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Tyler explained what he dislikes about his job in the ‘About’ section of the discussion, which is quoted in the bounty terms:

Many of the tasks I am assigned seem eminently automatable, and performing them is excruciating for me (though I recognize my good fortune overall). Even when there are micro-problems which require creativity to solve, I still find the process painful, given that they are other people's problems rather than my own. It is the same pain of school: creativity forced to work toward answers to questions not asked.

But what is the import of the story to the present debate?

‘The Simplest Thing in the World’ has themes about fear and safety vs self-actualization. For example:

What’s the quality that all the people you know have got, the outstanding quality in all of them? Their motive power? Fear. Not fear of anyone in particular, just fear. Just a great, blind force without object. Malicious fear. The kind that makes them want to see you suffer. Because they know that they, too, will have to suffer and it makes it easier, to know that you do also. The kind that makes them want to see you being small and funny and smutty. Small people are safe. It’s not really fear, it’s more than that. Like Mr. Crawford, for instance, who’s a lawyer and who’s glad when a client of his loses a suit. He’s glad, even though he loses money on it; even though it hurts his reputation. He’s glad, and he doesn’t even know that he’s glad. God, what a story there is in Mr. Crawford! If you could put him down on paper as he is, and explain just why he is like that, and . . .

… people go their whole lives resisting their passions, and are secure.

Physically maybe. I can’t look into those people’s minds but I suspect they don’t ever really feel psychologically secure. It takes a certain kind of mind to have physical security, rather than fulfillment, as one’s main concern for one’s whole life. https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/self-esteem.html

It’s essentially living like an animal.

… my bad for combining ideas in #3819 …

No worries, and good catch. What you could do, to clean up this branch, is revise #3819 to remove this part:

The concerns are over the tradeoffs of leaving the day job (finances, impact to employability, etc.).

And then, before submitting the revision form, uncheck criticism #3834 underneath the form.

It’s not strictly required – there are cases where joining multiple criticisms into one comment is fine – but I almost always recommend splitting them, especially for beginners.

You should reach far higher in life than merely ensuring food/water/shelter. It’s a pretty elementary concern and easily met.

who's

whose

Well, this is starting to sound a bit contrived. But even in the dark ages, people could be guitarists and find a job they love. Or they could create a new job they loved.

Tyler is saying the six-month minimum won’t be an issue.

Well, agreement doesn’t sound like criticism. It sounds like agreement!
But I see now that you meant to say – correct me if I’m wrong – that the six-month minimum of reserves won’t be a problem for you. In which case that indeed neutralizes my criticism. I’ll counter-criticize my own.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

(How do we draw ligaments between ideas in different threads?! Is this deeper than merely an aesthetic or organizational function? Hmm...)

Using hash links like you did is fine. But feel free to submit a feature request in the ‘Veritula – Meta’ thread if you have any ideas beyond that.