3 ms·

> 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

> 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
- godelski 2y ago
  Where she begins the talk made me laugh a lot. I research machine learning and one thing I disagree with a lot of my peers with is the speed in which ML is progressing. I don't disagree that things have changed rapidly, but the underlying work and innovation is rather slow. There's a lot of similarities in frameworks and underlying connections that mean one should be able to transfer a lot of knowledge from one niche to another. (e.g. I was focused on normalizing flows in the beginning of my PhD, while everyone was on GANs, and when diffusion came out I instantly understood it. And now flows are becoming a thing but I still am unable to publish in this area because I cannot obtain a reviewer that understands the base concepts nor the history and context of the papers. It doesn't work if I have to spend 10 pages in background contextualizing everything...). I think with funding, the thing is you need to embrace the noise. I don't want to dissuade people from trying to optimize this process. But I think if we don't recognize there is a high amount of noise, that it is doomed to fail. There's things you know you know, there's things you know you don't know, there are things you don't know that you don't know, and there are things you think you know and don't know. Due to the latter two, you have to embrace noise into the system or else you will be limited to the first two. You have to embrace the outside, wild, and crazy. It can be extremely difficult to differentiate genius from craziness, and often there is none. There's always a price, so the question is which is more costly. She picks universities as the great breakthrough place, and to be fair, I mostly agree, but I think there's a lot of metric hacking that she isn't thinking about. That this has been baked in for years. The people that are successful in the system breed that system. Nor does it account for the dark horses, the noise. It reinforces fast timelines, as we're rewarding predictability in domains where it may take several decades for those predictions to be proven accurate or not. There's a certain irony in her mentioning Higgs, as his original paper was in 1964 but we didn't discover the particle until 2012. Part of the issue she is talking about is solved more easily. Lots of research is rejected for lack of novelty. Why this is even a metric to judge a paper's worth is beyond me, as the foundation of science is about reproducibility. It also encourages obscurification as so much is obvious once you've been told, but not prior. If we go back to the form of publishing where we publish works void of major errors and plagiarism, I bet we would see an increase in innovation again. Another part of the issue is in evaluation itself (similarly solved). We're all under lots of time pressure and so few spend time reviewing carefully (you'd be shocked at some reviews I've gotten and similarly how generic they are: "paper is well written and easy to understand. Not enough experiments, not novel. There are too many writing errors" (points out easily solvable thing like a broken cross reference or an incorrect issue like saying 'these data')). You can see part of this in HN comments too btw. Where people look at benchmarks and read them as answers instead of hints. Which there is an extra problem in that anything sufficiently novel will be unlikely to be state of the art on all things in the initial go. So it is easy to reject. Then the research is not pursued. But this is ludicrous when we're talking about research, which is at a much lower level. The problem is people read research papers as if they are reviewing products. This can only stifle innovation. In machine learning there is the "gpu rich" and the "gpu poor." I can with high confidence say that the "gpu poor" aren't any worse at innovating, but rather that their works are just more likely to be rejected. How can you compete when others can spend 2-5x the money to tune parameters when what the paper is about is an architectural change or a change to optimization methods. We aren't holding variables equal here and very few want to admit it.
RandomWorker 2y ago
ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later
- ghxst 2y ago
  I tend to not edit drafts as much anymore and just start over, more of a destructive iterative design approach. It makes it harder to plan projects and colleagues don't always like it but my output is high and I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. Do you feel similarly?
  - godelski 2y ago
    > I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. I tend to be bad at this because "this isn't working" becomes "oh interesting, this isn't working". Fwiw, very rarely does that not lead to value. Its just that the value add can be later down the line or in a different project. But so often there's that "Ahha!" or "oh it's just like that" moments. But I think a lot of people have difficulties with long term rewards. I think it's good to have both though but I'm not sure any single person is good at both so you need both types of people. Different optimizers for different goals
  - RandomWorker 2y ago
    Totally it’s all about the kind games, trying to frame every paragraph, sentence or even word as a first draft. Don’t need to wipe an entire document imho.
- godelski 2y ago
  I'm not so sure the knowledge acquisition is slower. I'm actually starting to believe it's faster. What my other ADHD friend and I notice is the threshold for thinking you get it is lower. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand any single thing but I do have a lot of peers which will say yes far earlier and it leads to a lot of confusing experiences. A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol). Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work. I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.
ghxst 2y ago
> It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough Adderall that can fix that. My psychiatrist told me that when using any amphetamine-based medication for ADHD, it's important to see it as a way to reinforce routines and habits, whatever they may be, and not necessarily a fix to ADHD itself but rather as a tool to help my brain. With that in mind, I was advised to take my medication and immediately start doing the things I usually struggle with. For me, that just meant getting to work on specific tasks or studying specific things. Sticking to this approach made a huge difference in how well the medication worked for me. Over time, I was able to lower my dose, and now I find it much easier to settle into a routine. While the medication can dull my creativity, I've learned to work around that by adjusting when I take it and planning out my work accordingly. In the case my workload or life changes I tend to get back to my old dosage for a short period until new routines settle, I'm very fortunate to have a family doctor that understands this and is willing to change dosages when needed. I'm not sure how this would play out with extended-release versions or if this applies to your situation, but I figured it was worth sharing. Also curious to know if this approach has worked particularly well for me but not for others, or if you take the same approach already.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I think the lowest effective dose of the mildest possible stimulant is a pretty good strategy for people with ADHD doing any type of creative work. It also probably helps to take it intermittently so you can have the benefits of both being with and without it. I find my creativity is still pretty much 100% on a very low (basically small child level) dose of ritalin. I won't even touch adderall- it completely killed my creativity and ability to sleep soundly.
- godelski 2y ago
  Thanks. I do use a similar strategy though I've only been on Adderall for about 2 years. I do take XR and treat it like a baseline. But I also have an instant that allows me to adjust. Getting better at dosing but yeah it definitely requires flexibility. I do notice it depends on lots of things like sleep, exercise, and diet. Doesn't help that human sensitivity is similar to manufacturing tolerances lol. It's hard to find the routine though as there are a lot of external forces and it doesn't help that everyone acts like they need to be done right away (I mean the big issue with ADHD is triage and prioritization). This is worse in academia than when I've worked and honestly I only went to get diagnosed because the environment made everything more difficult. One thing I found helps is I put desiccant in my bottles and it helps maintain the quality. I do some 3d printing and so store any excess medicine with filament.
_yb2s 2y ago
I'm also an academic researcher with ADHD, and feel exactly the same as you. Sometimes my hyperfocus and sense of adventure leads to big discoveries and resulting publications that keep me successful... but that is interspersed with months or years of guilt and terror over not meeting expectations at regular intervals. I love science, but I do feel like my health is suffering from this, and that I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job. Anyways, you are not alone, there are others like you also going through this. I am thinking about how nice it would be to have a community for ADHD academics to share advice and strategies.
- godelski 2y ago
  > I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job. God, so much this > Anyways, you are not alone Thanks. Even though I know it's true it helps to have it said. It's easy to forget especially when spending so much time trying to mask it and fit in
thayne 2y ago
This is actually why I decided not to pursue a career in Academia. I originally wanted to work in acadeemia, but as I finished my undergraduate I realized that while I would love to do research, the other aspects, like applying for grants, constantly having to publish, etc. would be extremely taxing and stressful for me.
- godelski 2y ago
  Yeah a lot of the faculty is surprised I don't want to pursue academia. I absolutely love research and I actually like teaching (and my students really like my teaching style too[0]). Grants I can with but yeah it sucks. Why I won't do it though is all the politics. The admins hired to take care of all the bureaucracy just make things take longer as you need to ask approval for things but can't do so through a direct line of communication so it takes all day. I just get nothing done and am having so many interruptions you can't settle into deep work [0] funny story. My advisor is kinda lazy so pushed it off to me. But he didn't always show up. But he would teach sometimes because the department would get mad if he didn't (politics). But when it'd be just me the student in the front would nervously ask "is it just you?" And when I'd say yes they all relax and get excited lol

