4) It's a designated area for social interaction. If I did want to talk to a stranger, this is permitted in bars, whereas it's prohibited in most other venues. (Your mileage may vary here; The UK is a lot more staid about these things than the rest of Europe and North America.)
To the point where I sometimes wonder whether the UK has "bars" at all, of the sort being talked about. Go into any pub in the UK, and it will be mostly full of people in small groups who already know each other and went there to talk to each other. In a few specialised environments (e.g. a university campus during the first few weeks of a new year) it may be more common for strangers to strike up new acquaintances in "bars", but I'm not aware of anywhere where it's a general custom. Perhaps in "nightclubs", which I've never been in, but from observation of the queues outside such places, nobody goes to such a place alone, whatever they then do inside.
To the point where I sometimes wonder whether the UK has "bars" at all, of the sort being talked about. Go into any pub in the UK, and it will be mostly full of people in small groups who already know each other and went there to talk to each other. In a few specialised environments (e.g. a university campus during the first few weeks of a new year) it may be more common for strangers to strike up new acquaintances in "bars", but I'm not aware of anywhere where it's a general custom.
It's not the general custom in bars but you can do ...
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?