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?
When I want to gather friends together and don't feel like hosting, it's usually going to be on an evening; that rules out a lot of options already. The only things that are ubiquitous and comparable to bars for those purposes are restaurants, but it's a hassle asking everyone to have dinner at the same time, waiting for everyone to show up before ordering, etc. (Plus they're more expensive, and I'm more likely to have a friend who can't find anything there they'd like to eat.) So I default to bars.