There are a surprising number of YECs (many of whom are also climate-change denialists -- it's all part of the same ideology) lurking here. I suspect it's part of an organized covert effort to spread the doctrine. Part of the strategy is to discredit science and scientists in general.
I'd think YEC is a small subset of climate deniers even if most YEC are climate deniers. I can image a climate denier contingency here but I have a hard time believing that YECs bother with HN. I'm not up to date on conspiracy theorists though. Are there any threads you can point to about YEC here?
Regardless, this is also a great way to stifle important scientific discourse. Nobody wants scientific commentary to happen hidden from public view, so more and more happens on preprint servers and social media. But then nobody wants to make even good faith criticisms because they don't want the general public to misinterpret, aided by bad faith spinning by other parties.
Of course you will see criticisms related to e.g. labor conditions, but when it comes to criticism of scientific practice or even in some cases specific results, there are always a bunch of people ready to comment about how most critics are quacks and we need to be careful about extremism. This is awfully convenient for the scientists that are doing subpar work.
> I have a hard time believing that YECs bother with HN.
Hard to say. It's hard to get a YEC to come out of the closet here. Maybe I'm a little overly sensitized to YECs in particular because I spent some time on the YouTube YEC debate circuit.
But it hardly matters. What matters is that there are a lot of anti-science ideologues out there, some of them are well organized and well-funded, they are developing a collection of stock rhetoric (including that Feynman quote) which can be very persuasive, and some of that rhetoric appears regularly here. Whenever I see it I try to smack it down, but sometimes it feels like whack-a-mole.
