Should we listen to music? This seems like a high-value thing to think about.* Some considerations:

• Music masks distractions. But we can get the same effect through alternatives such as white noise, calming environmental noise, or ambient social noise.

• Music creates distractions. It causes interruptions. It forces us to switch our attention between tasks. For instance, listening to music while driving increases the risk of accidents.

• We seem to enjoy listening to music. Anecdotally, when I've gone on "music fasts", music starts to sound much better and I develop cravings for music. This may indicate that this is a treadmill system, such that listening to music does not produce lasting improvements in mood. (That is, if enjoyment stems from relative change in quality/quantity of music and not from absolute quality/quantity, then we likely cannot obtain a lasting benefit.)

• Frequency of music-listening correlates (.18) with conscientiousness. I'd guess the causation's in the wrong direction, though.

• Listening to random music (e.g. a multi-genre playlist on shuffle) will randomize emotion and mindstate. Entropic influences on sorta-optimized things (e.g. mindstate) are usually harmful. And the music-listening people do nowadays is very unlike EEA conditions, which is usually bad.

(These are the product of 30 minutes of googling; I'm asking you, not telling you.)

Here are some ways we could change our music-listening patterns:

• Music modifies emotion. We could use this to induce specific useful emotions. For instance, for productivity, one could listen to a long epic music mix.

• Stop listening to music entirely, and switch to various varieties of ambient noise. Moderate ambient noise seems to be best for thinking.

• Use music only as reinforcement for desired activities. I wrote a plugin to implement this for Anki. Additionally, music benefits exercise, so we might listen to music only at the gym. The treadmill-like nature of music enjoyment (see above) may be helpful here, as it would serve to regulate e.g. exercise frequency - infrequent exercise would create music cravings which would increase exercise frequency, and vice versa.

• Listen only to educational music. Unfortunately, not much educational music for adults exists. We could get around this by overlaying regular music with text-to-speeched educational material or with audiobooks.

* I've been doing quantitative attention-allocation optimization lately, and "figure out whether to stop listening to music again" has one of the highest expected-utilons-per-time of all the interventions I've considered but not yet implemented.