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Still learning the art of Veritula (my bad for combining ideas in #3819). From the top, this branch seems to be:
Go on hiatus?
- No hiatus, compress activates
----- Yes hiatus, can't compress. No hiatus because resume gap.
--------- No to resume gap -- So YES hiatus. But currently #3834 flows up and flips to a no-hiatus criticism (because I melded a yes and a no idea in one comment, and Dennis criticized the latter).
------------- Yes hiatus via this comment to correct

"It’s best to write only one criticism at a time."
----- Best, or required, to avoid errors?! (or I'm confused)

Still learning the art of Veritula (my bad for combining ideas in #3819). From the top, this branch seems to be:
Go on hiatus?
- No hiatus, compress activates
----- Yes hiatus, can't compress. No hiatus because resume gap.
--------- No to resume gap -- So YES hiatus. But currently #3834 flows up and flips to a no-hiatus criticism (because I melded a yes and a no idea in one comment, and Dennis criticized the latter).
------------- Yes hiatus via this comment to correct

"It’s best to write only one criticism at a time."
----- Best, or required, to avoid errors?! (or I'm confused)

Still learning the art of Veritula (my bad for combining ideas in #3819). From the top, this branch seems to be:
Go on hiatus?
- No hiatus, compress activates
- Yes hiatus, can't compress. No hiatus because resume gap.
- No to resume gap -- So YES hiatus. But currently #3834 flows up and flips to a no-hiatus criticism (because I melded a yes and a no idea in one comment, and Dennis criticized the latter).
- Yes hiatus via this comment to correct

"It’s best to write only one criticism at a time."
- Best, or required, to avoid errors?! (or I'm confused)

There's no security in not pursuing your passion

Do we mean by security something other than food/water/shelter? Or, resisting your passion only buys temporary security? This isn't true; people go their whole lives resisting their passions, and are secure.

There exist people who's passions exclude all available paying jobs, unless this is not physically possible. Aspiring guitarists in dark ages.

Only that I didn't see it, not that there wasn't any, but I see that this is effectively the same. Edited the comment to be a criticism.

The Fountainhead is on my list. Listened to ‘The Simplest Thing in the World’. One message seems to be that one's creativity will continuously resist attempts to coerce it into doing something it doesn't want. A will of its own. I feel such resistance acutely at this current job, more so but no differently than during previous jobs and assignments, as we all have. But what is the import of the story to the present debate? My creative muse will continue fighting me so long as I'm trying to steer it towards other things? I have no doubt. The questions here are over what is practical, secure and strategic, all largely in the financial sense--or so I think. Where does one draw the line between passion and security? Maybe there is no general-purpose explanation. I will continue reflecting.

So we could say working via discipline to make money tentatively, as part of a problem solving process, is not irrational? I suppose that's what I'm doing now...

My thought was to negate (criticize) the "if you don't" portion of your comment, which was a criticism of mine. Unrefuted, yours sits as a criticism of the original, but it isn't...
- Go on hiatus?
- No runway = bad
- Do have runway
How should criticisms with conditionals in them be handled? Is this comment a criticism?!

Another reason to quit is that you work at night. I believe you told me you don’t personally mind this, but continued interruption of your circadian rhythm is bound to impact your health.

Focus is usually defined in coercive terms—working without distraction or despite it. This framing sneaks discipline in through the side door.

• Deep Work: Focus is the ability to concentrate on cognitively demanding tasks without distraction.
• Indistractable: Focus is doing what you intend to do despite internal and external distractions.
• Hyperfocus: Focus is intentionally directing attention while deliberately ignoring everything else.

What all of these share is the assumption that focus is valuable because it resists distraction. Distraction is treated as interference to be pushed aside.

I think this coercive component should be removed. At the same time, empirical experience makes it clear that people do differ in their ability to stay engaged—and that this ability can be trained. So something real is being gestured at, but mischaracterized.

Here is my Deutsch-compatible explanation of it:

Focus is the stickiness of engagement with a chosen problem.
It is not about heroic self-control—suppressing distractions or forcefully pushing competing thoughts away—but about how reliably engagement sustains itself without requiring repeated creative intervention. Creativity enables intentional action; focus determines how often that intentionality needs to be actively renewed.
When focus is weak, engagement is fragile. Minor distractions, impulses, or shifts in attention repeatedly pull us away, forcing creativity to be spent again and again just to re-establish intentional direction.
When focus is strong, engagement is stickier. The threshold for a distraction to take hold is higher. Distractions still occur, but they are rarer. And when they do arise, they are less disruptive, because our sticky focus allows us to handle them using sound judgment rather than succumbing to poor judgment.
Focus is a capacity we can train like any other skill. Periods of sustained engagement stretch that capacity, and—when followed by adequate recovery—our ability to stay engaged grows stronger

This reframing preserves what the popular literature gets right—that sustained attention exists and matters—while rejecting its coercive foundation. It replaces self-war with problem-solving, and willpower myths with creativity and judgment.

I would love to hear criticisms of this theory of focus. It is a core part of my book and, I believe, a necessary incorporation into a Deutschian / TCS view of the mind—one that fully addresses and refutes the popular focus literature referenced above.

HTV isn’t a principle even by your own definition. What on earth are you talking about man.

Even if HTV itself is not a computational task, the decision-making method Deutsch proposes is one, and it depends on HTV. But even if we sidestep that issue and outsource HTV completely to the user, we still run into all kinds of issues. This has all been addressed. No fancy talk about sets or constraints is going to change that.

