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> John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down perfectly captured this when he noticed that schools, another place where authority figures hang out, ruthlessly disciplin

• BowBun 2y ago
  I enjoy this take. As someone who feels like they align with a lot of symptoms associated with ADHD, I thrive in startup environments and would rather be unemployed than work in a corporate environment. That checks out! And there's no harm to it, there are plenty of opportunities for people of all kinds. I think the danger is expecting that any environment fits everyone. We're too many and too diverse for that to be true.
• __rito__ 2y ago
  There are already some research hinting that ADHD in human population helped human civilization progress. [0][1] [0]: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/evolution https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/evolution [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/21/adhd-may-have-been-an-evolutionary-advantage-research-suggests https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/21/adhd-may-hav...
  • swayvil 2y ago
    All the great inventions, great art, great ideas. ADHD. Nobody else has the focus. In ancient times the Raja Yogis (basically wizards) preferred to recruit from those with ADHD. They called them "habitually one-pointed".
    • patcon 2y ago
      Wouldn't "habitually one-pointed" people be very focussed, rather than distracted? Or is the idea that a very distracted person being honed into a focussed and aware person is a duality that's valued -- able to live in both worlds? (Rather than a very focussed person being taught to be distracted and highly integrative?)
      • swayvil 2y ago
        I know. But I'm told they're calling "Aspergers" ADHD now. And the brittleness that comes with habitual focus looks like massive distraction. I mean you've got these guys who can focus to the point of magic, but one push and they crack. And we're borrowing somebody else's terminology anyway. So don't expect precision.
        • cromulent 2y ago
          As someone who has both diagnoses late in life (autistic/Aspergers and ADHD), they explained it to me as different things. The ADHD wants to respond to stimulus, the autism wants to resist it and impose order. One at a time is fine. If they both activate, then the result is massive stress.
          • patcon 2y ago
            I have ADHD and dated someone with AuDHD who I cared for deeply (read lots of books about the neurotype and implications on our relationship). your explanation was very clear and helpful. Wish I'd heard it explained so clearly at the time :) thanks!
        • 2y ago
• godelski 2y ago
  > People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. Being a researcher with ADHD I find academia very very weird. I feel like my ADHD (and others I know) should be a superpower. Loving to dig down into rabbit holes and a bunch of different topics, which can allow connecting different things. Not needing reasons to go down the rabbit holes, but just because. Meaning you explore things others don't. But actually academia is incredibly stressful and feels hostile. There's the publish or perish, so you can't go down the rabbit holes and deep dive. You don't have time to dig deep. Dealing with review is crazy as you have to argue to people who don't care that your stuff matters even though no one can tell if it does or not and you should just pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. (We used to not review this way. We used to check for errors and plagiarism and if not, publish). Everything is just hyper metric focused even though everyone knows the metrics mean so little to the actual end goal they are everything to your survival goals. The goals are at odds and I don't think anyone wants to do anything about it even though many will admit it. I know some people will say I'm naive to think academia should work that way but I think that's naive, so we'll have to agree to disagree. I think academia should be about pursuing knowledge and giving people the environment they need to do that, with the trade being teaching the future generations. To be honest it feels the world is becoming more hostile to me. There is becoming less flexibility. Fewer opportunities to explore and hire punishments for doing so. Its harder to take things apart (physical or code) as the gardens close more and more. Harder to fix things, harder to make things to things I want (for utility and for fun). It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough adderal that can fix that. I think you are right that the chaos helps escape local minima. If I've learned anything in my studies it's that noise is essential in optimization theory. It is also a measurement of error or uncertainty. So unless you can measure something to infinite precision then you should be incorporating noise into your models
  • patcon 2y ago
    You might get a kick out of this: it's an attempt to remodel funding to reward and reinvigorate research with the intelligence of the folks who straddle fields -- to reward those who make correct predictions about where future "breakthrough innovations" (ie. Intersectional and significant research convergences) will appear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24 Puja Ohlhaver has some great ideas and interventions in this space <3
• patcon 2y ago
  STRONG agree with your sentiments btw
