1) doing something you do (claim to) not enjoy 2) Participating in a tribal ritual that seems to make everyone worse off by having to do an activity they dont enjoy. (A group that is locked into doing something few members actually want to do.)
1) Even if the group would be better off if nobody did the activity, it doesn't follow that the individuals are stupid if they are participating. (I don't think the adjective "stupid" is applicable to group decisions which are a Nash equilibrium.)
2) I seriously dispute the assumption that everybody is doing an activity they don't enjoy. Most sports fans enjoy their fandom. Now I watch sports much less than in my high-school years where I had much more opportunities to discuss football or ice hockey with my friends - therefore I know how important...
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?