You previously claimed you’re an engineer. I don’t think you are. You just pasted some code that was clearly written by AI and didn’t even compile, twice.

You talk about ‘sets’ and ‘constraints’ and ‘computations’ but I don’t think you understand any of them. No offense but I think those concepts are all distractions so you don’t need to actually address HTV. That’s why you need to use those big words.

Discussing with you is a waste of time. Again, no offense but I don’t think you’re qualified to weigh in on this discussion. Prove me wrong and submit working, handwritten code for HTV or Deutsch’s decision-making method. I’ll delete any further comments from you in this discussion that don’t contain working code. If you keep commenting anyway, I’ll lock your account.

You criticized your own idea. Presumably that’s not what you meant to do.

From BoI chapter 1 glossary:

The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.

That says nothing about absolute vs relative. Stop making up stuff.

with good points

I didn’t say the explanation doesn’t make good points, I said the explanation doesn’t get points.

So my criticism is that the HTV criterion is not a computational task (but a principle, universal statement) and Deutsch's criterion of understanding (you need a program) only applies to computational tasks.

With principle/ universal statement/ theory, I mean for example: for all masses, there is a force proportional to the inverse square of their distances/ for all integers, addition is commutative/ for all species, their evolution is governed by variation and selection, for all interpretations of moral actions, they are moral relativism when ... applies to that interpretation/ ....

• Principles/ universal statements/ theories are not computable because they speak about sets of (possible) transformations (not 1 in particular which would be a computation) and they offer a constraining criterion to those transformations in the set.
• Whereas a computer program is an abstraction capable of causing 1 particular transformation (between sets of inputs and sets of outputs)

There may be a way to quantify HTV, and thus deal with specific evaluations of how HTV of one theory is higher than another. That would be a computational task. But that is different from the criterion for HTV (which is by definition not computable). And having no program for that computational task does not imply that the criterion for HTV is irrelevant or not usable, or even fluff.

Compare for example to the theory of evolution: the theory of "variation and selection" is the criterion for a set of allowable transformations (of species), but not having a specific program (e.g. for how a particular species can evolve in some particular niche) does not imply that the criterion is useless or fluff.

I think the usefulness of the HTV criterion becomes clear when you link it to Constructor Theory, then one can argue that HTV criterion adds more than criticisms alone can do. But that's a whole other story we could get into.

That's because a good explanation for Deutsch is not an explanation with good points, but an explanation that is harder to vary compared to any other explanation. So again relative to other explanations.

The word "good" is indeed misleading in that sense, but he clearly qualifies it as performing better, relative to other explanations, on his HTV criterion, and not as: the explanation having scored high points.

So my criticism is that the HTV criterion is not a computational task (but a principle, universal statement) and Deutsch's criterion of understanding (you need a program) only applies to computational tasks.

With principle/ universal statement/ theory, I mean for example: for all masses, there is a force proportional to the inverse square of their distances/ for all integers, addition is commutative/ for all species, their evolution is governed by variation and selection, for all interpretations of moral actions, these are moral relativistic one/ ....

• Principles/ universal statements/ theories are not computable because they speak about sets of (possible) transformations (not 1 in particular which would be a computation) and they offer a constraining criterion to those transformations in the set.
• Whereas a computer program is an abstraction capable of causing 1 particular transformation (between sets of inputs and sets of outputs)

There may be a way to quantify HTV, and thus deal with specific evaluations of how HTV of one theory is higher than another. That would be a computational task. But that is different from the criterion for HTV (which is by definition not computable). And having no program for that computational task does not imply that the criterion for HTV is irrelevant or not usable, or even fluff.

Compare for example to the theory of evolution: the theory of "variation and selection" is the criterion for a set of allowable transformations (of species), but not having a specific program (e.g. for how a particular species can evolve in some particular niche) does not imply that the criterion is useless or fluff.

I think the usefulness of the HTV criterion becomes clear when you link it to Constructor Theory, then one can argue that HTV criterion adds more than criticisms alone can do. But that's a whole other story we could get into.

Because relative criteria are fine to posit and not justificationist. We can propose criteria that claim that explanation A is better than explanation B without that being justificationism

That's because a good explanation for Deutsch is not an explanation with good points, but an explanation that is harder to vary compared to any other explanation. So again relative to other explanations.

The word "good" is indeed misleading in that sense, but he clearly qualifies it as performing better, relative to other explanations, on his HTV criterion, and as the explanation having scored high points.

You could play the guitar and have a well-paying job you enjoy as well.

How can the conflict be resolved?

By coming up with a new option that has no pending criticisms. We can’t state it in advance.

What is one to do until they resolve it? Surely it is rational to work to make money... Yet in this case, this requires forcing oneself to do something unpleasant; hence the rational thing to do in this case requires discipline.

Well yeah, acting without a solution is self-coercive. But that’s not a refutation of the idea that problems are soluble.

How can the conflict be resolved?

By coming up with a new option that has no pending criticisms. We can’t state those in advance.

Is the argument that: discipline, grit, drive, tenacity and more concepts in this web are all bad/irrational?

Discipline is irrational because it’s self-coercive by definition. For the others, it depends. Are you being tenacious because you’re forcing yourself to stick to some topic you don’t like? Then it’s irrational. Are you being tenacious because you have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in that area? Rational.