People Behave Socially and 'Well' Even Without Rules, Online Avatar Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2012) — Millions of human interactions were assessed during the study which included actions such as communication, founding and ending friendships, trading goods, sleeping, moving, however also starting hostilities, attacks and punishment. The game does not suggest any rules and everyone can live with their avatar (i.e. with their "game character" in the virtual world) as they choose. "And the result of this is not anarchy," says Thurner. "The participants organise themselves as a social group with good intents. Almost all the actions are positive."

ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2012) — For students to accept the theory of evolution, an intuitive "gut feeling" may be just as important as understanding the facts, according to a new study.

In an analysis of the beliefs of biology teachers, researchers found that a quick intuitive notion of how right an idea feels was a powerful driver of whether or not students accepted evolution -- often trumping factors such as knowledge level or religion.

"The whole idea behind acceptance of evolution has been the assumption that if people understood it -- if they really knew it -- they would see the logic and accept it," said David Haury, co-author of the new study and associate professor of education at Ohio State University.

"But among all the scientific studies on the matter, the most consistent finding was inconsistency. One study would find a strong relationship between knowledge level and acceptance, and others would find no relationship. Some would find a strong relationship between religious identity and acceptance, and others would find less of a relationship."

Human beings have secured some kinds of knowledge without using the scientific method.

Can you think of any examples beyond what I've thought of? Are there any of these that you think aren't true knowledge?

Examples include:

1. Mathematical knowledge

Mathematicians may employ a kind of scientific method - e.g. manually computing the elements of a sequence to see whether a given conjecture is experimentally true. But usually the mathematician will go back and try to prove the result with deduction. Experimentally, it seems the basics of mathematics - starting with subitizing, i.e. counting small numbers - appears to be inwrought in the infant mind and the minds of some animals.

2. Logic

I don't know anyone who has really disputed the basic logic employed by the human mind. Even non-Boolean logics are basically a mathematical toy, sometimes for quantum theorists, but the meta-logic remains Boolean logic. The faculty of logic also seems to be inwrought in the human mind.

3. Austrian Economics

Does the atheist believe in Good and Evil?
I was talking to my friend, a Female Atheist, that did not
Believe in good or evil. When I asked her to
Explain, she did not know how to.

Hello everyone,

I was listening to some local talk radio the other day.  There was a topic that came up.  They posed the question for women, would you get angry at your husband or significant other if you came home and found him pleasuring himself?  Why or why not? 

They then turned  the question around to the guys and asked them the same thing about their wives or girl friends.

The answers were totally opposite.  The women called in and most would get irate where as the guys thought nothing of it. 

What do you all say?

I need this challenged so I'm going to put it down for critique.  Feel free to kick the idea around as much as you like, I have no emotional attachment.

Basically the back story is that I'm looking for an underlining currency of communication between any two individuals in an epistemic frame of reference.  The work and research is very fragmented at this point, and I'm not even sure if I have anything worth considering, but I find it extremely fascinating.  One of these days, when I have some real time to invest, I want to put it all together so it makes sense. 

At this particular point in time I'm considering degrees of certainty and as I have been kicking the idea in my head over the past week or so, I seem to have arrived at this axiom.  The degree or certainty (relative to any proposition) is indirectly proportional to the size of the reference frame. 

Let me present some extreme examples to illustrate.  

If I present to you a reference frame, where a set of elements are sequentially incremented by a constant. In the format of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.  That frame of reference, represented by the stated relationship and not by the potential size of the set, is extremely small.  Therefor, a proposition that 2+3=5 has a very large degree of certainty, when the incremental constant is 1.  

I have had to ask this question cited in the subject line.  I know there are statistics up the butt, but what is YOUR opinion as to why?  Please say if you are male or female.  I have found that men and women have differing opinions and I am just curious as to the thought processes.  Thank you.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2011) — Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren't comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.

In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.

 A YouTuber named Craig sent me a PM regarding my video on abortion. His comments and my responses were too large for the YouTube video comment section:

 A YouTuber from Australia posed a number of questions designed to stimulate thought on what was a moral response to a dilemma. One of them was the "Sophie's Choice" dilemma. A conversation on the general definition of morality ensued.

Q: I wonder if you may expand on your point about the specific examples given not being moral issues, to stop any further confusion (if you see any)?