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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

Unlike put forth in the article, I listen to music for the experience not as background noise. For me the problem is simply being "over-whelmed by choice", which AI tells me was outlined in a book called "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" by Barry Schwartz, which I haven't read because there are so many other books to read.

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I am beginning to miss the times in my life where all I could afford was just a couple of albums per year, max. I would listen to the tracks over and over and over again, fully immerse myself in the experience, assign my own meaning to the lyrics based on my own experiences in life at the time and permanently associate songs with feelings, situations and people. Now I have seemingly infinite choices and nothing seems to satisfy me anymore. One of the things I used to love to do growing up was driving and listening to music. Now I just skip songs during my commute until I reach my destination because I'm always thinking that maybe the next thing that spotify will throw at me will be an even more enjoyable thing somehow.

And to your comment, I remember not even fully understanding some of the lyrics, so I would just try to come up with phrases that made sense to me. Worse, not being a native English speaker.

Just go all in; Ken Lee, tulibu dibu douchoo is a glorious mondegreen of baseless self confidence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQt-h753jHI

I call your mis-understood English song, and raise you one song purposefully written to use fake-English sounding 'words':

> The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, however the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right".[8][9] Andrew Khan, writing in The Guardian, later described the sound as reminiscent of Bob Dylan's output from the 1980s.[9]

> Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who do not understand the language proficiently. "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."[6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol

* Audio-only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDY3HFkh_Y

* M/V: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

Quite catchy.

My German wife’s sister famously (in our family) used to sing along to a song called “Jamaica the Sun” (Jamaika die Sonne).

It was U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday”

After some time I understood this is not easy and simply requires hard work (also, the YT algorithm that worked well in the past simply shows me the same songs I listened to many times).

So once a few months I put away some time for that, usually a few hours, and go through my favorite section on Israbox, checking every album in it. I disregard 95% straight away. Usually it is enough to hear the first notes to understand, sometimes I listen for a couple of minutes. The result of these couple of hours is 1, 2, maximum 3 albums I choose. Often VA: it is more and more difficult to find artists who manage to be creative enough so that all songs in their album don't sound the same while preserving their individual spirit.

Years ago, I would do similar work in a music store, every month on Saturday once I got my paycheck. And I would look forward to this "discovery Saturday" knowing there will be a lot of disappointment but also, mist likely, a satisfying surprise.

You can skip the book and watch the TED talk[1]. It’s been a very long time since I watched it and I recall liking it, but I was also a different person back then, and nothing about it struck me as needing a full book to flesh his ideas out in.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...

Ok so it wasn't just me! The book is fine but it covered almost nothing that the TED talk didn't. About the only take away I can remember from the book over the talk was, Barry had trouble finding Jeans.

I’ve never read the book nor seen this talk, but somehow I’ve heard about the paradox through the grapevine. It just seems like one of those ideas that should be obvious once you hear about it.

That's true of a great many books in this vein. Yes, examples and research can flesh things out a bit, but a TED Talk or an article probably provides 90% of what you might want to know. But TED Talks and articles don't put food on the table.

This came out about the time during a trend where some idea/concept like this, which could be nicely explained in a 10-20min TED talk or long form article was then padded out and published as a full size book.

It's publishing economics. If you go through a publisher, something like 250 pages is about the minimum they're willing to deal with. The one time I've gone through a publisher, I was happy enough with the second edition for, for the first edition, I really felt like I was padding out the book.

True. Something I used to do is go to a bookstore and if there was some new book that seemed like it had an interesting idea, I would look in the ToC for the chapter named the same as the book and just read that. I never felt like I walked away needing to buy the whole book when I did that, and so the only books I tended to buy were history, cooking and fiction.

A very well-known effect, actually, resulting in "analysis paralysis".

Many will relate here via a simple example. When I have to start a project, I can spend weeks trying to decide what combination of language, framework, and cloud offerings to use. There are just too many ways of getting the same thing done.

