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?
By adding more hours your productivity today may increase while your productivity tomorrow drops, because you didn't have enough sleep, because your neglected relationships are falling apart (and your bad mood affects your productivity at work), etc.
But today, it feels like a net gain.
And tomorrow... well, you will probably have to work overtime to compensate for your decreasing productivity. Also to keep up with your colleagues who are still in their "today" phase.
I agree that sometimes it makes rational sense to work harder than usual. But I also think humans are bad at calculating all the consequences. The work life gives us exact numbers as a feedback, while the personal life mostly gives us only a feeling that something is wrong... until the consequences accumulate and one gets some kind of boolean feedback, such as a divorce or a heart stroke, but by then it's kind of late to make a balance. So I guess most people in these professions err on the side of working more than is optimal for the best cost-to-output ratio. Problem is, when the other people are doing it, standing out of the crowd is usually very bad signalling.