Evolution & Big Bang “Lies” —Congressman on House Science Committee | Hacker News Reader

Evolution & Big Bang “Lies” —Congressman on House Science Committee

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26 pointsiProject13 comments

People who believe things like this do not make good hackers. They are prone to accepting answers based on what they think they ought to believe rather than figuring out something that works. They have no ability to make good decisions based on evidence.

People who believe things like this try to spread their systems of belief. They are hostile to education, and favor training instead. If they get their hands on your local educational system, it will produce people who are not well educated and will not make competitive employees.

When this happens in a place far away from you, you can point and laugh. Your economic value goes up because they will not be competitive with you.

When this happens in a place where you expect to recruit employees, cofounders, or otherwise depend on the expertise of the local people, you are in trouble.

There. Now it's relevant to HN.

Let the fallacy barrage begin.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy

This sort of thing enrages me, but for that very reason, I don't think it belongs here. It's not germane to hacking and startups unless you start making more indirect arguments with which you could probably pull in whatever sort of topic you felt like.

"Intensely, but shallowly, interesting".

I should point out that as you read the article and watch the video, be careful not to lump a lot of people in with his type of thinking. One extreme person in a group is not representative of the group as a whole.

But as this person is a democratic elected official, he is representative for a group. An he is not talking to himself, he is talking to part of that group, in the video.

On a side note, it just baffles me that in an age where anybody with a 4 inch device in his or her pocket can access the world in knowledge, people choose, literally choose, to be willfully ignorent.

Then again, I always find it good to remember that people from the same country currently also have a rover running about on Mars. Apparently one check in away from being the mayor.

Oh yes, I understand that. But the problem I have is this - he's a congressman, how come?

Technically, it's the fault of the voters for hiring an incompetent person and their responsibility to fire him.

It is very difficult since most of the constituency believes the same thing he does.

I'm guessing you don't live in the US, because there are a lot of people who believe this is true, and it's a constant struggle for people to have to deal with stupid issues like this over actual issues of substance.

I've always wondered, how many US citizens believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old?

Considering that the definition of the word "believe" is tied to concepts such as acceptance and opinion the answer is relative to number of non-critical thinkers out there.

Ask instead "how many US citizens KNOW the earth is less than 10,000 years old?" and the answer will be a smaller number.

Haven't watched the video but is the evolution theory now our new religion? Must an educated person nowadays believe in evolution like a medieval scientist had to believe in what his church prescribed?

There's much more scientific evidence for evolution than there is for the belief (which the Congressman states in the video) that the earth is 9000 years old and was created in six days.

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