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.
Ego depletion. Well, the idea that self-control takes effort, and that the ability can be cultivated, goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, and I would be unsurprised to find it in all cultures everywhere throughout human history. It seems quite likely true.
I'm not sure what value experimental psychologists have added to this piece of universal folk psychology, because of general concerns like Ioannidis' work and the extraordinarily parochial range of experimental subjects that a lot of experimental psychology uses. Ioannidis studied medical research, but psychological research has in principle all of the same hazards plus a few of its own: the WEIRD issue, and the fact that most of the entities studied do not have the same objective existence as those of medicine. You can exhibit someone's liver, but not their "self-control". I would be interested to see someone do for psychology what Ioannidis has done for medicine.
So, ego depletion, fine. Everyday phenomenon known to everyone. What of it? BTW, it's curious that although the Wikipedia article begins by describing it as "a model that relates self-control to a muscle, which can become both strengthened and fatigued", all of the experiments described there relate only to weakening. The strengthening part gets left out.
Since it's costing me 5 karma per post to post down here, I'll try and respond in advance to what I think your answer would be to my "What of it?", not because I'm concerned about the karma, but because I agree with the norm of not prolonging downvoted discussions.
If someone is overwhelmed by a crisis, well, then, they are overwhelmed by a crisis. There is no point in telling them then that they could have dealt with it better had they been better prepared to handle such things. The time to become prepared is before the crisis. Soldiers are not trained by throwing them straight into battle with equipment they know nothing about.
And yet, that side of the ego depletion metaphor is little studied.
Annoyingly, this exchange feels like it's starting to get somewhere interesting now.
My response to "what of it" would kind of along those lines, but rather than having some sort of binary state of crisis/not-crisis, there are ongoing areas or subjects in one's life that are cognitively expensive to think about. These subjects might popularly be called "unresolved issues", but that carries a lot of unnecessary connotations.
An especially banal personal example is a task I have to occasionally do at work, which involves dealing with a par... (read more)