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.

I am assembling a list of interesting blogs to read and for that purpose I'd love to see the kind of blog the people in this community recommend as a starting point. Don't see this just as a request to post blogs according to my unknown taste but as a request to post blogs according to your taste in the hope that the recommendation scratches an itch in this community.

Links? I am also quite suspicious of measuring happiness -- by one measure Bhutan is the happiest country in the world and, um, I have my doubts.

While I agree that depressives should try CBT, I've begun to think some of the enthusiasm is misplaced, especially when contrasted with the scrutiny antidepressants receive. Yvain has written about this before:

The AJP article above is interesting because as far as I know it’s the largest study ever to compare Freudian and cognitive-behavioral therapies. It examined both psychodynamic therapy (a streamlined, shorter-term version of Freudian psychoanalysis) and cognitive behavioral therapy on 341 depressed patients. It found – using a statistic called noninferiority which I don’t entirely understand – that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. In fact, although the study wasn’t designed to demonstrate this, just by eyeballing it looks like psychoanalysis did nonsignificantly better. The journal’s editorial does a good job putting the result in context.

This follows on the heels of several other studies and meta-analyses finding no significant difference between the two therapies, including, another in depression, yet another in depression, still another in depression, one in generalized anxiety disorder and one in general. This study by meta-analysis celebrity John Ioannidis also seems to incidentally find no difference between psychodynamics and CBT, although that wasn’t quite what it was intended to study and it’s probably underpowered to detect a difference.

In the vein of non-risky interventions, you might also want to add a section on meditation, expressing gratitude (not sure of the citation -- maybe here? -- but I recall the best possible selves intervention mentioned in the paper being ineffective among the depressed), and expressive writing generally.

Awesome, thanks so much! If you were to recommend one of these resources to begin with, which would it be?

I am not sure if this deserves it's own post. I figured I would post here and then add it to discussion if there is sufficient interest.

I recently started reading Learn You A Haskell For Great Good. This is the first time I have attempted to learn a functional language, and I am only a beginner in Imperative languages (Java). I am looking for some exercises that could go along with the e-book. Ideally, the exercises would encourage learning new material in a similar order to how the book is presented. I am happy to substitute/compliment with a different resource as well, if it contains problems that allow one to practice structurally. If you know of any such exercises, I would appreciate a link to them. I am aware that Project Euler is often advised; does it effectively teach programming skills, or just problem solving? (Then again, I am not entirely sure if there is a difference at this point in my education).

Thanks for the help!

One of my university professor once told me that if you have a strong reaction to either the sentence: "I'm a normal human." or "I'm not a normal human." that means that you probably have an issue worth addressing in detail.

An astrology test might tell you: "One the one hand you are a human like everybody else, but on the other hand there something were unique about you."

If the statement that the test says that you are a normal human like everybody else triggers you, that has meaning. If you get an angry reaction, where you say: "No, there no way in which I'm like other people." that's a topic worth further exploration.

Just to be clear, I don't have meaningful personal experience with astrology I'm extrapolating from other personal experience and general knowledge.

Sigh, well, I've been trying to fix it for about ten years (so as long as I've been failing. Coincidence?? Probably not). I'm on 2 anti-depressants right this minute (the fourth or fifth cocktail of which I've tried). I've gone through years of therapy. And the result? Still depressed, often suicidally.

So what else am I supposed to do? I refuse to go to therapy again. I'm sick of telling my whole life story over and over, and looking back on my past therapists, I think they were unhelpful at best and harmful at worst (for encouraging me to pursue my ludicrous pipe dreams, for instance). Moreover, talk therapy (including cognitive behavioral therapy, which some say is the most effective form) is, according to several meta-studies I've looked at, of dubious benefit.

I could try ECT, but apparently it has pretty bad side-effects. I've looked into submitting myself as a lab rat for deep brain stimulation (for science!), but haven't been able to find a study that wouldn't require quitting my job and staying somewhere across the country for two months. So here I am.

But if we can sidestep the ad hominem argument for a moment, it sounds like you're saying that my aversion to failing at something else is irrational. Would you mind pointing out the error in my reasoning? (This sort of exchange is basically cognitive behavioral therapy, btw.)

PredictionBook:

• Contingent on losing her appeal, Amanda Knox will be extradited to Italy to serve her sentence.
• Amanda Knox will be found guilty by the Italian Supreme Court.

Writing software that is bug free is certainly possible

The reality disagrees: the defect rate in bugs/1000 lines of code for high-quality business software is 10-15, for scientific computing is 1-5, and for military applications 0.2-3. See, for example, http://home.comcast.net/~gregorympope/published_papers/Measuring_Good2.doc . This is by no means "bug-free".