I've always found it amusing when people respond inappropriately to something entirely out of ignorance. Before we move on, let me give you the actual definition of the word ignorance so that you're not ignorant of the word ignorance. [url=http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ignorance]The condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed.[/url] Often times people do not understand the true meaning of the word and relay on a lay knowledge of the word. Many people think ignorant means stupid, but it does not. It simply means that the person who is "ignorant" lacks any knowledge about the topic at hand. I digress. As I said before, I find it amusing when people overreact or become angry about something they clearly don't understand. Often times these people overreact without investigating what the actual meaning of the offending statement means. I encounter this not only here, but pretty frequently in my practice of emergency medicine. Recently I made the comment, "If your only tool is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails." One person in particular seemed to think that this comment was a r@pe joke/comment. The reality is that this statement is a very common and popular statement in academia and medicine referring to the "Law of the Instrument" made by Abraham Maslow, a very prominent psychologist. What Abraham Maslow and the quote was referring to was the phenomenon of selection and confirmation bias. Basically, what it says is that people will interrupt something in a way that favors their own preconceived belief structure. This is why two people will look at an event and you will have two different narratives of what happened. Each person will construed the actual events to fit a narrative they favor. The reason why this phrase is popular in medicine is because each physician will approach a patient in the manner as to which they were trained. If you ask a surgeon about a patient, don't be surprised of they say they need surgery. In this example the surgeon's tool is surgery and thus the surgeon wants to fix the problems with surgery, the nails. taking me for example, I'm an emergency physician. I'm trained to identify and treat life threatening diseases. My hammer is to assume every complaint a patient presents with is something bad until proven otherwise. When I made my post of, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails." I was responding to a thread about if someone had made a r@pe joke. The "joke" made, IMO, was fairly subjective. When I heard the "joke" before all the houpla was made about it in the gaming media, I thought it to be more of a homicide joke, not r@pe. That is my bias I guess. The fact that someone instantly though that my comment was some kind r@pe joke or comment proves what that the quote actually means. Your own bias makes you see things that aren't necessarily there. As a general rule, I try to figure out what something means before I get mad about it. There is no reason for ignorance, take the time to educate yourself before reacting and making an ass of yourself. Edit: This was originally posted in a group I was a member of.