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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.
This isn’t a criticism. A criticism must point out some shortcoming. Please read ‘How Does Veritula Work?’
But what is the import of the story to the present debate?
That sounds like a criticism. It implies that you don’t see the import.
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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 …
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.)
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.
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.
It does sound like Deutsch thinks all these different criteria boil down to being about hard vs easy to vary, see #3807.
The quote may be false, but I don’t see how it’s misleading. I’m not quoting Deutsch in isolation or cherry-picking information or anything like that.
Liberty responded (1:39:46) that that quote is misleading because it makes it sound like hard to vary is the only criterion people use when making decisions, which can’t be true. There are other criteria, like “consistency with data”, “logical consistency”, “fitting in with existing theories”, etc.
I’m fine allowing user input to sidestep the creativity problem, see #3802.
I’m not saying hard to vary is a decision-making method. I’m saying it’s an integral part of Deutsch’s decision-making method. As I write in my article:
He argues that “we should choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.”
Liberty said (at 1:38:39) hard to vary isn’t a method of decision-making. It’s a factor people take into account when they make decisions, but decision-making itself is a creative process.