It is not surprising that there aren't a proportional number of old people in TV/movies right now. And I suspect there never were. TV/movie audience desire to view people who possess high-status markers. Two important markers are beauty and power. In reality, younger people typically have beauty but not much power. Older people have more power and less beauty. Since TV/movies don't have the constraints of reality, we can make young people who are beautiful also powerful. We can rarely make old people beautiful with some exceptions, which TV/movies often exploit. I don't think this has anything to do with respect.
TV/movie audience desire to view people who possess high-status markers...I don't think this has anything to do with respect
This is a contradiction.
We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository. It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were. Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.
I'll start us off with one simple example: The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long. I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms. (And I went to a *good* high school.) Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?
There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction. Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.
Bad concepts don't have to be scientific. Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here. There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics. But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.