Well, comparisons with meth, cocaine or weed seem a little extreme. After all, music doesn’t cause any physical addictions, I’m not actually aware if music causes any addictions.
Is there no value in pleasure? That seems counterintuitive, really. People value pleasure a lot, and you need some pleasure to enjoy life.
Do you also not eat sweets, as they are unhealthy, thus have negative value? Do you not take leisurely walks in nature, as they are time wasting? Do you not watch movies, shows? Read fiction? Have pets?
Music is a pretty “clean” source of pleasure compared to what a lot of people choose. Other than a little focus on what you are doing, music doesn’t really have any “side effects”.
If you’re looking for studies then the thing with contrarian claims is that they exist because so far there weren’t any. However I can give out a logical argument for why that’s the case. Humans use language to communicate, reason, learn, etc. Music exploits the reward circuitry responsible for learning language (I can further give proof for this). By listening to music you are severely limiting your ability to do or improve in anything language related. Because the reward circuitry is “exhausted” from prior listening to music.
That’s interesting, I would for sure need some empirical evidence to be fully convinced, but the only problem I have with your argument is “severely limiting your ability to do or improve in anything language related”.
The word “severe” implies a great difference between people who listen to music, and those who don’t. I think such a difference would be apparent, and my anecdotal personal experience doesn’t correlate with it.
Musicians would have to near incoherent to talk to, considering how much music they listen to.
Musicians would have to near incoherent to talk to
Not that severe...
However speaking as someone with success on informatics olympiads (requiring verbal reasoning) I do believe that avoiding music can give some useful edge.
That is the problem I have with your argument: not listening to music only gives an “edge”. This edge, for now, lies in the realm of anecdotal evidence. You can say “I have seen this person who didn’t listen to music and he was good at verbal reasoning” and I can i say “I have seen this person who did listen to music and he was good at verbal reasoning” and this won’t prove anything really.
To have such claims you need empirical evidence to base your assumptions on. For example this study reached an opposite conclusion that music instead helps speech-related problems, and learning music can help train your brain.
You don’t need empirical evidence to reason from first principles. In math we do that all the time.
I’d expect that people listening more to music might even be better verbally. But that’s simply because their brain is more oriented for this language learning which also causes more rewards from music. So correlation not causation.
This is basically my outline for proof:
something gives humans value → it gives us pleasure (evolution in most cases tried its best to make sure this is true)
it gives pleasure → something gives human value ∨ exploits some property of rewards system that generally in ancestral environment resulted in value
music gives pleasure, now i will show it exploits some property of reward system and we all known the disproportionate evidence to its value given how much pleasure it gives, so since we know it doesn’t give value it is already reasonable to suspect that it exploits our brain, but i will further drive this point by showing how exactly does it do that
our reward system especially in humans evolved rewards for predicting audio tokens, eg. to learn speech more effectively, music is mostly about lots of very easily predictable impactful audio tokens, this model of music already explains why we like similar genres, why music usually sounds better after second listen, explains its structure, probably many more things
we have seen in AIs just how effective learning mechanism prediction of tokens is
Not infrequently, I listen to music with lyrics in a language that I don’t understand well, alongside which I sometimes do things like listen carefully to the pronunciation, or look up the meaning and consciously nudge myself to associate the words I didn’t previously know. I’m not serious enough about this to measure, but from self-observation it seems like I’ve picked up or reinforced a noticeable amount of language patterns via exposure (indeed, implicit and untuned spaced repetition) that way. Lyrics being a form of poetry broadly, and especially the use of children’s music in early learning more specifically (where my guess would be that the use of melody might help anchor the representations in memory), also seem suggestive of pro-language-acquisition music activities. How does your model treat this?
I’ve already outlined the model. This really was just a test of Lesswrong. I think what I’ve said will be an obvious accepted truth in the future. Either once we’ll get AIs capable of deducing contrarian things from first principles or once our society grows up a bit. I don’t want to argue my side more tbh but what you’ve outlined is just one example of a very rare usecase of music which really doesn’t disprove anything.
Alright @dirk I’m happy to make a bet since you think it’s less than one percent I’m going to be generous and give you 8:2 odds. Eg. you put up $800 I’ll put up $200. And once we’ll have truth seeking AI whether it will confirm that my model is correct.
I said the similarity is in “all pleasure no value”. Pleasure is an evolved signal for value usually, but oftentimes it can be exploited eg. with sweets too fatty foods. So saying there is “value in pleasure” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Following pleasure signals like the activities you have shown (besides cats) is usually a good idea. Altho sometimes the pleasure can be simply explained as with drugs as some form of exploit of our imperfect brains, in which case there is indeed no value.
I can’t wrap my head around your argument. For example:
Imagine a shop cashier, he came back home after a whole day of dealing with angry customers, unreasonable management, poor working conditions and is just simply miserable with life. So he decides to smoke some weed to relax and to make life seem a little bit less miserable.
Is it worse than other options of pleasure? Sure. Does it have no value? I think he would be much more miserable, and perhaps do something drastic. Does this have no value?
Yes if it’s that or something drastic that would indeed be value. But would you say that smoking weed therefore gives value in general? I wouldn’t. Also oftentimes our brain learns to reach these emotional states because we reinforce it with the follow up reward.
In context of humans it’d probably make sense to define value as improving our inclusive fitness (the evolved utility function). But it could also be many other things, for instance money made in one’s lifetime.
