Bad Concepts Repository

moridinamael

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.

You say that Westergardian theory allows one to treat the music of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern as belonging to the same school as earlier Western music, as if this were a point in favor of that theory. To me, it is a proof that the theory is both wrong and destructive, because my aesthetic sense says that music is crap.

This is not really true, for a variety of reasons:

Schenker and Westergaard do not claim that their theory can explain atonal music. A claim that Schenckerian/Westergaardian analysis helps explain tonal music is much stronger than the claim about atonal music, and should be evaluated on its own merits. In particular, we know that Schencker was aware of early atonal music, and didn't like it.
People's "aesthetic sense" seems to be quite dependent on their musical experience. Modern atonal music was the result of a very gradual development of taking existing (e.g. tonal) music and adding more and more "atonality" (whatever that means: some would say dissonance, others would talk about modulation, or complexity). People generally learn to appreciate atonal music by retracing these developments gradually, and listening to more and more challenging pieces. Thus, while your aesthetic sense says that this music sucks, this may not prove much.
There is plenty of music that was clearly "not written using harmonic theory" insofar as harmonic theory (e.g. as detailed by Rameau's Treatise on Harmony) postdates it. And yet, Renaissance and Baroque period music (and even a lot of secular Medieval music) is generally appreciated, just as much as music written after harmony-based theories became established.

If you showed that Westergardian theory gave a simpler explanation of the music that I like, that would help convince me that it was a superior theory.

I do agree that this would be quite relevant.

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