I don't understand why people work ridiculously long and hard hours in Wall Street or the City for more money than they could ever use.
My brother works long hours on Wall Street. He says that most people in finance retire significantly earlier than the rest of the population. He also says that people working in finance generally value money more than time, and that this is a self-reinforcing system. People not willing to work long hours for a high hourly rate don't find the jobs attractive, and the people already hired prefer not to have extra help; the money to hire each extra person would, essentially, come directly out of their own salaries.
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?