• 93po 2y ago
  > I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima. I have had life-long crippling ADHD that I am only now, in my 30s, starting to learn to cope with. My biggest thing was educating myself on what ADHD actually was so that I was better able to spot it in my own life, and then apply strategies to address it. I'm not sure the above is relevant, but what I wanted to say is in response to this: > I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima. My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate - playing an instrument, learning a language, gettign a PhD, etc. But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things. On one hand, that sucks. I wish my brain needed less short-term reward. I wish I was able to hold long term goals in my head as a motivation to get stuff done. But ADHD brains are famously very bad at this, mine included. On the other hand, ADHD, to your point, has forced a LOT of growth and movement in my life. I cannot sit in one job, town, relationship, friendship, forever. I get antsy. I have to try new things. I crave novelty, and I seek it out in every aspect of my life. I do weird, crazy things, and I meet people who also do those things, and we get along just great. I live a very nontraditional lifestyle. And I've tried a million different things, hobbies, people, cities. I know a little bit about absolutely everything and can talk to almost anyone about something they're interested in because I know just enough to ask interesting questions that they enjoy answering. It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate (...). But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things. This is 100% accurate description of me, too. Except, I somehow managed to finish my masters' studies, start a career in software and eventually get a decent job, then get married and had a kid before I got diagnosed and realized where all my anguish comes from, why I barely hold on. On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, this still sucks. I really wish I'd been diagnosed a bit earlier, because even if the kind of lifestyle and perspective you described would've worked for me too, it's too late for me now. I can't afford to try any nontrivial novelty, try different hobbies, or do anything else I've been denying myself, with the intensity I actually need. No, an hour a week of a new hobby will not do; nothing short of frequent binges lasting uninterrupted for days would do. It's how I learned everything, including the knowledge and experience to give me a solid start in software. I thought I don't need it, I denied myself it to fit better with normal society and regular people, and now it's too late - too many loved ones depend on me not just bailing out and reinventing myself in another industry. > It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work. Yes, like this, and I wish I could do it like you. Wonder if there is another way.
• Aurornis 2y ago
  > There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation. The “scored higher” part of this study is editorialization. The game was developed in a way that exploration produced a higher numeric result so they could measure something as part of the test. The game was an artificial experiment environment and it was designed to “reward” behavior associated with ADHD, so it would have been more surprising if the game did not result in higher scores for people with ADHD. The layers of editorialization and hypothesizing built on studies like this remind me of the debate over “depressive realism”. Some researchers put out a study showing that people with depression more accurately interpreted something in some specific scenarios which were designed for the study. It was widely misinterpreted by the public and pop culture science writers as showing that depressed people see the world more accurately, and therefore they are an untapped reservoir for seeing the world as it really is. There’s a huge problem with this interpretation because depression produces a lot of cognitive distortions that make people think things are much worse than they really are, so they’re really only more “accurate” when you have them evaluate situations that are worse than they appear. Yet this nuance is lost in the pop culture debate and many people think “depressive realism” means depressed people have a secret advantage. I think these ideas have become popular as the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and other conditions have widened to include large percentages of the population. In the past the diagnostic criteria for ADHD was such that it was estimated to have low single digit percentage prevalence in the population. Now we’re at a point where Adderall is the 14th most prescribed drug in America ( https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx ). A similar thing has happened with Autism Spectrum diagnoses, where the criteria were once so strict that it was very rare for someone to get a diagnosis. Now I’m hearing fellow parents casually mention that their young children got an Autism Spectrum diagnosis after simply visiting a medical professional (found on internet listings) and suggesting it. Meanwhile my family friends with a severe autistic child are increasingly frustrated that pop culture idea of autism has shifted so far into the population that people are seemingly forgetting that severe autism is actually very debilitating, much like severe ADHD.