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Absolutely. I generally believe that the way behavioral patterns emerge is not instant, and therefore the way you get out cannot be instant. In other words, the

Absolutely. I generally believe that the way behavioral patterns emerge is not instant, and therefore the way you get out cannot be instant. In other words, the only way out of the darkness is walking back through the exact path you came from. It takes a long time of not focusing on daily practice and discipline to get to the point where you don’t realize you need to put in at least a few hours of studying per day. If you go years and years of studying the week of or the day before the test, you will become a certain way. I’d wager most Americans do all their major class work last minute since they were kids. Along with that, they spend hours and hours playing video games and watching YouTube/Netflix/social media since childhood. By the time you are 25, you probably have a solid 20 years of insane habits. What few people will admit here is what they did for most of their life. Okay, so you realized you can’t read a textbook in college. Can you describe to me how you passed the time over the last 18 years? I’m sure you managed to fill the time. You didn’t stare at the wall for 18 years. If you literally stared at the wall, fine, here is a prescription to whatever drug you want. If you managed to do all of the other bullshit I described above, then please take some responsibility on developing better habits. It’s the intellectual version of becoming obese. You know what you ate for the last several years. The only part of this I have genuine sympathy for is that life does not wait around for you to take the steps and fix this stuff when reality confronts you. If your 20, life will not wait 5-7 years for you to rehabilitate. Life will pass you by. I understand it, but we aren’t going to propagate confirmation bias, especially when we are teaching the new generation of children even earlier that their habits are conducive to being productive. The developer community can help in the workplace. Split up work, don’t make everything end-all-be-all project. Everyone’s dealing with burn out or a lifetime of bad habits, drug dependency, etc, and this will compress the timeline needed to begin fixing this. It’s unfortunate, to say the least.

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
> I generally believe that the way behavioral patterns emerge is not instant, not everything is a habit, some behaviours are impulsive or context driven. lets say that habits take time to form though. > and therefore the way you get out cannot be instant. this is only true if breaking a habit, is also a habit. i don’t not certain this is always true. lets ask, what is a habit? since this is an async convo i will answer myself. i think a habit is a behaviour that you repeat based on some trigger (time of day, previous activity etc). based on that we could call a “routine” a series of habits (or habitual behaviours). we do them, one after the other, in sequence (generally). yeah i agree, these take time to build! how do you maintain them? because i spent 3 years working on running everyday and then i was ill for a week and immediately stopped. i broke my habit (or routine) that took 3 years to build in 1 week. are you wrong or am i broken? > In other words, the only way out of the darkness is walking backing through the exact path you came from. more generally i would say, the only way out of “the darkness” (which i will use to mean a period of time in my life where i am incredibly unhappy) is to deal with my trauma and accept all parts of myself (probably with the help of a therapist). i’ve not found ruminating over the past to be a successful strategy for creating light in my life. > It takes a long time of not focusing on daily practice and discipline to get to the point where you don’t realize you need to put in at least a few hours of studying per day. i honestly don’t understand this line. is the realisation that small iterative steps are required for study innate? is this your experience? i had to explicitly learn it. is not one of the greatest productivity strategies to break large complex things (passing an exam) into smaller, manageable tasks (a few hours of study a day). i do not buy this line. > If you go years and years of studying the week of or the day before the test, you will become a certain way. what certain way is that? > I’d wager most Americans do all their major class work last minute since they were kids. it would be interesting to see a survey of this! i won’t join this wager as i don’t like gambling. > Along with that, they spend hours and hours playing video games and watching YouTube/Netflix/social media since childhood. what are you claiming video games, youtube and netflix cause here? I’m not saying they each don’t have they negative aspects! especially youtube, just enough dopamine to keep you watching, so easy to waste a bunch of hours. > By the time you are 25, you probably have a solid 20 years of insane habits. i too thought i was late all the time because of the template my mum handed down to me(shes late all the time too). you know what else can be handed down though? heritable traits. i still object to modelling all human behaviour around habits. the scope is much larger and the insanity is often a lack of behaviour (e.g not washing your butt). > What few people will admit here is what they did for most of their life. Okay, so you realized you can’t read a textbook in college. Can you describe to me how you passed the time over