An example of this that was told to me is imagine you're going to dinner with the in-laws (or maybe your best friend's parents). What would their reaction be if you took out your wallet and offered to pay them cash for the meal? As opposed to offering to e.g. bring a bottle of wine or helping to set the table?

Offering to pay might be the "transactional" trade meant by the grandparent. While offering to contribute [food | labour | goodwill] is more of the trading time in a leisure situation.

I remember reading on acoup that in agrarian societies, often they relied on favours and communal sharing in times of bounty. So say if I butchered a hog today, all my neighbours might get some. Not in exchange for something directly, but in the expectation that when I fall on hard times or they get a windfall, they'll do the same for me.

There's probably some potential for freeloading here, but these sorts of communities are likely often right on the edge of survival. If someone develops a reputation for being miserly, that might well result in them starving (or freezing) because they're rejected by their neighbours. So there's an incentive to at least appear generous and pay your fair share.

It's amazing to feel emotions I'd normally not want to express in everyday life and just let them flow out. Rage, jealousy, lust. The music is such a great trigger to tap into these primal feelings, and then expressing them through movement just feels incredible. It feels real and amazingly cathartic, but the transience of the experience leaves no consequences.

I guess that's why there's the saying dance like nobody's watching. Because for many people, that expression of feeling strips us down and leaves our feelings exposed and vulnerable .

Haven't reread recently, but it was interesting at the time, and sort of helpful for keeping me motivated to get myself out of a bit of a rut. What parts of his writing did you find to be indicative of abandoning intelligent debate?

But there are differences in the sexes with regards to the process of conceiving and rearing a child. And it seems to me that a big part of our social constructs that were developed to deal with those differences can be reduced to "the man doing something expensive and hard to fake". Which isn't really that different from "the man proving she matters to him by buying something".

Because practically, aren't ideas tied to people? I don't think you can have an idea survive without people keeping it alive. So how do you express intolerance for "bad" ideas without letting that expression bleed into an intolerance for the people propagating the "bad" idea?