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"And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I
by neaden 3y ago
"And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist." I'm guessing this is just because it's never come up. Maybe it's because I live in the midwest or something but I know a number of creationists, republicans, people against gay marriage etc. and interact with them. While my social circle is certainly influenced by my more liberal politics when there are so many people around I don't see how you can't interact with them as friends, neighbors, coworkers etc. But unless you specifically talk about issues like creationism with them it can easily not come up, we tend to assume people share our politics/opinions unless proven otherwise.
- adrusi 3y agoI'm quite nearby to Scott in social space, and no, I don't think it's just "never come up." It's a very highly selected scene.
- lolinder 3y agoAre you quite near to where he was in 2014? He said in the article that he lived (at time of writing) in a pretty conservative area: > I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them. I agree with OP that it's much more likely that he did meet them, just in contexts where it doesn't come up.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoI think that was because he was doing his residency in a place where he would not normally choose to live. As typical, during that time he was probably so overworked he didn't really interact with any of the locals until his time was up and he moved back out to a self-selected community.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 3y agoIt might not be that these topics just "don't come up" like it's some kind of accident. When people hold these "weird beliefs" as he puts it, [I think] they generally know they are weird and would be embarrassed to bring them up. I don't think I know any Flat Earthers, but if I actually do, they probably deliberately keep it to themselves because they know that they'd look like kooks by outing themselves. To get more extreme, maybe some of my friends are Nazis, but they sure aren't showing me their memorabilia, not because "it just doesn't come up" but because they know it's wrong and don't want to ostracize themselves. Maybe eventually people work up the courage to probe a little, they'll use code words and innuendo, and soft dogwhistles, maintaining plausible deniability until they identify their fellow outgroup members. I think I see this behavior in a few of my friends, but they wisely don't come out with it.
- mistermann 3y agoCulture war topics being literally banned on /r/ssc combined with that community's imperfect ability in "keeping it together" when some conversation does sneak in leads me to believe that it would be extremely easy to be never found out if you were among them.
- travisjungroth 3y agoLocation is huge here, and then social circles within that location. Midwest is a world apart from the East Bay.
- stcroixx 3y agoI lived in both places. Almost all the parents of my kids friends in public school in Hayward regularly went to church. I knew not a single person that attended church in Chicago.
- travisjungroth 3y agoI don’t want to like “exception that proves the rule” here, but I overgeneralized the area. I think Scott is in Oakland and runs in pretty specific circles. Probably very different from Hayward. And then Chicago isn’t exactly typical Midwest.
- JamesBarney 3y agoSan Francisco and the Midwest probably have wildly different base rates of creationist beliefs.
- hospitalJail 3y agoSan Fran is a city, midwest is a region. If you took San Fran and Chicago, metro Detroit, Minneapolis, they would probably be similar.
- arcticbull 3y agoNot to mention San Francisco and the very-nearby Central Valley are likely quite different.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slowmovintarget 3y agoAs someone who has lived in most of those places and is familiar with all of them... no.
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- neaden 3y agoIn the article Scott says he lives in a Republican district in a state with a Republican Governor, so he wasn't in San Francisco at the time he wrote this. I live in a Democrat district in a state with a Democrat governor so I can't imagine the political demographics of where we live are that divergent.
- nitwit005 3y agoI'm sure the polls near him would also show quite a few creationists, but unfortunately, we know people lie on these polls: https://www.prri.org/academic/study-know-last-sunday-finds-americans-significantly-inflate-religious-participation/ https://www.prri.org/academic/study-know-last-sunday-finds-a... There's no great way to know the "real" rate of creationists, when apparently people change their stated beliefs for social reasons.
- AlexandrB 3y agoThe rate of creationists would also heavily depend on how the question is phrased, because there's not one "creationism" but several, sometimes incompatible, ideologies. Compare these questions: > Do you believe that a supernatural force created the universe? > Do believe that God created the earth 6000-10000 years ago? The first is much broader and would also probably include the origin stories of many non-Abrahamic religions. The second is referring to a specific school of Christian "young earth" creationism.
