Shouldn't sympathy for the target of criticism kill the fun? Like you imagine doing something hurtful, then you picture the other person, hurt.
You're expecting lots of people to perform the extra work of imagining that.
But thrilling?
Yeah, many people get positive feelings from being swept up in crowd behavior, like laughing at a comedy or applauding at the end of a great performance. Booing is a similar behavior.
Personally, I think it's just that it's considered acceptable feedback. It's appropriate to laugh, cheer, clap, or boo depending on context. The performers get honest feedback from the audience.
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?