Many years ago I read an article about a venture capitalist (I think) who took over the ailing Avis car rental company. He said that the most important thing he did to turn around the company was to fix a deadline of one month for all decisions. If you have been trying to work out which of several options to choose and have spent more than a month on it then you just toss a coin.

The rationale is that no amount of analysis will guarantee the right choice so more time is just a waste when you could be finding out in real life whether or not your decision was right. Instead of spending six months agonizing over the decision and still making the wrong one you get to make that wrong decision five months earlier and discover a month later that it was wrong. Now you are four months ahead and can go for one of the other options.

Makes sense. In general, I found there is a middle ground. I often look back and I am thankful to myself for "marinating" on something a bit, as "jumping in" has its drawbacks.

You can spend weeks implementing something and then having to start from scratch - time wasted. It's important to at least play certain decisions forward in your head, understanding that you will not know a lot in advance until you actually run into them - discovered work.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and a bulb goes off - "oh, THAT would be a huge problem! Next option."

So yes, marinate, but up to a point.

> over-whelmed by choice

I'm not sure it's really that, because we can't hold more than 7 plus or minus 2 alternatives in mind at any time [0].

It's more related to FOMO, or a gnawing feeling that whatever we choose is sub-optimal, because we could have made a better choice. The apparent magnitude of possible choices kinda just confirms that.

You see people on Tinder dates sitting at a restaurant table each still scrolling in case something "better" turns up.

The way out of that it to accept this moment is unconditionally perfect and relinquish control. That's not a common skill nowadays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...

>You see people on Tinder dates sitting at a restaurant table each still scrolling

Do you actually? That's appalling.

Some time ago I was on a second date with someone (met through a friend, not Tinder) whose phone was frequently pinging the Tinder notification sound. She was very pretty, I was under no illusions about the level of competition, but I was so insulted by the disrespect. Imagine not even putting your phone on silent! Had no idea it could've been worse, god help me if she got it out and started swiping.

This describes me at FOSDEM: too many parellel tracks, a headache coming up from keeping attention to talks and schedule, running around feeling FOMO wherever I go.

But then I let go, had a coffee, had some beers with peers. No more headache + increased happiness.

Life lesson learned.

Breakouts at a conference mostly don't matter unless it's something you're especially interested in or know the speaker. At FOSDEM they're recorded anyway--not that you'll get around to watching the recordings.

Speaking of conferences, this is one thing I loved about the Monitorama conference in Portland. It has a single track, so everyone attending the conference goes to all the same talks, which means you now have something in common with everybody in the hallway track and post-conference events to talk about.

("Loved" because I haven't been in years -- the conference is, AFAIK, still going strong.)

This kind of comment always blows my mind. How can you come in and say 'well, actually, i think what you say you experience is not true. And disregard all the literature on the subject too!'

> This kind of comment always blows my mind.

In a good way or a bad way?

> How can you come in and say 'well, actually...

It's a mixture of qualities; education, scepticism, and original thinking are the key ones. Some cultures discourage this sort of thinking and promote an unquestioning attitude that takes whatever is presented on face value. For me as a scientist my own upbringing placed a lot of value on the opposite life-stance.

> i think what you say you experience is not true.

That is an unfair characterisation of what I said. Truth or falsehood hardly applies to experience. I am suggesting there's an alternative way of looking at what people report than "overwhelming" choice. That may apply to you. It may not. Make your own path.

I think maybe you took what was intended as a general observation about this phenomenon as a rebuke of your personal experience.

> disregard all the literature on the subject too!

One TED talk and a book (albeit a good one) does not really count as "all the literature".

I wish I could understand you better. Does encountering other points of view feel "offensive" because you disagree? Does it feel like invalidates something you believe in, in a "personal" way (like an attack)? Or do you really feel uncomfortable with sceptical thinking?

Bit ironic, ha.

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