This is really interesting, I'll be forwarding to my science writer friends for opinions.
Potentially interesting to some: we get the same phenomenon right here on HN regularly! To someone an advanced understanding of music theory (including western harmony, tuning systems, acoustics, psychoacoustics, doing a graduate degree, etc) HN is a regular source of armchair music theorists putting forth their own musical grand unified theories of everything without understanding the foundations. I guess, much like the field the author works in, the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly more complex. I'd say once a week or so I see posts on HN that are the musical equivalents. I used to answer with pointers to what one might want to learn or suggests books, but really, I have no idea what the right response to that sort of thing is. It's way, way more complicated than one would think coming from a tangentially related field. Perhaps similarly, the popular music theory writing out there creates the same effect.
Potentially interesting to some: we get the same phenomenon right here on HN regularly! To someone an advanced understanding of music theory (including western harmony, tuning systems, acoustics, psychoacoustics, doing a graduate degree, etc) HN is a regular source of armchair music theorists putting forth their own musical grand unified theories of everything without understanding the foundations. I guess, much like the field the author works in, the nature of it is that a strong understanding of a small piece leads one to easily believe there is this neat and tidy system of well behaving patterns when the reality is vastly more complex. I'd say once a week or so I see posts on HN that are the musical equivalents. I used to answer with pointers to what one might want to learn or suggests books, but really, I have no idea what the right response to that sort of thing is. It's way, way more complicated than one would think coming from a tangentially related field. Perhaps similarly, the popular music theory writing out there creates the same effect.