[lolinder]

Are you quite near to where he was in 2014? He said in the article that he lived (at time of writing) in a pretty conservative area:

> I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

I agree with OP that it's much more likely that he did meet them, just in contexts where it doesn't come up.

[Tuna-Fish]

I think that was because he was doing his residency in a place where he would not normally choose to live.

As typical, during that time he was probably so overworked he didn't really interact with any of the locals until his time was up and he moved back out to a self-selected community.

[ryandrake]

It might not be that these topics just "don't come up" like it's some kind of accident. When people hold these "weird beliefs" as he puts it, [I think] they generally know they are weird and would be embarrassed to bring them up.

I don't think I know any Flat Earthers, but if I actually do, they probably deliberately keep it to themselves because they know that they'd look like kooks by outing themselves. To get more extreme, maybe some of my friends are Nazis, but they sure aren't showing me their memorabilia, not because "it just doesn't come up" but because they know it's wrong and don't want to ostracize themselves.

Maybe eventually people work up the courage to probe a little, they'll use code words and innuendo, and soft dogwhistles, maintaining plausible deniability until they identify their fellow outgroup members. I think I see this behavior in a few of my friends, but they wisely don't come out with it.