There are some people I don't engage with because I don't expect my engagement to leave either of us better off than my non-engagement.
There are many people I don't engage with because I don't expect their response to my engagement to leave me better off than their response to my non-engagement and I don't much care about how it leaves them.
The sets of circumstances that leads me to those expectations and those values are many and varied, and I don't know how I could begin to summarize the general case.
What set of circumstances (or can you think of a set of circumstances that) would cause you TO respond?
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?