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Originally posted by buddhatrance
I am starting to question how many people will be let down. It may be less and less. It looks like most of us are having a good time with this thread independently from the puzzle, grown fond of this interaction.
This has balanced out the expectations.
I agree completely. The website has become like a backdrop for such a great story!
Originally posted by TNTarheel
Originally posted by buddhatrance
I am starting to question how many people will be let down. It may be less and less. It looks like most of us are having a good time with this thread independently from the puzzle, grown fond of this interaction.
This has balanced out the expectations.
It does not matter to me if this non/puzzle is/is not solved...the company here is the reason I keep coming back. The website is just a peculiarity to me.
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true. As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs. For example, in reading about gun control, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and/or recall have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a stronger weighting for data encountered early in an arbitrary series) and illusory correlation (in which people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased towards confirming their existing beliefs. Later work explained these results in terms of a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In combination with other effects, this strategy can bias the conclusions that are reached. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show confirmation bias because they are pragmatically assessing the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.
Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that makes it difficult to: Tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, Think logically, Have normal emotional responses, Behave normally in social situations As the illness continues, problems with thinking, emotions and behavior develop, including: Lack of emotion (flat affect), Strongly held beliefs that are not based in reality (delusions), Hearing or seeing things that are not there (hallucinations), Problems paying attention, Thoughts "jump" between unrelated topics ( “loose associations”), Bizarre behaviors, Social isolation
Studies performed by those who believe that some religious groups do practice mind control have identified a number of key steps in coercive persuasion:
People are put in physical or emotionally distressing situations; Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized; They receive what seems to be unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader or group; They get a new identity based on the group; They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled