It depends. There is a difference between disruption with a goal to get more information, and a disruption for the sake of disruption. Some people disrupt classes because they don't pay for them (state or parents pay), because they don't care about the lesson, and disrupting a lesson is a method of signalling high status and reducing the amount of transferred knowledge.
Disrupting someone's lesson shows your high status against them (attacking someone with impunity) and against your classmates (you had the courage to do it first). This is why having one disruptive student per classroom is often manageable (they assert their status, and are happy with it), but having two or three is a disaster (it becomes a competition between them).
Reducing transferred knowledge makes sense if you can later bargain that you shouldn't be examined for knowledge you did not receive during the lesson (thus by disrupting you reduce your necessary learning for exams); and it also reduces your competitive disadvantage against classmates who try to pay attention during the lesson (this last motive was explicitly explained to me by a few extra rude students).
I did private teaching, teaching at public schools, and teaching employees. The behavior depends on whether the person comes to the lesson willingly, whether they are interested in topic, and whether they are in the age interval 13-17 (when they get most status from their peers for destructive behavior).
There is a difference between disruption with a goal to get more information, and a disruption for the sake of disruption. [...] disrupting a lesson is a method of signalling high status and reducing the amount of transferred knowledge.
I think you're leaving out a category. My primary reason for asking questions or making comments during lectures is to signal high status (specifically, to show that I'm an unusually intelligent person who knows things that aren't on the curriculum), but I'm not trying to be maliciously disruptive or hinder other people's learning; rather, it's somewhat gratifying, seemingly harmless, and most professors seem to like it ("class participation").
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?