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?
For many people, alcohol raises talkativeness and lowers inhibition, so you're more likely to say things you normally wouldn't (in vino veritas). Sharing private things is a friendship-builder (HPMOR 7), but it can also be embarrassing. Drinking is a pre-commitment to build friendship through potentially embarrassing interactions, and when you abstain, you're saying, "I'll hear your secrets, but keep mine, thank you very much," which is a suspicious and untrustworthy kind of stance.
To the extent the above is true, it's too bad, because
Pre-commitment is only necessarily bad in for perfectly rational agents in one-player games without akrasia. In multi-player games (the ones where CDT doesn't work, e.g. Parfit's Hitchhiker), or if you have akrasia (which can be described as you acting as a different player than yourself at a different time), pre-commitment does win in certain situations. That's the whole point of picoeconomics, including pre-commitment devices such as Beeminder.
Plus, alcohol is not such a strong pr... (read more)