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Now you're making me curious why people with ADHD (me included) tend to have a weird tendency for writing longer run-on sentences with commas, that on top of th

Now you're making me curious why people with ADHD (me included) tend to have a weird tendency for writing longer run-on sentences with commas, that on top of that use more parenthesis than average. Often nesting them, even. Because according to research our working memory is a little lower on average than neurotypicals, which seems to contradict this.

deleted 2y ago
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boesboes 2y ago
no filtering i would say. More stream of thoughts, less structured and planned communication
dTal 2y ago
Perhaps the text itself is functioning as working memory. Both ADHD people and neurotypicals have deeply structured thoughts. "Serializing" those thoughts without planning ahead leads to the "stream of consciousness" writing style, which includes things like run-on sentences and deeply nested parentheses. This style is considered poor form, because it is hard to follow. To serialize and communicate thoughts in a way that avoids this style, it is necessary to plan ahead and rely on working memory to hold several sub-goals simultaneously, instead of simply scanning back through the text to see which parentheses have not been closed yet. It could also be simply that ADHD people have "branchier" thoughts, hopping around a constellation of related concepts that they feel compelled to communicate despite being tangential to the main point; parentheses are the main lexical construct used to convey such asides.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  If it exhibits in spoken language as well, that would be evidence for the "branchier thoughts" explanation. That said, knowing when to use dashes—longer than hyphens—can help mix things up.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    Well, people with ADHD often have varying degrees of pressured speech, which on the surface appears like it could have the same origins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_of_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_of_speech
- GistNoesis 2y ago
  It's not just "branchier" thought that make it hard to communicate, it's graphier thoughts, when you mean (it's important) to communicate that it's not just a tree, but that connections may also go both ways, and sometimes they even have cycles. That to see the full picture in more nuance you've got to consider those feedback loops, and that they don't necessarily have precedence one over the other but that they must be all taken account simultaneously. When you explain it serially you are forced to choose a spanning tree, and people usually stop listening when the spanning tree has touched all the relevant concepts, then they persuade themselves they got the full picture but miss some connections, that make the problem more complex and nuanced. When graphs have more than one loop, loopy belief propagation doesn't work anymore and you need an another algorithm to update your belief without introducing bias.
  - aeonik 2y ago
    This explanation resonates with me a lot. I use Logseq to store my notes in a graph now, which works pretty darned good for me, but it still bothers me that I can't have polyhierarcies in the namespaces and/or compound aliases. I want to be able to simultaneously encode [[Computer Science]] and [[Computer]] [[Science]]. And [[Project1/Computer Science]] to at least provide a connection to [[Project2/Computer Science]].
    - GistNoesis 2y ago
      I am not familiar with logseq. The sort of connection you want to made can often be made automatically using some embeddings. Because [[Project1/Computer Science]] and [[Project2/Computer Science]] likely have similar content, their semantic embedding are probably close, and a neighborhood search can help find them easily. Communication is kind of the game of transmitting the information in such a way that your interlocutor internal representation of things ends up mapping to yours. Low dimensional embeddings are often very useful, but sometimes graph are not planar. Symmetry is usually useful, and a symmetric higher dimensional embedding is often better, because the symmetry constrain it more making it easier to be sure it was transmitted correctly. When people ends up with different concept maps, in one of which some concepts are located near each other and in the other the same concepts are located far apart, interesting things usually happen when they communicate, ranging from culture enlightenment to culture war. Some of these mapping are sometimes constrained to 3d, by things like memory palaces, (method of loci), but this is somewhat arbitrary, and staying more abstract and working in higher dimension until you "feel" everything fall into the right place intuitively is often preferable, (aka the Feynman method).
wruza 2y ago
One guy (whom I (electronically more than else) know) writes (can) in (most of the times this (or deeper)) style. He can produce whole paragraphs of this semi-regular language and it even has distinct structure and non-standard interactions like in the above sentence.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  The rule of parenthesis (that they only ever add context) implies that your example sentence's core message is; "One guy write in style"
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    GP is hitting against limit of expressiveness of sequential text. Stacked parentheses work when the flattened sentence still reads correctly, but in this case, GP has a graph-like thought, in that: in (most of the times <this> (or deeper)) style is supposed to represent a graph, where "most of the times" and "or deeper" both descend from "this", and "or deeper" also descends from "most of the times". A DAG like that can't in general be flattened without back references (which would be meta-elements in the text, something natural writing generally doesn't do) or repetition, and the latter will lead to non-grammatical sentences, especially as you trim the DAG down to reduce detail. Also: while I'm not the guy GP references, I am a guy that does that too - or rather did, at some point in the past, until I realized there's like 5 people in my life who could understand this without an issue, even less who'd indulge me or enjoy communicating this way. So over time, I got back to writing like a normal person[0]; I guess conformity is just less mentally taxing. -- [0] - Mostly - I still use semicolons and single-depth parentheses a lot, and on HN, also footnotes.
    - aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
      I used to do it a lot myself since it's closer to the thought. But I'm also dyslectic. Getting lost at which stack-depth I'm at while reading made me respect short and to-the-point writing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

