Search Ideas

… 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.

… 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

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.

I think that's a misreading. If 'hard to vary' is a fixed criterion used to measure the value of an explanation, it would go against Deutsch's own criticisms of justificationism (various chapters of BoI and FoR) as well as his criticisms of scientism – that is, the misapplication of scientific methods to philosophical problems (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tzWGfi4XhLA&t=7s). I see why you would interpret the BoI quote in that way, but in the context of the whole philosophy your interpretation is implausible.

Regardless of what Deutsch meant, though, the main point is that it's possible to talk about the virtues of explanations without falling into justificationism, for example when trying to explain progress.

I have made related points in #3883.

I see why you would interpret the BoI quote in that way, but in the context of the whole philosophy your interpretation is implausible. It would go against Deutsch's own criticisms of justificationism (various chapters of BoI and FoR) as well as his criticisms of scientism – that is, the misapplication of scientific methods to philosophical problems (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tzWGfi4XhLA&t=7s).

Regardless of what Deutsch meant, though, the main point is that it's possible to talk about the virtues of explanations without falling into justificationism, for example when trying to explain progress.

I have made related points in #3883.

It seems that you've taken the idea of hard to vary as saying that the process of choosing between competing theories is just about measuring how much of this trait they have. One clearly wouldn’t get better explanations from doing that, as it would just be a mechanical way of judging theories.

But this is a misunderstanding of hard to vary, which is simply an outcome of the process of conjecture and criticism. It's not a criterion to be applied before any critical discussion has taken place.

The same goes for other aspects of good explanations, such as depth, accuracy, elegance, reach. These are things we aspire to have, but they are not criteria for judging theories, for which we need no justification.

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.