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?
Why is malice addictive?
I'm talking about malice which goes way beyond anything which could be expected to raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success.
For example, some people put huge numbers of hours into trolling, and while some people are in troll sub-cultures so there's local status to be gained, I don't get the impression that's a large fraction of trolling.
There are more than a few parents who engage in emotionally and physically abusing their children, and it's a long campaign of causing misery. Some of it can be reasonably interpreted as a failed effort to get the children to pursue status or at least not lower their parents' status, but not nearly all abuse falls into that category.
Self-hatred can go on for a very long time as a compulsion.
The set of comments to this post are what I consider another example of the relative social(?) weaknesses the typical population of Less Wrong has compared to the general population.
If this question was asked of a college humanities class, a subset of the answers would be much better than these and the class as a whole would be better at identifying the answers that are more correct.
There are some answers below that are fine, but they're not said with enough confidence, and the 'ev psych' answers are not reliable. Not because ev psych can't hit upon an an... (read more)