Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbskm | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of Americans who would disqualify a candidate that doesn't believe in evolution, global warming, or some other widely known scientific fact.

Unfortunately, there are just as many ill-informed Americans that share these views. It's sad and depressing, and is usually just the result of being in a conservative bubble. If you live in rural America, your friends and family all regurgitate the same things they hear from Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Breitbart, and other conservative sources, which, for whatever reason, seem to hold a lot of scientific things in contempt.

They're ignorant, sure, but it's hard to see things from another perspective if you've never really been exposed to anything else.

View on HN

> If you live in rural America, your friends and family all regurgitate the same things they hear from Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Breitbart, and other conservative sources

It's funny that conservatives 'regurgitate', while liberals are simply repeating things they've thought about deeply after hearing John Oliver say them.

Both sides have people who don't think critically. It's a huge problem. I consider myself a liberal but I dislike sites like Huff Post. It looks to me just like Breitbart. I don't know why it's popular. John Oliver is funny and can give some insight into many topics but no one should use it as sole source of information, I don't think many do but I'm not on the receiving end of their argument so it's hard to tell.

    > They're ignorant, sure, but it's hard to see things 
    > from another perspective if you've never really been 
    > exposed to anything else.

Are you sure they're ignorant?

Could they not be intelligent, rational individuals with the personal agency to have looked at the same facts as you and come up with different conclusions?

> Could they not be intelligent, rational individuals with the personal agency to have looked at the same facts as you and come up with different conclusions?

No. Just as someone that says 2 + 2 = 457 is also wrong.

Not on that subject, no. It's not reasonably possible for a person to look at the known facts of modern biology and not believe in the process of evolution.

Things intelligent, well-read people can disagree on: fiscal policy; democracy versus republic; abortion rights; single-payer healthcare.

Things so overwhelmingly shown to be factually true that it's not a sign of reasonableness to debate them: Earth and life are old; vaccines don't cause autism.

There are 'liberal' biases in science too, especially when it comes to 'evolutionary' differences between races and genders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com