LegibleCrimson3

Thank you for that site. As an atheist who is frequently extremely annoyed at other atheists for being hypocritically intellectually lazy when it paints faith negatively (i.e. "Christians just believe what they're told without any critical thought" and "somebody told me Christmas was pagan, which would be embarrassing for the Christmas, so I immediately believed and repeated it" from the same person), reading many of these articles is extremely satisfying and cathartic.

It reminds me of many of the negative but obviously false stories that were flying around about Trump before he was elected. I strongly dislike Trump, but I really hate bullshit. It's a shame that so many people who consider themselves to be critical thinkers and above the impressionable are just as susceptible to lazy confirmation bias as the rest.

It's an incentives problem, and the ad industry is largely to blame. It's the same cause as much of the destruction and centralization of the web, the rise of clickbait, rising extremism and political polarization, negativity-driven engagement, and myriad other public problems. An attention-drivin economy is disastrous for mental and public social health. And some people still defend the ad industry, even going so far to laud it as a public good, even talking about it as if it's a charity and not a very rich industry, funding a "free Internet".

We missed the boat long ago on dismantling or neutering the ad industry before it did massive irreparable damage. Whatever we do to fix this mess is still going to leave prominent scars for generations.

Yes, it is, if there is literally no evidence to the contrary, you have never heard any consistent claims otherwise, and you have never experienced anything that would cast it into doubt. That's not the reality we live in, though. The Bible can't even keep from contradicting itself, so external evidence isn't even necessary to doubt the literal word of it.

> Don't forget about the decent chunk that believe evolution occurs/occurred but was done or guided by a creator rather than natural selection as the mechanism

I'd wager that represents the majority of religious scientists. I'm not disparaging faith itself (not here at least), just creationism and denial of evidence because it is contrary to preconceptions. Why I consider creationism as contrary to the hacker ethos is precisely because being a hacker involves thinking outside boundaries and engaging in playful curiosity (often with a disregard for established authority). Creationism is mental gymnastics to support an established orthodoxy. It's excessive effort spent to explicitly avoid exploring the boundaries of one's own beliefs.

Honestly, I don't know on the throwaways and I don't blame you for the assumption. By all accounts, this would look like a throwaway. I don't think there's a great word for it, and my pattern of social Internet use is admittedly uncommon.

I disagree that they aren't off-topic. It's an article about a specific observation of evolution, and their response is to question the entire reality of evolution as a whole. It's like the people who go into a programming language update announcement to complain and trash talk the language (which happens a lot in Rust submissions in particular). I also think it's inordinate. It's likely a tiny minority of people who think this way, but because they are the loudest, they still managed to determine the topic for the entire comment section. Thus there is much argument and disagreement over something that the vast majority of scientists and commenters here already agree on.

Edit: I also find it funny, in retrospect, that this is an exact example of Poe's Law as originally stated.

That's a fair enough point. A minority with more fervently held opinions is more likely to voice them. I am mostly surprised because of where we are. The hacker mindset is far more compatible with evolution than creationism, so I'd expect vanishingly few people who consider themselves hackers to be creationists. Creationism is kind of an antithesis of intellectual curiosity (even from somebody who has read lots of creationist philosophy and apologetics; there's always a logical leap of faith to God).

Not all new accounts are throwaways. I did create an account for this purpose, but not to avoid association with any main identity (I habitually delete or permanently abandon social media accounts on a regular basis, when I feel that my behavior is becoming too addictive, to enforce a break on myself). I did actually think the comments were jokes at first. I took the first one I saw as sarcasm. I didn't think the microevolution/macroevolution argument was still seriously peddled around. The last time I saw that one was in a Chick Tract, but I don't tend to see evolution discussed in places where creationists hang out often.

And though I am curious about the numbers, I'm also alarmed and dismayed that such intellectually dishonest positions are being seriously posited here, and I don't think they deserve to be treated as neutral and valid positions. They are offensive and extremist, and in many cases, actively harmful and disruptive. Almost every comment here is directly or indirectly debating the existence of macroevolution as a result.

The details, yes, but denying the fact that all life as we know it has evolved into what it is now from something markedly different is not at all reasonable. I'm not claiming that the entire body of accepted mechanisms and details about evolution are 100% accurate. I'm claiming that something being a theory is not reasonable grounds to disbelieve it entirely. There is no reasonable disbelief in evolution.

I'm a little shocked at the number of creationists on here. I thought it was a joke at first. Does this happen for every submission about evolution? Do we have young Earth creationists doing the same thing on posts about Earth's distant past as well?

Strictly speaking, plate tectonics is a theory as well. I get quite tired of people claiming something as a theory as if it casts doubt on it. Evolution is known and accepted by biologists to be an undeniable fact by all but the most fringe. Even the vast majority of Christian biologists accept this.