the last 18 years? read interesting books? played games? made music? rode bikes? went to parties. i’m not sure what you are attempting to get at here. >I’m sure you managed to fill the time. You didn’t stare at the all for 18 years. see above. > If you literally stared at the wall, fine, here is a prescription to whatever drug you want. so only if i did absolutely nothing in response to not being able to do something else, do i qualify for medication? i guess no one with any executing function disorders should get anything because sitting still is a real pain. sorry we’re not performing disorder well enough for you, i’ll get all the adhd peeps into a workshop perhaps you could join since you know exactly how someone with a disorder would perform. we really need those meds so any help you can offer is welcomed. > If you managed to do all of the other bullshit I described above, then please take some responsibility on developing better habits. man, f*k you. i’ve been taking responsibility for my actions for 30 years. you don’t know me. > It’s the intellectual version of becoming obese. You know what you ate for the last several years. so we have resorted to fat jokes. well, i’m not sure what i had hoped for tbh. tl;dr you don’t believe in this ADD-whatever the fuck and people should grow up and act like ever other adult. idk if you are a boomer but you should get checked out for alzheimers because your ideas are old as fuck. NOTE: i had a nice, emotional description of my experience but i forgot how people here like to argue (stupid me), so i took responsibility for my actions and took apart the argument line by line instead.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Hey I never ran a day in my life. I found out if I take steroids I can jump start my running in 3 months. Turns out I’m a great runner, so I must have been a great runner all this time and just need a therapeutic dose of steroids to show that I had chemical deficiency that easily solved it. Now life is much more fair for me. Look, once your life depends on a decision you know was a trade off (you feel entitled to whatever it is you don’t have from not putting in the actual work), it’s going to take intense mental gymnastics to feel sound as a person. But I can help you, repeat after me. This life wasn’t going great, so I made a decision. It’s better now, and I can live with it and fuck anyone else. All I’m saying is, don’t you dare sell that confirmation bias back into the zeitgeist. We can be friends, I’ve been there (probably still there). Certainly don’t try to sell it to the person that put in 3 years running, and the only difference between you and that person was an unprovable chemical deficiency. The guy waking up everyday to run never felt like it was never going to amount to anything once, right? They just had it in them, just like you. It’s all in you, like magic, just needs to brought out. Just own your decision in it’s entirety. No one is a saint here. Edit: is not one of the greatest productivity strategies to break large complex things (passing an exam) into smaller, manageable tasks (a few hours of study a day). i do not buy this line. This retort is a dead give away of entitlement. Everyone breaks down studying like this, Jesus. How special do some of you think you are? This is all supposed come freely to you? Read a chapter a day, and if some of you truly exhibit the impulsivity of dogs (the wind can distract you apparently), then read a page a day, and if you can’t do that, read a word a day. This is how people do it. Bunch of hidden brainiacs think they can just take a book and place it near their forehead and instantly absorb it and then cry foul when it doesn’t happen. And the last thing I want to add is, you won’t have fun doing any of the above stuff. It’s never going to be fun and it never is fun for anyone. The only joy you’ll get is at the very end when you succeed. Yep, classical delayed gratification. Now we get closer to the truth, yeah?
  - Leparamour 6y ago
    >And the last thing I want to add is, you won’t have fun doing any of the above stuff. It’s never going to be fun and it never is fun for anyone. The only joy you’ll get is at the very end when you succeed. You still haven't understood the perspective of people with ADHD. They know all of this intellectually (and depending on age) they have tried more systems, mental models, techniques, strategies, tricks and hacks than you can ever imagine. This is not something that you can "tough your way" through, or all of this being harsh on myself would have amounted to something. Your example, with reading just one word a day and the compound effect of repeating that behaviour regularly, hinges on some "axiom" that one will just stick to a habit. With ADHD you just "forget" to read that one word, no matter how many post-its you stick on the monitor or mirror. At best you cycle back to the "word" every few weeks without making progress, like treading water.
BirdieNZ 6y ago
It's a cool hypothesis of yours, that it's just a discipline issue. Unfortunately your typical lifestyle of a slacker you described was not my life, and I still struggled intensely, daily, with procrastination and getting things done and paying attention. I'm intelligent, had a good upbringing with strong study disciplines instilled in me, as well as a joy for learning and working. I want to be a fantastic worker and be highly productive, but despite all the advantages in life I have had, without meds my adult life is just barely staying afloat. With ADHD meds, I'm suddenly performing like all my potential and desires suggests I should be.
