Few people respond positively to being told something like that. At best, maybe you'd get a crestfallen "oh... okay." Otherwise, they might try to talk you into changing your mind, or get angry, or act out to try to get your attention, or try to save face by discrediting you behind your back. Given those possibilities, why would you give an explanation?
Certainly this could be true in many cases; but I like to think that I have demonstrated in most cases that I will react in good faith to these sorts of things.
Is there a sort of person with whom you would give an explanation? Someone you knew would be much happier with even a short explanation and not bother you about it?
What sort of evidence would it take for someone to convince you they were that kind of person?
The reason I ask is that I have honestly never even once in my life been even the tiniest bit concerned about someone trying to discredit me be...
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?