Upvoted, but I would note that it's interesting to see a moral value listed in a (supposedly value-neutral) "bad concepts repository". The idea that "deserve" in the sense in which you mention is a harmful and meaningless concept is a rather consequentialist notion, and seeing this so highly upvoted says something about the ethics that this community has adopted - and if I'm right in assuming that a lot of the upvoters probably thought this a purely factual confusion with no real ethical element, then it says a bit about the moral axioms that we tend to take for granted.
Again, not saying this as a criticism, just as something that I found interesting.
E.g. part of my morality used to say that if I only deserved some pleasures in case I had acted in the right ways or was good enough: and this had nothing to do with a consequentialist it-is-a-way-of-motivating-myself-to-act-right logic, it was simply an intrinsic value that I would to some extent have considered morally right to have even if possessing it was actively harmful. Somebody coming along and telling me that "in reality, your value is not grounded in any concrete mechanism" would have had me going "well, in that case your value of murder being bad is not grounded in any concrete mechanism either". (A comment saying that "the concept of murder can be harmful, since in reality there is no mechanism for determining what's murder" probably wouldn't have been upvoted.)
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.