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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on The Danger of Invisible Problems - Less Wrong Discussion
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The human ability to adapt to changing circumstances is high. And especially the ancestral environment allowed little to do about such things. Clearly exhibiting such 'failures' (and calling for help constitutes this) probably reduced your reproductive fitness (I can't give references for this but I vaguely remember that birds show outward signs of illness only prior to it being deadly).
This hypothesis makes some interesting predictions, such as being more willing to display failures to close family than to extended family - if the problem is due to an infectious disease then alerting your close relatives will increase your inclusive fitness more because they can shield themselves from you, while the benefits to displaying it to extended family will be less likely to outweigh the downside of shunning.
I've noticed cats are the same way, they only show signs of something being wrong when they're very sick.