Jach 6y ago
You might find some mileage reading Behavior: The Control of Perception, which presents a hierarchical control system as a model of human behavior. We act to control our perceptions. From this model some interesting things can be derived based on control theory, like that some disturbances are too large to be overcome (trivial example, hold your hand out level, add an object to it and watch the control system output of your muscles react to the disturbance, add a very heavy object to it), the speed at which the system can react to a disturbance is limited by the speed at which the system can perceive the disturbance, and that lower level systems act faster than higher level ones which have to form higher level perceptions from a composite of lower level ones. (Beliefs don't come into the author's model until the 8th of 9 levels -- and of course changing beliefs is also a lot harder than rotating your wrist (level 3). Also our low level musculature is capable of much higher response rates mechanically yet is limited by perception speeds.) I'm sympathetic to your argument, but I think it falls on deaf ears for those who need to understand it. There is indeed an issue with "normies" who don't have such extreme challenges and can't imagine them in that they tend to set the policies, but the non-normies arguing with you about how drugs are absolutely necessary either ignore or fight by mischaracterizing other non-normies who have experienced such challenges, yes even at extreme levels, and understand, and nevertheless successfully thought their way out of them. Or at least well enough out of them that they have a satisfying life, and sometimes with more "just happened/got older" mystery than conscious thinking. But these two sets of non-normies form multiple crab bucket mentalities which makes communication difficult. The crabs in the bucket create additional obstacles to escaping the bucket and inevitably when one escapes he tends to look down on (if not resent) the ones still in the bucket, while the ones in the bucket have similar negative feelings for the escapee, even to the extent of thinking he can't imagine what it was like inside the bucket. As an analogy for another kind of crab bucket mentality that can happen, i.e. "there's nothing wrong with me/us", look up some deaf people's thoughts on hearing aids. An attitude of "I thought myself into this way, I should be able to think myself out of it" is hard to internalize and harder to pull off. I'm not sure you can successfully argue it into someone. Especially someone who is using drugs to alleviate their situation has in some sense already given up, and perhaps rationally so -- there are effectively irreversible processes, if your walk into darkness included a fall down a cliff, you can't just "fall" to get back up, and if you get it into you to at least try becoming stronger and climbing back, you may find the cliff is just unclimbable after all. (Though there may be a way around, or a more climbable slope, that can at least get you incrementally closer even if you may never get back to where you were originally.) I think your highlight on video games / other modern media is misguided, but there is something underlying it, which I'd summarize as simply that society is sick. A healthy society does a lot to alleviate the individual pressures described all over these threads, often preempts the need for individual strategies to deal with them, but a healthy society is not one just like ours but without games/YouTube/social media/normies controlling drug access/skyscrapers/[whatever one's particular axe to grind]. What to do then, to alleviate your pressures? Sometimes it's "nothing", they'll go away on their own. Sometimes you can make a go at changing society in a measurable way (though you'll probably just make things worse if you have any impact at all). And sometimes it's drugs, or an escape into games/studies/work/farming, or therapy, or religion, or crafting your own philosophy... I don't see a universal answer. I dislike it when people suggest there is one without solid data, whether that's "more drugs!" or "just Be Well!". On the other hand it's important to look at data and recognize when highly effective treatments do exist for lots of things -- vaccines for instance, or for an obese person rather than "put the cookie down!" (were it so easy they probably wouldn't have gotten that way) it's more useful to point at keto. (Still a "horse led to water..." effect there that may have to be addressed first, but a less intensive one, as you don't have to feel starved. Calling the effect an "executive function disorder" may be useful in having a fancy label for the phenomenon, I prefer "akrasia", but focusing on the label too much risks conflating the map with the territory.)

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago

> I generally believe that the way behavioral patterns emerge is not instant, not everything is a habit, some behaviours are impulsive or context driven. lets say that habits take time to form though. > and therefore the way you get out cannot be instant. this is only true if breaking a habit, is also a habit. i don’t not certain this is always true. lets ask, what is a habit? since this is an async convo i will answer myself. i think a habit is a behaviour that you repeat based on some trigger (time of day, previous activity etc). based on that we could call a “routine” a series of habits (or habitual behaviours). we do them, one after the other, in sequence (generally). yeah i agree, these take time to build! how do you maintain them? because i spent 3 years working on running everyday and then i was ill for a week and immediately stopped. i broke my habit (or routine) that took 3 years to build in 1 week. are you wrong or am i broken? > In other words, the only way out of the darkness is walking backing through the exact path you came from. more generally i would say, the only way out of “the darkness” (which i will use to mean a period of time in my life where i am incredibly unhappy) is to deal with my trauma and accept all parts of myself (probably with the help of a therapist). i’ve not found ruminating over the past to be a successful strategy for creating light in my life. > It takes a long time of not focusing on daily practice and discipline to get to the point where you don’t realize you need to put in at least a few hours of studying per day. i honestly don’t understand this line. is the realisation that small iterative