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Extra context for those interested

Most models of the mind are wrong. They treat distractions as inevitable annoyances—exploitable bugs in our evolutionary wiring—that must be overridden rather than understood. The supposed antidote is to train the ability to overcome distractions. On this view, willpower, self-control or grit is required for success: something you must strengthen so you can push through resistance. We are at war with our own minds, and many things simply suck and must be endured. Discipline = freedom.

From a Deutschian / TCS perspective, this framing is deeply mistaken. Distractions are not mere inevitabilities. They are signals—indicators that something may be wrong or misaligned. Taking those signals seriously is rational; dismissing them merely because they are “distractions” is irrational. The relevant question is not how to suppress them, but what problem they might be pointing to.

Addressing such problems does not consume willpower. It consumes creativity. Creativity is — among other things — the currency of intentional action: generating and criticizing ideas about what to do next. When we force ourselves through distraction-signals, we spend creativity to override our own warning systems—and train ourselves not to trust our minds.

Optimizing for ever-stronger defensive strategies is therefore a poor strategy. It amounts to stockpiling and mobilizing massive amounts of valuable creativity in order to do something harmful: coercing yourself through unresolved conflicts. Hyper-discipline can work —the army being an obvious example—but it often achieves productivity by damaging the inner environment, suppressing signals rather than resolving their causes.

A more effective optimization target is a life in which unwanted distractions arise less often. This shifts attention away from defense and toward shaping what we do and how we do it so fewer internal conflicts arise in the first place. And when distractions do occur, we should deal with them through rational sound judgment—by resolving the underlying problems—rather than swatting them away only for them to cause more damage and come back even fiercer.

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 improve. 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.

So it is a relative claim about an explanation, relative to another, not versus some absolute criterion of goodness.

So what? I didn’t mention an absolute criterion. My original criticism already applies to both relative and absolute criteria of quality (what you call “goodness”).

Similar to a crucial test …

But that’s exactly where HTV differs from Popper. Popper doesn’t give a theory points when it survives a crucial test. HTV does. From BoI chapter 1:

… testable explanations that have passed stringent tests become extremely good explanations …

The criterion for HTV applied to 2 explanation is not justificationism I think. It allows to say explanation A is better than explanation B, which is equivalent to: explanation B is worse than explanation A. So it is a relative claim about an explanation, relative to another, not versus some absolute criterion of goodness. Similar to a crucial test (e.g. Eddington): we refute Newton's theory and keep Einsteins, that is not a claim about the goodness of Einsteins theory, that theory merely has survived, it has not gotten "goodness points". It could be refuted always later on by any better theory, in which case we would drop it too.

Yes, the criterion for democracy is not a computational task, but an abstraction that constrains computational tasks. In the same way: the criterion for HTV is also not a computational task, it constrains the possible computational tasks that attempt to quantify HTV.

We understand computational tasks by being able to program them (as per Deutsch' criterion). But we understand criteria/ principles/ axioms/ theories ... (non computational tasks) in another way: by varying them and eliminating the variants that do not solve the problem the principle purported to solve.
For example:
a+b=b+a (in arithmetic) is a principle/ axiom that we understand by elimination of possible variants (a+b =/= a ... a+b =/=b ... etc)
but 3+5=5+3 is a specific transformation that should be understood via a computational task: adding 5 to 3 and then 3 to 5 and comparing both outcomes, via a program.

FWIW, if I was hiring, and I was looking at a resume of someone who always ‘played it safe’ and was very concerned about what others think, I wouldn’t hire them. Whereas I would hire someone who takes smart risks and cares about truth over popularity, even if they have a resume ‘gap’.

Discipline means arbitrarily favoring one conflicting idea over another. ‘Arbitrarily’ meaning favoring without resolving the conflict.

You don’t actually know which idea is better, if any, before you resolve the conflict. So siding with one before then is irrational.

Instead of practicing discipline, practice resolving conflicts between ideas and thus finding common preferences with yourself: ideas you wholeheartedly agree with, have no reservations about.

Veritula helps you with that.

skill

Self-discipline isn’t a skill. It’s an anti-skill and irrational.

Should suffering be avoided? Not if it's useful..?

Self-coercion should be avoided, yes. When we coerce ourself, we are not creating knowledge and instead arbitrarily favoring one idea over another. If a part of you disagrees that something is useful, then don’t do it!

You can always find a common preference with yourself. Problems are soluble. Do not act on ideas that have pending criticisms.

https://veritula.com/ideas/2281-rational-decision-making-expanding-on-2112

Just because lots of things are excruciating doesn’t mean life necessarily involves those things. Life doesn’t have to be difficult in this way.

You can find a passion, have fun 100% of the time, and never coerce yourself. (That’s an ideal we can fall short of – if we ‘only’ have fun 90% of the time, that’s still infinitely better than dooming ourselves to a life we hate.)

https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/unconflicted

It would be fantasy/reckless if, for example, you were in your mid 40s, had a family to take care of, and had no savings.

Why does it have to be a career? You could try it for a year or six months or whatever. If you don’t like it, you switch to something else. That’d be fine.

You didn’t mark this as a criticism, but it sounds like one. Consider revising your idea to mark it as a criticism. (No changes to the text necessary for that.)

The questions here are over what is practical, secure and strategic, all largely in the financial sense--or so I think.

There’s nothing practical about working a job you hate. There’s nothing practical about fighting yourself.

Where does one draw the line between passion and security?

There’s no security in not pursuing your passion, and there’s no need to make this kind of tradeoff anyway.

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.

I find this point irrefutable, aside from the risk being educated or calculated... Maybe it is those things...
What I would ultimately love to do is pivot into AGI research as a career, but when is pursuing that educated risk-taking vs fantasy?

This brings us back to our conversation about discipline. Maybe we can recapitulate here, or maybe best done elsewhere. Lots of things are excruciating, like homework and exams; should I not have done them? Exercise as well. There seem to be problems which can only be solved by maintaining other problems..!
Should suffering be avoided? Not if it's useful..? I'm still conflicted about this.

Good thought, in general. But the dislocation would take significant time and resources itself. The current lease arrangement also cannot be exited without a heavy fee. I also moved recently, I would love to not do that again for some time.

So far this has proven ineffective, though a skill which could be improved. However, questions remain for me over whether self-disciplining is good, in general, and where to draw the line between coercion and healthy structure.

A related idea is to become more disciplined with my time, getting more out of the off days.

I think I've compressed other activities as much as possible. With the current job, I don't think I can increase focus on research any further. The concerns are over the tradeoffs of leaving the day job (finances, impact to employability, etc.).

Yes, very little time and energy for research while working, a handful of hours a week. The intermittence carries its own cost, I also find.

It does sound like Deutsch thinks all these different criteria boil down to being about hard vs easy to vary, see #3814.

Not according to Deutsch. He says hard to vary is epistemologically fundamental, that all progress is based on it. For example, he phrases testability in terms of hard to vary (BoI chapter 1):

When a formerly good explanation has been falsified by new observations, it is no longer a good explanation, because the problem has expanded to include those observations. Thus the standard scientific methodology of dropping theories when refuted by experiment is implied by the requirement for good explanations.

He also says that “good explanations [are] essential to science…” (thanks @tom-nassis for finding this quote). Recall that a good explanation is one that is hard to vary.

For Deutsch, hard to vary is the key mode of criticism, not just one of many.