Bad Concepts Repository

Mostly, the result I anticipate from "should"ing a norm-violator is that other members of my tribe in the vicinity will be marginally more likely to back me up and enforce the tribal norms I've invoked by "should"ing. That is, it's a political act that exerts social pressure. (Among the tribal members who might be affected by this is the norm-violator themselves.)

Alternative formulas like "you'll get more of what you want if you don't do that!" or "I prefer you not do that!" or "I and others will shame you if you do that!" don't seem to work as well for this purpose.

But of course you're correct that some norm-violators don't respond to that at all, and that some norm-violations (e.g. murder) are sufficiently problematic that we prefer the violator be physically prevented from continuing the violation.

Saying "you should x" (in the moral sense of the word) is just equivalent to saying "I would prefer you to x", but with bonus social pressure.

I really think this is a bad summarization of how moral injuctions act. People often feel a conflict for example between "I should X" and "I would prefer to not-X". If a parent has to choose between saving their own child, and a thousand other children, they may very well prefer to save their own child, but recognize that morality dictated they should have saved the thousand other children.

My own guess about the connection between morality and preferences is that morality is an unconscious estimation of our preferences about a situation, while trying to remove the bias of our personal stakes in it. (E.g. the parent recognizes that if their own child wasn't involved, if they were just hearing about the situation without personal stakes in it, they would prefer that a thousand children be saved rather that only one.)

If my guess is correct it would also explain why there's disagreement about whether morality is objective or subjective (morality is a personal preference, but it's also an attempt to remove personal biases - it's by itself an attempt to move from subjective preferences to objective preferences).

Objective morality is meaningless, and subjective morality reduces to preferences.

These aren't the only two possibilities. Lots of important aspects of the world are socially constructed. There's no objective truth about the owner of a given plot of land, but it's not purely subjective either -- and if you don't believe me, try explaining it to the judge if you are arrested for trespassing.

Social norms about morality are constructed socially, and are not simply the preferences or feelings of any particular individual. It's perfectly coherent for somebody to say "society believes X is immoral but I don't personally think it's wrong". I think it's even coherent for somebody to say "X is immoral but I intend to do it anyway."

"Should" is not part of any logically possible territory, in the moral sense at least. Objective morality is meaningless, and subjective morality reduces to preferences.

Subjectivity is part of the territory.

International espionage is probably one of the worst examples to attempt to generalize concepts like justice from. It's probably better to start with simpler (and more common) examples like theft or murder and then use the concepts developed on the simpler examples to look at the more complicated one.

The lesson is to not let rare pathological cases ruin useful generalizations (at least not outside of formal mathematics).

By the way even in formal mathematics (and maybe especially in formal mathematics), while pathological cases are interesting, nobody discards perfectly useful theories just because the theory allows pathologies. For example, nobody hesitates to use measure theory in spite the Banach-Tarski paradox; nobody hesitates to use calculus even though the Weierstrass function exists; few people hesitate in using the Peano axioms in spite of the existence of non-standard models of that arithmetic.

However, some people take "strictly better" too, um, strictly, and try to point out weird cases where you would prefer to have the seemingly worse card. Often these scenarios involve Mindslaver

Ahh, that would do it. The enemy being the one who uses the card would tend to make inferiority desirable in rather a lot of cases.

Sorry if it was confusing but you are taking it out of context. I actually meant: the fact that we don't have a proportional number of old people in TV/movies as in real life is not because we respect old people less in real life. It is simply a reflection of the freedoms available in TV/movies.

I've used up my Discussion Post powers [...] I now need to rest in my crypt [...]

OK, I'm confused. (Probably because I'm missing a joke.) Reading the above in isolation I'd take it as indicating that you posted something that got you a big ball o' negative karma, which brought you below some threshold that meant you couldn't post to Discussion any more.

Except that your "weird alliances" post is at +7, and your total karma is over 4k, and your last-30-days karma is over 200, and none of your posts or comments in the last week or so is net negative, and those are all very respectable numbers and surely don't disqualify anyone from doing anything.

So, as I say, I seem to be missing a joke. Oh well.

Ok, I'll post about this in the open thread to gauge interest / see if anyone else knows of a pre-existing LW post on these specific obviousness problems.

The link is to a comment.

