In a tribal environment lying about status carries higher risks.
I agree, and that would imply that today's environment favors acting high status. And in fact I have a pet theory that the increase in urbanization and mobility in, say, the 1900s have led to a shift to more socially aggressive short-term status posturing behaviors (vs. carefully cultivating a reputation long-term.) This accounts, among other things, for the rise of the "self-esteem" movement as well as the recent rise of pickup artistry, which in its initial forms was nothing more than a way to rachet up your apparent status, unsustainably, fo...
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?