boesboes 2y ago

no filtering i would say. More stream of thoughts, less structured and planned communication

dTal 2y ago

Perhaps the text itself is functioning as working memory. Both ADHD people and neurotypicals have deeply structured thoughts. "Serializing" those thoughts without planning ahead leads to the "stream of consciousness" writing style, which includes things like run-on sentences and deeply nested parentheses. This style is considered poor form, because it is hard to follow. To serialize and communicate thoughts in a way that avoids this style, it is necessary to plan ahead and rely on working memory to hold several sub-goals simultaneously, instead of simply scanning back through the text to see which parentheses have not been closed yet. It could also be simply that ADHD people have "branchier" thoughts, hopping around a constellation of related concepts that they feel compelled to communicate despite being tangential to the main point; parentheses are the main lexical construct used to convey such asides.

Terr_ 2y ago
If it exhibits in spoken language as well, that would be evidence for the "branchier thoughts" explanation. That said, knowing when to use dashes—longer than hyphens—can help mix things up.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  Well, people with ADHD often have varying degrees of pressured speech, which on the surface appears like it could have the same origins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_of_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_of_speech
GistNoesis 2y ago
It's not just "branchier" thought that make it hard to communicate, it's graphier thoughts, when you mean (it's important) to communicate that it's not just a tree, but that connections may also go both ways, and sometimes they even have cycles. That to see the full picture in more nuance you've got to consider those feedback loops, and that they don't necessarily have precedence one over the other but that they must be all taken account simultaneously. When you explain it serially you are forced to choose a spanning tree, and people usually stop listening when the spanning tree has touched all the relevant concepts, then they persuade themselves they got the full picture but miss some connections, that make the problem more complex and nuanced. When graphs have more than one loop, loopy belief propagation doesn't work anymore and you need an another algorithm to update your belief without introducing bias.
- aeonik 2y ago
  This explanation resonates with me a lot. I use Logseq to store my notes in a graph now, which works pretty darned good for me, but it still bothers me that I can't have polyhierarcies in the namespaces and/or compound aliases. I want to be able to simultaneously encode [[Computer Science]] and [[Computer]] [[Science]]. And [[Project1/Computer Science]] to at least provide a connection to [[Project2/Computer Science]].
  - GistNoesis 2y ago
    I am not familiar with logseq. The sort of connection you want to made can often be made automatically using some embeddings. Because [[Project1/Computer Science]] and [[Project2/Computer Science]] likely have similar content, their semantic embedding are probably close, and a neighborhood search can help find them easily. Communication is kind of the game of transmitting the information in such a way that your interlocutor internal representation of things ends up mapping to yours. Low dimensional embeddings are often very useful, but sometimes graph are not planar. Symmetry is usually useful, and a symmetric higher dimensional embedding is often better, because the symmetry constrain it more making it easier to be sure it was transmitted correctly. When people ends up with different concept maps, in one of which some concepts are located near each other and in the other the same concepts are located far apart, interesting things usually happen when they communicate, ranging from culture enlightenment to culture war. Some of these mapping are sometimes constrained to 3d, by things like memory palaces, (method of loci), but this is somewhat arbitrary, and staying more abstract and working in higher dimension until you "feel" everything fall into the right place intuitively is often preferable, (aka the Feynman method).

wruza 2y ago

One guy (whom I (electronically more than else) know) writes (can) in (most of the times this (or deeper)) style. He can produce whole paragraphs of this semi-regular language and it even has distinct structure and non-standard interactions like in the above sentence.

aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
The rule of parenthesis (that they only ever add context) implies that your example sentence's core message is; "One guy write in style"
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  GP is hitting against limit of expressiveness of sequential text. Stacked parentheses work when the flattened sentence still reads correctly, but in this case, GP has a graph-like thought, in that: in (most of the times <this> (or deeper)) style is supposed to represent a graph, where "most of the times" and "or deeper" both descend from "this", and "or deeper" also descends from "most of the times". A DAG like that can't in general be flattened without back references (which would be meta-elements in the text, something natural writing generally doesn't do) or repetition, and the latter will lead to non-grammatical sentences, especially as you trim the DAG down to reduce detail. Also: while I'm not the guy GP references, I am a guy that does that too - or rather did, at some point in the past, until I realized there's like 5 people in my life who could understand this without an issue, even less who'd indulge me or enjoy communicating this way. So over time, I got back to writing like a normal person[0]; I guess conformity is just less mentally taxing. -- [0] - Mostly - I still use semicolons and single-depth parentheses a lot, and on HN, also footnotes.
  - aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
    I used to do it a lot myself since it's closer to the thought. But I'm also dyslectic. Getting lost at which stack-depth I'm at while reading made me respect short and to-the-point writing.