steps are required for study innate? is this your experience? i had to explicitly learn it. is not one of the greatest productivity strategies to break large complex things (passing an exam) into smaller, manageable tasks (a few hours of study a day). i do not buy this line. > If you go years and years of studying the week of or the day before the test, you will become a certain way. what certain way is that? > I’d wager most Americans do all their major class work last minute since they were kids. it would be interesting to see a survey of this! i won’t join this wager as i don’t like gambling. > Along with that, they spend hours and hours playing video games and watching YouTube/Netflix/social media since childhood. what are you claiming video games, youtube and netflix cause here? I’m not saying they each don’t have they negative aspects! especially youtube, just enough dopamine to keep you watching, so easy to waste a bunch of hours. > By the time you are 25, you probably have a solid 20 years of insane habits. i too thought i was late all the time because of the template my mum handed down to me(shes late all the time too). you know what else can be handed down though? heritable traits. i still object to modelling all human behaviour around habits. the scope is much larger and the insanity is often a lack of behaviour (e.g not washing your butt). > What few people will admit here is what they did for most of their life. Okay, so you realized you can’t read a textbook in college. Can you describe to me how you passed the time over the last 18 years? read interesting books? played games? made music? rode bikes? went to parties. i’m not sure what you are attempting to get at here. >I’m sure you managed to fill the time. You didn’t stare at the all for 18 years. see above. > If you literally stared at the wall, fine, here is a prescription to whatever drug you want. so only if i did absolutely nothing in response to not being able to do something else, do i qualify for medication? i guess no one with any executing function disorders should get anything because sitting still is a real pain. sorry we’re not performing disorder well enough for you, i’ll get all the adhd peeps into a workshop perhaps you could join since you know exactly how someone with a disorder would perform. we really need those meds so any help you can offer is welcomed. > If you managed to do all of the other bullshit I described above, then please take some responsibility on developing better habits. man, f*k you. i’ve been taking responsibility for my actions for 30 years. you don’t know me. > It’s the intellectual version of becoming obese. You know what you ate for the last several years. so we have resorted to fat jokes. well, i’m not sure what i had hoped for tbh. tl;dr you don’t believe in this ADD-whatever the fuck and people should grow up and act like ever other adult. idk if you are a boomer but you should get checked out for alzheimers because your ideas are old as fuck. NOTE: i had a nice, emotional description of my experience but i forgot how people here like to argue (stupid me), so i took responsibility for my actions and took apart the argument line by line instead.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Hey I never ran a day in my life. I found out if I take steroids I can jump start my running in 3 months. Turns out I’m a great runner, so I must have been a great runner all this time and just need a therapeutic dose of steroids to show that I had chemical deficiency that easily solved it. Now life is much more fair for me. Look, once your life depends on a decision you know was a trade off (you feel entitled to whatever it is you don’t have from not putting in the actual work), it’s going to take intense mental gymnastics to feel sound as a person. But I can help you, repeat after me. This life wasn’t going great, so I made a decision. It’s better now, and I can live with it and fuck anyone else. All I’m saying is, don’t you dare sell that confirmation bias back into the zeitgeist. We can be friends, I’ve been there (probably still there). Certainly don’t try to sell it to the person that put in 3 years running, and the only difference between you and that person was an unprovable chemical deficiency. The guy waking up everyday to run never felt like it was never going to amount to anything once, right? They just had it in them, just like you. It’s all in you, like magic, just needs to brought out. Just own your decision in it’s entirety. No one is a saint here. Edit: is not one of the greatest productivity strategies to break large complex things (passing an exam) into smaller, manageable tasks (a few hours of study a day). i do not buy this line. This retort is a dead give away of entitlement. Everyone breaks down studying like this, Jesus. How special do some of you think you are? This is all supposed come freely to you? Read a chapter a day, and if some of you truly exhibit the impulsivity of dogs (the wind can distract you apparently), then read a page a day, and if you can’t do that, read a word a day. This is how people do it. Bunch of hidden brainiacs think they can just take a book and place it near their forehead and instantly absorb it and then cry foul when it doesn’t happen. And the last thing I want to add is, you won’t have fun doing any of the above stuff. It’s never going to be fun and it never is fun for anyone. The only joy you’ll get is at the very end when you succeed. Yep, classical delayed gratification. Now we get closer to the truth, yeah?
- Leparamour 6y ago
  >And the last thing I want to add is, you won’t have fun doing any of the above stuff. It’s never going to be fun and it never is fun for anyone. The only joy you’ll get is at the very end when you succeed. You still haven't understood the perspective of people with ADHD. They know all of this intellectually (and depending on age) they have tried more systems, mental models, techniques, strategies, tricks and hacks than you can ever imagine. This is not something that you can "tough your way" through, or all of this being harsh on myself would have amounted to something. Your example, with reading just one word a day and the compound effect of repeating that behaviour regularly, hinges on some "axiom" that one will just stick to a habit. With ADHD you just "forget" to read that one word, no matter how many post-its you stick on the monitor or mirror. At best you cycle back to the "word" every few weeks without making progress, like treading water.

