Less Wrong's Markdown implementation doesn't allow HTML, and there's no way to do tables in the non-HTML part of Markdown, except for using spaces to separate the columns so that they line up in a fixed-width font, then indenting each line by four spaces.
| | Projected Monetary | Projected Opportunity |
| Available Funds | Cost of Attending | Cost of Not Attending | End Result
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Friend | $600 | $600 | Unknown (Possibly Nought) | Known loss of monetary funds
| | | | - unknown opportunity cost
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Other | $3,000 | $1,200 | Lifelong Saudade | Worthwhile expenditure of
| | | | time & funds
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
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?