I asked if you can point to any examples of human beings who face life without any normative/value-based rules AT ALL. I'm of the opinion that SM is just another belief system. It, too, can be the basis for constructing normative rules.

Makes sense.  

As the TED talk mentions, even though the symbol "snake" is illusory, you still don't want to pick one up. The "pain" (and possible death) you'll encounter feels real enough, illusory or not.

Sam Harris - Life after death

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VXiF1MRvIE

This is a cute fairy tell.
At best scientists do not describe anything but the numerical outputs of some tools that they bought from somebody else. Scientists do not rely on their 5 senses, they are not empiricists. Scientists claim that their imagination is a way to ''truth'' or ''objectivity'' or some other big words that somehow describe a' ''reality'' wherein humans are not, and of course to sort all their fantasies, since they think that senses are pathetic and corruptible sooner or later, they build the fantasy of ''validity'' of a fantasy with respect to something that ''is not human'' [if it were human, it would be relative to humans and then those people would be upset since they despise  a lack of consensus among humans, since beforehand they reify their idea of consensus among some humans and so far there is still no consensus about anything if more and more opinions of humans are taken into].

At this point, the rationalists can either go even more nutty by clinging to a sky daddy, or can equally go full stupid to go for ''nature'' but of course there is no ''nature'', even less ''nature without humans''.  There is what is experienced thru the 5 senses and what is experienced through the imagination [= opinions, ideas, concepts, inferences, whatever]. So some guys thought they were geniuses because they slapped back the fantasies against ''the 5 senses'' as the validity of inferences, to check whether his ''inferences'' were valid and they got cocky because they did not ''need god as an hypothesis''. Pure cringe.
But it turns out that what is experienced through the senses is just what is experiences through the senses, no matter how hard people cling to their fantasy of a validity of a ralitionalism-claiming-to-be-empirisist. Well the only good thing from this doctrine by the secular humanist is that it has been providing, for the last centuries, a salary for lots of people in the liberal revival of the academia.
 
 
So the trick of those people is to develop ''models'' (modelling what? nobody knows) and then to make the model compete and say ''this model is more valid than this model'' and that ''Scientific theories are only valid until they are disproven by further experiments'' (this is one of the best jokes so far).
Of course a model cannot model the ''reality'' since to model the reality you must know the ''model of the reality'', plus the ''reality'' plus the comparison between the ''model of the reality'' with the ''reality''. And if you know the ''reality'' you do not care about modelling it in the first place.
Why do I need a model to know the truth? why do my senses cannot get to truth? They do not know.

Then they develop statistics, because those people claim that statistics of a data set somehow connects you to ''truth'' and the other big words that they love, like ''objectivity'' [which is a nice fantasy obtained by.... seeing that people disagree on topics, then some genius comes around and claim ''wait let's rely on my nearly infallible rationality  one more time (which makes me a human, not a beast), I will use the power of negation, like you know day is the opposite of night right, right that's like empiricism, grounded in experience, not relying on dumb God contrary to you know who; let's apply this to my fantasy of subjectivity, so let's  negate my concept of subjectivity (which is bad, because a consensus amongst a few humans is desirable, why? nobody knows) and get the fancy objectivity. OMG it works, I get a new word out it, it must exists, objectivity is the best amrite, let's speculate a bit  and  strive for this for thousands of years and if people do not they are unrational''.]
Of course they have no proof of this, for people who love to claim they prove things it is disappointing from them.... THey claim that nobody can derive a  knowledge with ''just one event'', unless you imagine a causality like Anscombe.
They claim that their fantasy of the ''repeatability of the conditions leading to an effect'' is the way to check ''a model against the reality'' (which is again stupid).

So how do you get truth from stats according to these people. You run your little model, you buy some tools, you run an ''repeatable experiment'' several times (these people love to claim that the condition producing an event are stable across time) and you collect ''data'' which is ''the reality'' (these people love to claim that reality is just a bunch of functions or numbers,like a photon, 12 electrons, a black hole whatever it their system is,  and then those numbers are axiomatized, by some of  people, as some sets). Then you compare ''the reality'' to the ''model'' and you try to fit the curve of the model on the data points of ''the reality''.
After this you read a book, where is written that the ''convention'' for determining ''the truth'' is to have a statistical significance both for the ''reality'' and the ''output of the model''. So for instance  people in biology or physics claim that ''the statistical significance'' for some ''repeatable experiment''  is ''3 sigma'' or some ''p value of whatever number they choose at this date of the conference''.

Then they publish their articles, they are happy about what they are doing, are more or less free in their daily life, and can even begin to critize other scientists as soon as a tenure is landed, they get some phd slaves to bring the coffee, they get their salary and a few awards if enough big names already approved have faith in their article. Of course the disputes arise when a few big names already in the fields trash the article and other big names in the field support the article. The people who did not do math and even less science beyond some PhD thesis are lost and they do not know who is the good guy to follow.
If the scientists are bored at the end of their career, they wonder what the hell they have been doing for 40 years, they read a bit of philosophy of science, which they did not during their career nor during their education, and those rationalists easily fall on their newest buzzword of ''intersubjectivty'', since the old buzzword of ''objectivty'' has been destroyed long time ago, or ''Model-dependent realism'' à la Hawking, aka ''I have no idea what scientist do at the end, but it is the best that we can do, trust me, keep supporting us so that we share kownledge right, truth and  kownledge is without border, and sharing is amazing, it is the essence of the humanity right, people are not nice to each other because they are not educated about this and do not benefit from the pleasing fruits of technology, that must be it, what else can it be anyway, be a good guy and let's be nice to each other'' and they die.