BirdieNZ 6y ago

It's a cool hypothesis of yours, that it's just a discipline issue. Unfortunately your typical lifestyle of a slacker you described was not my life, and I still struggled intensely, daily, with procrastination and getting things done and paying attention. I'm intelligent, had a good upbringing with strong study disciplines instilled in me, as well as a joy for learning and working. I want to be a fantastic worker and be highly productive, but despite all the advantages in life I have had, without meds my adult life is just barely staying afloat. With ADHD meds, I'm suddenly performing like all my potential and desires suggests I should be.

Jach 6y ago

You might find some mileage reading Behavior: The Control of Perception, which presents a hierarchical control system as a model of human behavior. We act to control our perceptions. From this model some interesting things can be derived based on control theory, like that some disturbances are too large to be overcome (trivial example, hold your hand out level, add an object to it and watch the control system output of your muscles react to the disturbance, add a very heavy object to it), the speed at which the system can react to a disturbance is limited by the speed at which the system can perceive the disturbance, and that lower level systems act faster than higher level ones which have to form higher level perceptions from a composite of lower level ones. (Beliefs don't come into the author's model until the 8th of 9 levels -- and of course changing beliefs is also a lot harder than rotating your wrist (level 3). Also our low level musculature is capable of much higher response rates mechanically yet is limited by perception speeds.) I'm sympathetic to your argument, but I think it falls on deaf ears for those who need to understand it. There is indeed an issue with "normies" who don't have such extreme challenges and can't imagine them in that they tend to set the policies, but the non-normies arguing with you about how drugs are absolutely necessary either ignore or fight by mischaracterizing other non-normies who have experienced such challenges, yes even at extreme levels, and understand, and nevertheless successfully thought their way out of them. Or at least well enough out of them that they have a satisfying life, and sometimes with more "just happened/got older" mystery than conscious thinking. But these two sets of non-normies form multiple crab bucket mentalities which makes communication difficult. The crabs in the bucket create additional obstacles to escaping the bucket and inevitably when one escapes he tends to look down on (if not resent) the ones still in the bucket, while the ones in the bucket have similar negative feelings for the escapee, even to the extent of thinking he can't imagine what it was like inside the bucket. As an analogy for another kind of crab bucket mentality that can happen, i.e. "there's nothing wrong with me/us", look up some deaf people's thoughts on hearing aids. An attitude of "I thought myself into this way, I should be able to think myself out of it" is hard to internalize and harder to pull off. I'm not sure you can successfully argue it into someone. Especially someone who is using drugs to alleviate their situation has in some sense already given up, and perhaps rationally so -- there are effectively irreversible processes, if your walk into darkness included a fall down a cliff, you can't just "fall" to get back up, and if you get it into you to at least try becoming stronger and climbing back, you may find the cliff is just unclimbable after all. (Though there may be a way around, or a more climbable slope, that can at least get you incrementally closer even if you may never get back to where you were originally.) I think your highlight on video games / other modern media is misguided, but there is something underlying it, which I'd summarize as simply that society is sick. A healthy society does a lot to alleviate the individual pressures described all over these threads, often preempts the need for individual strategies to deal with them, but a healthy society is not one just like ours but without games/YouTube/social media/normies controlling drug access/skyscrapers/[whatever one's particular axe to grind]. What to do then, to alleviate your pressures? Sometimes it's "nothing", they'll go away on their own. Sometimes you can make a go at changing society in a measurable way (though you'll probably just make things worse if you have any impact at all). And sometimes it's drugs, or an escape into games/studies/work/farming, or therapy, or religion, or crafting your own philosophy... I don't see a universal answer. I dislike it when people suggest there is one without solid data, whether that's "more drugs!" or "just Be Well!". On the other hand it's important to look at data and recognize when highly effective treatments do exist for lots of things -- vaccines for instance, or for an obese person rather than "put the cookie down!" (were it so easy they probably wouldn't have gotten that way) it's more useful to point at keto. (Still a "horse led to water..." effect there that may have to be addressed first, but a less intensive one, as you don't have to feel starved. Calling the effect an "executive function disorder" may be useful in having a fancy label for the phenomenon, I prefer "akrasia", but focusing on the label too much risks conflating the map with the territory.)