Why do people ____?

magfrump

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?

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.

And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."

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?

I can remember enjoying disrupting classes by passing slambooks (informal surveys on paper-- details available if anyone is interested). I didn't do it for the sake of disruption-- I was actually interested in the surveys, but I can remember the pleasure even if I don't exactly feel it any more.

I hated school because it was boring. I didn't exactly hate the teachers, but I didn't have any concept that they might want to teach something.

I'm not sure that status explains this adequately, but from the inside it felt as least as much as that I wanted to feel as though I wasn't of intractably low status rather than that I was trying to get higher status.

I hated school because it was boring. I didn't exactly hate the teachers, but I didn't have any concept that they might want to teach something.

Back when I was in highschool, a friend and I were accidentally sorted into a general level course, when by rights we should have been put in an AP-level course. Neither of us ever really got anything out of the teacher's lectures, and were able to ace the tests purely on knowledge gained from reading the textbook; consequently, we were bored out of our minds in class, and amused ourselves by competing to lure t... (read more)

9Viliam_Bur14y

A setting where one person is required to explain something and maintain discipline, and twenty persons don't care about the subject and are bored to death... is pretty much doomed to be frustrating for all participants. Is there a solution? Seems like an official solution is that every teacher is supposed to have some unspecified magical power which solves the problem. Confessing that I don't have this kind of power is very bad signalling in school, but I honestly don't, and I suspect neither do others. There is also a collection of non-magical powers (such as speaking clearly, putting things into proper context, inserting a few jokes, being fair and friendly, using analogies and pictures when necessary, etc) which sometimes work, but because of their lack of magic, they also sometimes fail. More often if someone is determined to make them fail, and there is no credible threat to stop them. How to fix it? One possibility is to make the lesson interesting to everyone. However, "interesting" is not an inherent property of the lesson, not even of the lesson+teacher configuration. (Many people fail to recognize this. They think there is a way to make the lesson inherently interesting, and a good teacher should be able to make it so.) A solution would be to make the lesson voluntary, but that is incompatible with the compulsory education. Other possibility is to cope with the boredom rationally; accept that it exists, that to some degree it is inevitable, and just try to minimize harm. Again, admitting this openly is bad signalling (that is, if a teacher admits it). How exactly would the rational solution look like? My offer would be "you can do what you want, as long as you are silent and do not distract me or your classmates, for example read a book, and there will be no consequences for doing it; however at the end of year you will be graded fairly based on your answers in the test". Unfortunately, such agreement with students below age 18 predictably fails. First

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