In one of Robert Greenberg's music histories, he said, IIRC, that around 1800, 1 in 20 people in Vienna were professional musicians.

Even granting this statistic, this is highly selective reporting. Vienna has historically been a musical center, and was especially so at that time. The situation there was hardly typical of European society as a whole. And the phenomenon of high-quality music being played in gathering places hasn't disappeared either: buskers play Bach, and recently I heard Beethoven's 7th symphony come on between jazz selections in a coffee shop.

Mozart and Beethoven are popular today, while Schoenberg is not; history has already given its verdict against the 2nd Viennese School

That is silly and presumptuous. "Popularity" is hardly an appropriate metric for judging "the verdict of history" on a form of advanced creative intellection. I can assure you that the Second Viennese School is held in high esteem by expert composers and music theorists.

Besides -- if "history" has "ruled against" the Second Viennese School, why are you complaining about the "death of great music" resulting from their influence?

I don't say these things in order to offend you. I apologize for using inflammatory language.

That's good; but there's also a larger issue here. Assertions about music should be held to the same level of scrutiny as assertions about anything else. (As a result of discussions like this, I may be tempted at some point to do a post on rationality as it relates to the arts.)

What about 5. Linkage to another belief that causes us to associate so-called masochistic behavior with something good?

Some people like BDSM because they like the feeling of someone being else in control. Some people like being hit because they associate it with the love of their parents. Some people wallow in bad feelings because that's how they learned to get attention.

I think question 2 is an important one. These behaviors can be logically grouped together as "masochistic', but the kinds of "bad" that they move towards are completely different. You're talking physical pain, confusion, fear, exhaustion, self-judgment, identifying with "suffering," etc. I don't think there's anything to be gained by combining them into one category. If we want to talk real masochism, I think the cleanest solution would be to stick with the enjoyment of physical pain.

Anyone gonna weigh in on the old pleasure and pain two-sided coin?

If you think that "the public" used to be interested in art music to anything like the extent they're now interested in popular music, you're under the wrong impression.

Not everyone could attend concerts, but I have heard many references to musicians performing music by the same composers in small groups in coffeehouses, taverns, and other gathering places. In one of Robert Greenberg's music histories, he said, IIRC, that around 1800, 1 in 20 people in Vienna were professional musicians. You could walk into music shops there whose main business was selling sheet music for people to perform at home; today, a city of the size that Vienna was in 1800 (200,000) might have 2 to 8 such shops (based on my knowing cities of about 50,000 that have one such store; and on the fact that Music and Arts, the largest chain of music stores around here, has 5 stores serving a population of 5,000,000 in the Washington DC area.) Some composers made a living by selling their scores. Despite the reachable market now being many times larger (perhaps 100 times larger), I don't think anyone can do that today.

I could be wrong. I wasn't there. And the question of how popular Mozart was in his day is not as important to me as the fact that Mozart and Beethoven are popular today, while Schoenberg is not; history has already given its verdict against the 2nd Viennese School. I don't say these things in order to offend you. I apologize for using inflammatory language.

Several of the items on your list have straightforward explanations that are variations on 3. In partiular, horror movies and rollercoasters are a controlled means of inducing fear for the emotional response it causes; and spicy food, if by that you mean food with substantial capsaicin levels, is a controlled and completely safe means of inducing arbitrary levels of pain in order to enjoy the resulting endorphin high.

On the other hand, while I'm not familiar with Alban Berg, I voluntarily listen to "music" that probably puts his work to shame in terms of apparent unpleasantness, and intuitively suspect 1 is the most accurate explanation of this. And no, I gain no benefit of signalling status or sophistication from this, as most people's response to said music is to wish not to speak with me.

As an aspiring rationalist you've already learned that most people don't listen, and you usually don't bother - but this person is a friend, someone you know, someone you trust and respect to listen.

I've actually had some success with Other-optimizing, so I'm going to go out on a limb and defend it. Doing it well isn't easy and doesn't give you the quick ego/status boost you get from giving someone a pithy injunction. You need to gather enough information about the other person's goals to uniquely determine what action you take, essentially giving away some of your optimization power for the other person to use for their own purposes. Of course, this mostly eliminates the usual motivation (i.e. status) while also being vastly more difficult.

Why? I have no power of authority on this site. My advice is just incoming information with no persuasive weight. There's no bias stopping CronoDAS from evaluating it on its merits before acting.

"The lateral geniculate nucleus preprocesses visual information on the way from the retina to the visual cortex" would be a cheap example. The representativeness heuristic and conjunction fallacy would be a less cheap one.

I tried reading your blog posts and couldn't (allergic to your style), but I'm sorry to inform you that you haven't reached the level of universal generalizations as yet. The stories you make up to explain why your tricks work are not the deep answers which constrain both the rule and the exception; from other sciences I have learned what true general models of the human mind look like, and your explanations, I'm afraid, are not in that class. The fully general art of combating human akrasia has not been invented by you. Your clients are only the ones for whom your techniques happen to work.

I hope that having discovered some tricks that work for some people is enough honor for you; and that you do not need to claim that your tricks work universally in order to value them. And that it does not wound you too deeply, if there are some people for whom your advice does not yet work, and who you do not yet understand. This is not the counsel of despair: study the exception and the rule, and you may find the deeper law.

Of course you could decide that I'm just being lazy. (Laughs.)

If you were to say tomorrow "I've been lying about the whole AI programmer thing; I actually live in my parents' basement and have never done anything worthwhile in any non-rationality field in my entire life," then would I have to revise my opinion that you're a very good rationality teacher? Would I have to deny having learned really valuable things from you?

But the fact that reality doesn't disentangle this way, is in a sense the whole point - it's not a coincidence that things are the way they are.

If we get far enough to have external real-world standards like those you're describing, then yes we can toss the "secret identity" thing out the window, so long as we don't have the problem of most good students wanting only to become rationality instructors themselves as opposed to going into other careers (but a teacher who raised their students this way would suffer on the 'accomplished students' metric, etc.). But on the other hand I still suspect that the instructors with secret identities would be revealed to do better.