There are plausible reasons for humans to have evolved this trait. One of the most complicated tasks a human has to do is predict the actions of other humans.
The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis suggests that this is entirely the reason for our species' level of intelligence. Hence chemistry professors using expressions like "electrons want to get to a lower energy state", as if electrons have desires of their own. That sentence makes a lot more intuitive sense to a human brain than "electrons just sort of always do this. Because of math."
Today's post, A Failed Just-So Story was originally published on 05 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Rational vs Scientific Ev-Psych, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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