- Ilverin 3y agoA) at the time this was written, Scott lived in the Midwest B) Scott worked at a hospital at the time, which selects a bit against those who are creationists. In my opinion, probably 40% of the nurses in such a hospital would be creationist, but maybe Scott disagrees with me about that assessment C) in terms of socialization outside of work, Scott is not an extrovert, so I can imagine arbitrary levels of selection and that it is plausible he did have 0 creationist social acquaintances (maybe the quote is only even talking about his social acquaintances, not his work ones)
- bombcar 3y agoI would suspect that as an introvert he just doesn't realize what his social circle really holds, even lightly. Lots of it doesn't come up, and the "higher in the US money/power structure you get the more you learn to be quiet". Another is to remember that many people may be technically creationists (the protestant church they go to is young-earth) but they just don't ever think about it at all.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoI know a surprising number of creationists in urban Seattle. They hide in plain sight because everyone simply assumes they don't exist, and the people that are creationist never say anything unsolicited that would indicate it. It is like the opposite of the meme about vegans, CrossFit, et al. You see a similar pattern with gun owners, which every statistic suggests exist in vast numbers even in neighborhoods with politics strongly aligned with anti-gun activists, but almost no one ever publicly admits to owning one. Like with creationism, being a member of this group isn't nearly as much of an affectation of political alignment as people assume. There are many polite fictions like this in society.
- aidenn0 3y ago> ... almost no one ever publicly admits to owning one. Does having an NRA sticker on your pickup's bumper count? I see those all the time.
- bitwize 3y agoI've seen more of those since living in the southeastern USA, than I ever did in the northeastern USA... despite having lived in Connecticut where gun laws were, until recently, fairly lax for a blue state and there were quite a few stealth gun nuts.
- retrac 3y agoI do see what the parent poster meant. Here in Canada, about 1 in 4 households have a firearm. It's over 10% even in large cities like Toronto. Statistically speaking, it seems likely several households in my condominium have firearms. Not quite at American ownership rates, but firearm ownership is far from scarce in Canada. You wouldn't get impression though; most owners are very discreet about it. That same sort of vibe seems to exist in parts of the USA, too.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThank you to share. This is a valuable post. Do you think people who own guns who live in non-rural areas do so for (a) personal protection, (b) hunting, or (c) sport shooting? I'm not a hunter myself, but (b) and (c) seem pretty reasonable anywhere that you live. However, I never understand the (a) crowd. For the record, Finland also has very high gun ownership.
- mrexroad 3y agoThis. A decade+ ago I made a Jesus-riding-dinosaurs type joke around a friend I’d known for years. He called me out on it. I knew he was from TX, homeschooled, and a devout 2A supporter, but for some reason I was floored when he said he believed in Creationism and I was wrong. I struggled reconciling that with him being a well educated Bay Area tech worker. A short time later I watched a train wreck on Facebook where a college friend (rigorous engineering school), who had an aptitude for maths and physics, become a Flat Earther. After that I stopped assuming anything about what others are likely to believe. The past decade has proven that, unfortunately, to be a wise decision.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- erudition43 3y ago[dead]
- Cpoll 3y ago> (rigorous engineering school), who had an aptitude for maths and physics, become a Flat Earther. I'd love to hear their math-aware rebuttal to the usual proofs against FE (stuff like horizons, the day-night cycle). Although debates of the sort rarely end well.
- zoogeny 3y agoI can comment on this since I had a similar co-worker. Well educated in Mechanical Engineering (or perhaps Electrical?) but working as a software engineer. He was a vocal supporter of flat earth and enjoyed debating the subject. The conversation was always 100% focused on what I could prove in the moment. The general form of his argument was a radical skepticism. If you question the vast majority of people enough you will be able to find a place where they are not solid on the science. He would expertly find and exploit these areas. He was also very conspiratorial, specifically believing that NASA was a government plot to hide government spending that was going towards a corrupt elite. He was also amazing at not understanding simple concepts when necessary. I remember he had an argument about high-quality photos of the earth seen from space distributed by NASA. It was based on some evidence that they were composite images. He had some totally clueless argument about no being able to project 2d surfaces (like those of photos) onto 3d surfaces like spheres. I mean, that is a pretty standard thing to do in 3d graphics texturing so I asked him about that and he would just get confused. It would almost be like you couldn't explain why 1 + 1 = 2 to him in those moments. Every step of the argument was drawn out and made excruciating. I became cynical about it eventually. He was reasonably intelligent on almost any subject. I figured he just liked being a Socratic debater type, in the sense that he just loved to push people into corners of science they didn't quite know and prove to them that their own beliefs weren't as solidly founded as they thought. Once I realized that I just stopped any debate on the topic immediately after it started.