Quite simply, because it seems to me very much like an equivocation is taking place, on the meaning of ‘focus’.
Consider:
After a few weeks of this exercise, it will feel like you’ve built a new muscle in your head, one which allows you to turn away from your inner thoughts at will. Let’s call it focus.
Isn’t this a strange thing to say? Why would we call this thing ‘focus’? The word ‘focus’ already has a common usage, one with which we’re all familiar. And now we’re being asked to refer to a brand-new concept by the term?
So, at best, this is an unfortunate word usage. In such a case, what we have is one word, ‘focus’, that has gained an additional referent (if we were writing a dictionary, we’d need to include one more entry for the meaning of ‘focus’ than before). This new ‘focus’ has basically nothing to do with the thing that most people refer to by the commonplace word ‘focus’ (much like a point of a conic at which rays reflected from a curve or surface converge is one thing, and the concentration of attention is another thing, and the indicator of the currently active element in a user interface is a third thing [wiktionary]).
In this case, “the ability to focus” has no obvious value. The claim that it has some value has to be made explicitly, and defended on its own merits. Since this ‘focus’ is a totally new phenomenon, which we’re encountering for the first time, and which is not identical to any of the things which we have previously referred to by the word ‘focus’, we have no particular reason to expect that being able to do this new ‘focusing’ thing is good, or bad, or anything.
But there’s another possibility: that the choice of the word ‘focus’ is deliberate, and is meant, essentially, to serve as a motte-and-bailey. The motte, of course, is just the quoted part of the OP—the claim that “here is a new thing; we’ll call it, oh, let’s say ‘focus’, why not”. The bailey—unstated, but implied (and implied clearly enough that you, for instance, got exactly this meaning from the post)—is that this new thing that we’ve decided to call ‘focus’ is actually the same thing as one of the other things that we have previously called ‘focus’ (and it’s obvious which referent of the word we’re meant to identify this new phenomenon with—it’s not the one about the conic sections, that’s for sure!).
And if that is the implied meaning… then I call shenanigans. If the OP wishes to make the claim that this “new muscle in your head, one which allows you to turn away from your inner thoughts at will” is in fact the same sort of ‘focus’ as the one that lets me (for instance) write a term paper for 6 hours straight without getting distracted by Reddit, or play certain sorts of concentration-requiring games more effectively, or more easily spot mistakes when editing a short story, or do any of the other things that are improved by that which we commonly refer to as ‘focus’—then let him make that claim explicitly. (And it would be one heck of a claim! Huge, as they say, if true.)
I’m still confused about how “the ability to focus” doesn’t count as a benefit, or is a particularly confusing one.
Quite simply, because it seems to me very much like an equivocation is taking place, on the meaning of ‘focus’.
Consider:
Isn’t this a strange thing to say? Why would we call this thing ‘focus’? The word ‘focus’ already has a common usage, one with which we’re all familiar. And now we’re being asked to refer to a brand-new concept by the term?
So, at best, this is an unfortunate word usage. In such a case, what we have is one word, ‘focus’, that has gained an additional referent (if we were writing a dictionary, we’d need to include one more entry for the meaning of ‘focus’ than before). This new ‘focus’ has basically nothing to do with the thing that most people refer to by the commonplace word ‘focus’ (much like a point of a conic at which rays reflected from a curve or surface converge is one thing, and the concentration of attention is another thing, and the indicator of the currently active element in a user interface is a third thing [wiktionary]).
In this case, “the ability to focus” has no obvious value. The claim that it has some value has to be made explicitly, and defended on its own merits. Since this ‘focus’ is a totally new phenomenon, which we’re encountering for the first time, and which is not identical to any of the things which we have previously referred to by the word ‘focus’, we have no particular reason to expect that being able to do this new ‘focusing’ thing is good, or bad, or anything.
But there’s another possibility: that the choice of the word ‘focus’ is deliberate, and is meant, essentially, to serve as a motte-and-bailey. The motte, of course, is just the quoted part of the OP—the claim that “here is a new thing; we’ll call it, oh, let’s say ‘focus’, why not”. The bailey—unstated, but implied (and implied clearly enough that you, for instance, got exactly this meaning from the post)—is that this new thing that we’ve decided to call ‘focus’ is actually the same thing as one of the other things that we have previously called ‘focus’ (and it’s obvious which referent of the word we’re meant to identify this new phenomenon with—it’s not the one about the conic sections, that’s for sure!).
And if that is the implied meaning… then I call shenanigans. If the OP wishes to make the claim that this “new muscle in your head, one which allows you to turn away from your inner thoughts at will” is in fact the same sort of ‘focus’ as the one that lets me (for instance) write a term paper for 6 hours straight without getting distracted by Reddit, or play certain sorts of concentration-requiring games more effectively, or more easily spot mistakes when editing a short story, or do any of the other things that are improved by that which we commonly refer to as ‘focus’—then let him make that claim explicitly. (And it would be one heck of a claim! Huge, as they say, if true.)