alt Hacker NewsYes, this is what has always blocked me from learning even basic music theory.
I get that maybe it's just the way it is, perhaps the underlying logic is so complex that it would be counterproductive to present it up front. I'm not saying that the theory should adapt to my pet peeves. But I'm very prone to learn things by understanding first principles and building from there. Having to memorize scales where suddenly you need to skip keys or use black keys without much apparent logic is a real deterrent for me considering it's something I learn as a hobby.
This is also the reason why I like algebra, calculus, etc. but dislike statistics... in algebra or calculus you start from first principles and work up from there understanding everything. In statistics (at least the way I was taught) you are shown the formula for the probability density of the Gaussian distribution and need to accept it as an act of faith.
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Depends on your stats class. The one I took in college started from first principles, and was focused on proofs.
what you seem to look for is a book about psychoacoustics. but even on that level you'll just have to accept that for some unknown reason humans consider certain pitch ratios as pleasant and even those that sound unpleasant have their place to express dissonance and tension and it's culturally dependent also. eventually there will be first attempts at a general music theory of which the western key based frameworks are special cases.