Thanks for your feedback on the Westergaard text. I think many of your problems will be addressed by the material I plan to write at some indefinite point in the future. It's unfortunate that ITT is the only exposition of Westergaardian theory available (and even it is not technically "available", being out of print), because your issues seem to be with the book and not with the theory that the book aims to present.

There is considerable irony in what you say about aural skills, because I consider the development of aural skills -- even at the most elementary levels -- to be a principal practical use of Westergaardian theory. Unfortunately, Westergaard seems not to have fully appreciated this aspect of his theory's power, because he requests of the reader a rather sophisticated level of aural skills (namely the ability to read and mentally hear a Mozart passage) as a prerequisite for the book -- rather unnecessarily, in my opinion.

This leads to the point about counterpoint exercises, which, if designed properly, should be easier to mentally "hear" than real music -- that is, indeed, their purpose. Unfortunately, this is not emphasized enough in ITT.

I think that your comparison is very interesting because I would predict that a phrasebook is much more useful than a grammar text for learning a language

Thank goodness I'm here to set you straight, then. Phrasebooks are virtually useless for learning to speak a language. Indeed they are specifically designed for people who don't want to learn the language, but merely need to memorize a few phrases (hence the name), for -- as I said -- ad hoc purposes. (Asking where the bathroom is, what someone's name is, whether they speak English, that sort of thing.)

Here's an anecdote to illustrate the problem with phrasebooks. When I was about 10 years old and had just started learning French, my younger sister got the impression that pel was the French word for "is". The reason? I had informed her that the French translation of "my name is" was je m'appelle -- a three syllable expression whose last syllable is indeed pronounced pel. What she didn't realize was that the three syllables of the French phrase do not individually correspond to the three syllables of the English phrase. Pel does not mean "is"; rather, appelle means "call", je means "I", and m' means "myself". Though translated "my name is", the phrase actually means "I call myself".

A phrasebook won't tell you this; a grammar will. If you try to learn French from a phrasebook, you might successfully learn to introduce yourself with je m'appelle, but you will be in my sister's position, doomed to making false assumptions about the structure of the language that may require vast amounts of data to correct. (It's no defense of a wrong theory that it didn't prevent you from learning the right theory eventually.) Whereas if you learn from a grammar, not only will you learn je m'appelle without thinking pel means "is", but you will also be able to generalize outside the scope of the "Greetings" section of your phrasebook and produce apparently unrelated phrases such as "I call you" (je t'appelle).

I think your comments are revealing about the mindset of people who resist or "don't get" my attack on harmonic theory. It seems to be assumed that of course no one actually learns musical thinking from a harmony book. Likewise, in defending phrasebooks, you help yourself to the assumption that the learner is going to have access to extensive amounts of data in the form of communication with speakers, and that this will be where the "actual learning" is going to occur. Well in that case, what do you need a phrasebook for? You can, after all, learn a language simply by immersion, with nothing other than the data itself to guide you. If you're going to have any preliminary or supplementary instruction at all, it surely may as well be in an organized fashion, aimed at increasing the efficiency of the learning process by directing one toward correct theories and away from incorrect ones -- which is exactly what grammar books do and phrasebooks don't do.

Harmony is actually worse than a phrasebook, because at least a phrasebook won't cause you to make worse mistakes than you would make otherwise; and it doesn't pretend to be a grammar of the language. With harmony, the situation is different. Harmony books are written as if they were presenting an actual musical theory, something that would be useful to know before sifting through vast amounts of musical data doing, as you put it, "actual learning". But then, when push comes to shove and it is pointed out how terrible, how actively misleading the harmony pseudo-theory is for this purpose, its defenders retreat to a position of "oh, well, of course everybody knows that you can't actually learn music from a book" -- as if that were a defense against an alternative theory that actually is helpful. It's enough to drive one mad!

(You'll understand, I hope, that I'm not reacting particularly to you in the preceding paragraph, but to my whole history of such discussions going back a number of years.)

Wow, thanks!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

I have to learn everything several times.

I understand and sympathize. (It wasn't that I thought I converted you to my view, but that I thought I had done a better job of conveying what my complaints about harmonic theory were.)

I don't see how I've misunderstood your claim.

The misunderstanding is most evident when you write a phrase like:

things written using harmonic theory

which begs the whole question. You assume that harmonic theory is an accurate description of "how those things are written", which is the very thing I deny. You seem to be confusing music theory with music, which is like mixing up the map and the territory.