Well, comparisons with meth, cocaine or weed seem a little extreme. After all, music doesn’t cause any physical addictions, I’m not actually aware if music causes any addictions.
Is there no value in pleasure? That seems counterintuitive, really. People value pleasure a lot, and you need some pleasure to enjoy life.
Do you also not eat sweets, as they are unhealthy, thus have negative value? Do you not take leisurely walks in nature, as they are time wasting? Do you not watch movies, shows? Read fiction? Have pets?
Music is a pretty “clean” source of pleasure compared to what a lot of people choose. Other than a little focus on what you are doing, music doesn’t really have any “side effects”.
And yes there are “side effects”. Just harder to observe.
I would love to see your source for this statement, I’m not aware of any big side effects, and would like to educate myself.
If you’re looking for studies then the thing with contrarian claims is that they exist because so far there weren’t any.
However I can give out a logical argument for why that’s the case.
Humans use language to communicate, reason, learn, etc. Music exploits the reward circuitry responsible for learning language (I can further give proof for this). By listening to music you are severely limiting your ability to do or improve in anything language related. Because the reward circuitry is “exhausted” from prior listening to music.
That’s interesting, I would for sure need some empirical evidence to be fully convinced, but the only problem I have with your argument is “severely limiting your ability to do or improve in anything language related”.
The word “severe” implies a great difference between people who listen to music, and those who don’t. I think such a difference would be apparent, and my anecdotal personal experience doesn’t correlate with it.
Musicians would have to near incoherent to talk to, considering how much music they listen to.
Not that severe...
However speaking as someone with success on informatics olympiads (requiring verbal reasoning) I do believe that avoiding music can give some useful edge.
That is the problem I have with your argument: not listening to music only gives an “edge”. This edge, for now, lies in the realm of anecdotal evidence. You can say “I have seen this person who didn’t listen to music and he was good at verbal reasoning” and I can i say “I have seen this person who did listen to music and he was good at verbal reasoning” and this won’t prove anything really.
To have such claims you need empirical evidence to base your assumptions on. For example this study reached an opposite conclusion that music instead helps speech-related problems, and learning music can help train your brain.
You don’t need empirical evidence to reason from first principles. In math we do that all the time.
I’d expect that people listening more to music might even be better verbally. But that’s simply because their brain is more oriented for this language learning which also causes more rewards from music. So correlation not causation.
This is basically my outline for proof:
something gives humans value → it gives us pleasure (evolution in most cases tried its best to make sure this is true)
it gives pleasure → something gives human value ∨ exploits some property of rewards system that generally in ancestral environment resulted in value
music gives pleasure, now i will show it exploits some property of reward system and we all known the disproportionate evidence to its value given how much pleasure it gives, so since we know it doesn’t give value it is already reasonable to suspect that it exploits our brain, but i will further drive this point by showing how exactly does it do that
our reward system especially in humans evolved rewards for predicting audio tokens, eg. to learn speech more effectively, music is mostly about lots of very easily predictable impactful audio tokens, this model of music already explains why we like similar genres, why music usually sounds better after second listen, explains its structure, probably many more things
we have seen in AIs just how effective learning mechanism prediction of tokens is
Not infrequently, I listen to music with lyrics in a language that I don’t understand well, alongside which I sometimes do things like listen carefully to the pronunciation, or look up the meaning and consciously nudge myself to associate the words I didn’t previously know. I’m not serious enough about this to measure, but from self-observation it seems like I’ve picked up or reinforced a noticeable amount of language patterns via exposure (indeed, implicit and untuned spaced repetition) that way. Lyrics being a form of poetry broadly, and especially the use of children’s music in early learning more specifically (where my guess would be that the use of melody might help anchor the representations in memory), also seem suggestive of pro-language-acquisition music activities. How does your model treat this?
I’ve already outlined the model. This really was just a test of Lesswrong. I think what I’ve said will be an obvious accepted truth in the future. Either once we’ll get AIs capable of deducing contrarian things from first principles or once our society grows up a bit.
I don’t want to argue my side more tbh but what you’ve outlined is just one example of a very rare usecase of music which really doesn’t disprove anything.
Alright @dirk I’m happy to make a bet since you think it’s less than one percent I’m going to be generous and give you 8:2 odds. Eg. you put up $800 I’ll put up $200. And once we’ll have truth seeking AI whether it will confirm that my model is correct.
I said the similarity is in “all pleasure no value”. Pleasure is an evolved signal for value usually, but oftentimes it can be exploited eg. with sweets too fatty foods. So saying there is “value in pleasure” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Following pleasure signals like the activities you have shown (besides cats) is usually a good idea. Altho sometimes the pleasure can be simply explained as with drugs as some form of exploit of our imperfect brains, in which case there is indeed no value.
Can you clarify what you mean by “value”?
I can’t wrap my head around your argument. For example:
Imagine a shop cashier, he came back home after a whole day of dealing with angry customers, unreasonable management, poor working conditions and is just simply miserable with life. So he decides to smoke some weed to relax and to make life seem a little bit less miserable.
Is it worse than other options of pleasure? Sure. Does it have no value? I think he would be much more miserable, and perhaps do something drastic. Does this have no value?
Yes if it’s that or something drastic that would indeed be value. But would you say that smoking weed therefore gives value in general? I wouldn’t. Also oftentimes our brain learns to reach these emotional states because we reinforce it with the follow up reward.
In context of humans it’d probably make sense to define value as improving our inclusive fitness (the evolved utility function). But it could also be many other things, for instance money made in one’s lifetime.