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Comment by lbolla | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who believes that Earth is 6000 years old, therefore dinosaurs lived alongside men and went extinct in the Medieval times (by some crazy global-scale dinosaurs hunting). I am so sad that he won't be able to enjoy this discovery as much as I do, because he'll be focused on debunking the scientific assertion that this fossil is 110 million years old.

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Please let's not bring religious arguments here. They're predictable, which makes them uninteresting, which makes them off topic.

I agree with the conclusion but that reasoning makes no sense.

From the guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

It took me years to understand this dynamic, so of course I'd be interested in how the reasoning is wrong. But hn@ycombinator.com would be a better place to communicate that at this point.

Btw, if you're going to tell someone this, you should say why. Otherwise they can't learn and the comment is uninformative.

Threads on Uber, Facebook, Apple, the NSA etc. are pretty predictable. Are we deeming them off-topic too?

"Pretty predictable" is already something different, and those topics have a steady influx of new information to mutate them at least somewhat.

The other factor, of course, is the heat with which these things burn. When they burn to a crisp, the crisps are all the same.

> I am so sad that he won't be able to enjoy this discovery as much as I do, because he'll be focused on debunking the scientific assertion that this fossil is 110 million years old.

In the whole scheme of things, I'm sure he enjoys plenty of things you don't. Just like any other 2 different people. That he doesn't enjoy this as much as you do is nothing to mourn about.

Can you tell me more about this friend? I have many in my hometown area who are similar, so I'd be curious to hear about other archetypes.

I once briefly dated a girl that believed in horoscopes and was dead set that it is a pre-determinator of a person's personality.

And I knew another girl that believed in the healing power of gem stones.

I released that irrational beliefs take many forms, not just religious (which creationism comes from), and it is a common human feature to explain things that you can't understand in ways that might make sense to you.

Looks like you are the one focused on his beliefs

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