We agree that the test of a theory of music is whether it helps one compose good music

Not quite. At least, the emphasis is on "helps", not on "good". You should think of a work of music (including its aesthetic qualities) being held fixed when we evaluate theories; the parameter we're measuring that determines how good the theory is is how easily the theory allows us to produce the music in question.

(Furthermore, it certainly can't be the case that harmonic theory's classifications track your likes and dislikes. After all, you apparently don't like Beethoven's Great Fugue, and yet as far as harmonic theory is concerned it's in the same category as his other works, which you do like.)

But even then, calling it a bad concept would be like calling Newtonian physics a bad concept because it doesn't explain motion at relativistic speeds.

I disagree that harmonic theory is anywhere near as good as Newtonian physics. I would instead compare it -- unfavorably -- to pre-Darwinian theories of biodiversity. I specifically believe it to be one of the worst theories of all time (whereas Newtonian physics is one of the best).

I agree that whether "the standard set of harmony concepts" is actually superseded by Schenkerian/Westergaardian analysis is not really obvious.

If you don't find it obvious after studying Westergaard and comparing it to (say) Piston, then my best guess is that you're relying on tacit musical knowledge that you don't realize others lack, or which you mistakenly think is being communicated in Piston (etc.) but which actually isn't.

Westergaard has a highly non-trivial theory of what counts as "consonance" or "dissonance" in a melodic line, which is roughly equivalent to "harmony" in standard music theory.

Not so -- there is nothing in Westergaard about root progressions (Rameau's "fundamental bass"), which is the defining concept of "harmony" in the traditional (theoretical) sense. Consonance and dissonance are part of traditional contrapuntal theory, which goes back to long before Rameau. (Yes, Westergaard does draw on the tradition of contrapuntal theory, as did Schenker.)

The other way that traditional "harmony" is recovered is that this kind of analysis allows for a note in the 'background'/'deep' structure to be tonicized over, effectively becoming a "temporary tonic" and admitting the construction of tonic triads ('arpeggiation').

Again, if you think this is what is meant by "harmony", you are missing the point. (Yes, Rameau kinda sorta had this idea as part of his theory -- but not really. It's really a Schenkerian idea.)

In harmonic theory, the "hierarchy" has only two levels of structure: a note is either part of the chord, or not part of the chord ("nonharmonic tones"). In Westergaardian theory (as in Schenkerian theory), there is no limit to the number of levels. Take the Mozart analysis that folds out from the back of the Westergaard book. The data in that analysis cannot be expressed in terms of harmonic theory. The latter is simply not rich enough. All you can do in harmonic theory is write Roman numerals under the score, which (at best) might be considered roughly equivalent to showing one level of reduction in the Westergaardian analysis (though not really, because the Roman numerals only contain pitch-class information, not pitch information like the Westergaardian version; plus harmonic theory's "chords" frequently and typically mix up different levels of Westergaardian structure).

Hopefully you can take my comment as an application of the principle of charity to PhilGoetz rather than a critique of your comment that he was responding to.

("Harmony is a bad concept?! But all my favorite music was written using that concept!")

things like episodic memories (separated from believing the information contained in them)

I'm not sure what you're saying here; you think of your memories as part of your identity?

realtionship[sic] in neutral groups such as a family or a fandom, precommitments, or mannerisms?

These memberships are all heuristics for expected interactions with people. Nothing actionable is lost if you bayes-induct for each situation separately, save the effort you're using to compute and the cognitive biases and emotional reactions you get from claiming "membership". Alternately you could still use the membership heuristic, but with a mental footnote that you're only using it because it's convenient, and there are senses in which the membership's representation of you may be misleading.

In case it wasn't clear, my comment on the universe felling guilty was my way of pointing out the futility of considering the universe unfair.

Do you disagree with any of this?

No.

It's entirely possible that you're talking about a completely different usage of these terms, but they certainly seem to have legitimate usage. Telling, say, a PTSD-sufferer to "just update already" would not be productive.

I agree that when someone is in the thick of something like that, there's no point in telling them to just get over it. In that context it would be the sort of useless and obnoxious advice that consists of telling someone with a problem that they just need to solve the problem.

However, it is possible to get over things effectively, and not wallow in jam-tomorrow "working through". The right time to acquire that skill, of neither ignoring the feelings nor obsessing over them, but instead attending to what needs to be done, is when there is no overwhelming trauma in progress.