Fear causes failure.

AND:

Ostensibly irrational fears can be traced back to causality viscerally experienced during childhood.

BUT:

Don't be afraid.

BUT:

Respect the mechanism. It is there to protect you.

Tags: thought

I've just read the handful of music-related articles in the latest New Scientist, and I am in the middle of reading "Musicophilia" by Oliver Sacks. The New Scientist articles were trite and hollow, and Musicophilia is a nothing more than a tangle of anecdotes and footnotes. It seems that these scientific writers think that simply by using a lot of medical terms for parts of the brain they are somehow explaining anything about music.



My friend was telling me on Sunday about a CV he saw where the candidate had talked about his PhD in Music. Apparently his conclusion was the bland statement 'there is something innate about humans that makes them like music'. A somewhat feeble conclusion, but no less helpful than anything else that any other purported expert is yammering about.

Perhaps I am too hard on these people but frankly I'm frustrated that nobody is getting anywhere with any of this thinking.

Matt Ridley has done the best job so far . He talks about how singing or chanting unifies a crowd -- clearly a very powerful force in warfare, religion, politics, sports and any other competitive or social situation you could name. Game theory tells us that co-operation is a powerful thing so it would make sense that a 'glue' like music would emerge in a species. But is music always a social experience? It's hard to be sure in this young age of recorded music. In the past, music always required participation - you could watch somebody sing or play, or you could go to church and sing with the parish; you could sing on your own but that was always a smaller experience than joining a crowd.

In writing this short post I appear to have reached a conclusion. Music is a 'tribal glue'. Music binds individuals to make them part of a larger whole. I will happily leave it to neurologists (neurographists??) to figure out the details of the implementation - that's the boring part.

Tags: music, science, thought

Look at this bullshit non-journalism covering some bullshit non-research: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7253493.stm

"Some people are very anxious when they don't have their technological gadgets next to them.

"They might get into trouble with their employers as they spend more and more time checking messages."

Boo hoo.....

The word 'addiction' is totally inappropriate here, as it usually implies severe negative consequences to continued use. Compare these 'negative' consequences to those of, say, heroin addiction, and you'll see what I mean.

They don’t call ‘breathing’ an addiction do they. No, this communications technology It’s just another technological augmentation of the human body – it’s how humans work – how they move forward – do you call ‘getting a bus to work’ every day an ‘addiction’? No you don’t. So what’s the difference here? The difference is that things are accelerating. People are scared, and they’re wasting their lives doing meaningless research - “You would be surprised how many people had their PDA or Blackberry next to their bed heads.” No I wouldn’t! Have you seen kids? Have you seen a mobile phone?!

It makes me sick that we need to a fucking ‘warning’ now because some people might ‘wake up in the night’. The technology is not the problem here – it’s the information people are expecting – if it’s something important, why wouldn’t somebody want to know as soon as possible?

A friend of mine contests that "addiction occurs when you have an inability to stop something, even when you want to. " In response I would say "would you want to stop using a mobile phone?" Not really. Partly because loads of stuff would become really inconvenient, but also because everybody else has one and if you didn’t then you’d be socially disadvantaged. It’s the Red Queen. A fact of life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen

Personally I'm pretty excited about the rate of technological change. Maybe I'm angry because so many other people are too scared to embrace it.

Tags: news, technology, thought

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/04/the-inevitable-march-of-recorded-music-towards-free

I read the comments on this post over the Christmas holiday. I thought the most compelling point was made by Tim (#152) - "Maybe the musical stars of the future will earn average incomes in the future, and will live instead as musicians have throughout most of history - on the wonderful intangibles of prestige, sincere compliments, and free dinners."

A compelling, if rather grounding point. Superstar musicians are a very recent invention, and it makes sense that this phenomenon is temporary. With Clear Channel's channel monopoly being progressively eroded by the internet and bands being able to find specific niches in other ways, I can see things becoming a lot more sensible in the future.

Another interesting thread was people saying 'musicians won't make music if they won't get paid' and the various refutations of this idea. I gave up on making money from music a long time ago - I remember when I was trying to charge for the tapes I was making while I was at school that I should have been giving away to anybody who was interested.

I think there are two main reasons that it is still worth producing CDs. The first is to sell at gigs. These are more of a 'souvenir' than a medium through which to necessarily listen to the music. The second is for gifts (nobody brought this up on the linked thread). The only time I ever buy DVDs or CDs these days is at Christmas time when I want to give things to other people. An MP3 is no substitute for a CD in this context.

I'd like to think there's a market for 'premium' editions of recordings with fancy packaging (that's the way Hollywood is going with DVDs lately) but the only reason to have these is (again) for gift giving, and perhaps for those odd freaky collector types who want to revere their favourite artists by purchasing every single edition of everything they have ever released and have an awful lot of shelf-space to spare in their 'den'.

Ah yes- that's the other good thing about CDs - like books they're excellent for decorating your flat (or Facebook profile!) - people like to display their tastes, and while iTunes makes it easy to flick through a lot of stuff it's not really the same as scanning the spines of 6 shelves of CDs.

What else? I always thought vinyl would stick around for DJs, but it's so heavy! If I was DJing I don't think I could be arsed with the weight-lifting angle. I'd go digital. That said, I do seem to take an AWFUL lot of kit when I play live! But that's different.. that's live

I think I'll talk about royalties tomorrow.

Tags: thought

I often get into discussions and arguments about technology, its effects on the environment and its effects on privacy, etc...

A lot of people's arguments can be boiled down to a simple fear:

"But what if a bad man uses it?"

This is hardly a problem with the technology itself. If I give a bad man an ashtray and he uses it to smash my head in, should we ban ashtrays?

I believe that the benefits of new technology tend to outweigh the cost. Usually the benefits MASSIVELY outweigh the cost. And as humanity gets more powerful, the new potential badness is usually counteractable by the same technology that made it possible in the first place.

We are living in times of rapidly accelerating change. You really have to look at things in terms of *balance* and step back from the issues themselves when you start to get scared. Game theory shows that social systems, over long timescales, tend towards co-operation, not conflict.

We're not often aware that we are choosing a particular scale on which to perceive a problem. I think your choice of the scale on which to look at things tends to be a factor of your emotional state more than anything else. If you're feeling existentially depressed it's easy to get distracted by the potential heat death of the universe. If you're in a good mood you might just be enjoying the shape of a cloud. When scale gets involved, everything gets intractably subjective. What is it about? My happiness? My future happiness? Your happiness? Your freedom? Your children's freedom? What are we all so afraid of losing?

Tags: technology, thought