquaintances.
Young earth creationists believe that dinosaurs coexisted with people? I thought they believed that dinosaurs never were alive and bones were tricks of the devil.
Maybe some? But even people who believe outlandish things try and fit them into some rationalized framework. The young earth creationism I'm aware of is big into "disproving" fossil dates and equating dragon myths to human accounts of dinosaurs before extinction. And looking for evidence of Noah's flood, of course. That ones a given for anyone trying to prove any sort of Biblical Literalism.
Some people just can't stand to live in a world in which they are not fully able to understand, and the good news is that they don't have to with delusions! Yay for delusions! No lesson to learn here, just believe whatever nonsense you want and certainly it couldn't have any unforeseen negative consequences. No certainly not!
I guess I am some version of centrist that looks at the left, right, communist, capitalist, anarchist, totalitarian, etc and just sees overzealous people desperately trying to apply their overfit model of human society. For most people who have "taken a side" they have subconsciously done so to escape the intractability of a universal philosophy for human prosperity. They've bowed before the altar of dogma and said their prayers.
> Another change in topic: bubbles. I’ve written before about how 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, and how strongly that fails to square with my personal experience. I’ve met young-earth creationists once or twice. But of my hundred closest friends/co-workers/acquaintances, I think zero percent of them fall in that category. I’m not intentionally selecting friends on the basis of politics, religion, or anything else. It just seems to have happened. Something about my personality, location, social class, et cetera has completely isolated me from one particular half of the US population; I’m living in a non-creationist bubble in the midst of a half-creationist country.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/