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

godelski 2y ago
Where she begins the talk made me laugh a lot. I research machine learning and one thing I disagree with a lot of my peers with is the speed in which ML is progressing. I don't disagree that things have changed rapidly, but the underlying work and innovation is rather slow. There's a lot of similarities in frameworks and underlying connections that mean one should be able to transfer a lot of knowledge from one niche to another. (e.g. I was focused on normalizing flows in the beginning of my PhD, while everyone was on GANs, and when diffusion came out I instantly understood it. And now flows are becoming a thing but I still am unable to publish in this area because I cannot obtain a reviewer that understands the base concepts nor the history and context of the papers. It doesn't work if I have to spend 10 pages in background contextualizing everything...). I think with funding, the thing is you need to embrace the noise. I don't want to dissuade people from trying to optimize this process. But I think if we don't recognize there is a high amount of noise, that it is doomed to fail. There's things you know you know, there's things you know you don't know, there are things you don't know that you don't know, and there are things you think you know and don't know. Due to the latter two, you have to embrace noise into the system or else you will be limited to the first two. You have to embrace the outside, wild, and crazy. It can be extremely difficult to differentiate genius from craziness, and often there is none. There's always a price, so the question is which is more costly. She picks universities as the great breakthrough place, and to be fair, I mostly agree, but I think there's a lot of metric hacking that she isn't thinking about. That this has been baked in for years. The people that are successful in the system breed that system. Nor does it account for the dark horses, the noise. It reinforces fast timelines, as we're rewarding predictability in domains where it may take several decades for those predictions to be proven accurate or not. There's a certain irony in her mentioning Higgs, as his original paper was in 1964 but we didn't discover the particle until 2012. Part of the issue she is talking about is solved more easily. Lots of research is rejected for lack of novelty. Why this is even a metric to judge a paper's worth is beyond me, as the foundation of science is about reproducibility. It also encourages obscurification as so much is obvious once you've been told, but not prior. If we go back to the form of publishing where we publish works void of major errors and plagiarism, I bet we would see an increase in innovation again. Another part of the issue is in evaluation itself (similarly solved). We're all under lots of time pressure and so few spend time reviewing carefully (you'd be shocked at some reviews I've gotten and similarly how generic they are: "paper is well written and easy to understand. Not enough experiments, not novel. There are too many writing errors" (points out easily solvable thing like a broken cross reference or an incorrect issue like saying 'these data')). You can see part of this in HN comments too btw. Where people look at benchmarks and read them as answers instead of hints. Which there is an extra problem in that anything sufficiently novel will be unlikely to be state of the art on all things in the initial go. So it is easy to reject. Then the research is not pursued. But this is ludicrous when we're talking about research, which is at a much lower level. The problem is people read research papers as if they are reviewing products. This can only stifle innovation. In machine learning there is the "gpu rich" and the "gpu poor." I can with high confidence say that the "gpu poor" aren't any worse at innovating, but rather that their works are just more likely to be rejected. How can you compete when others can spend 2-5x the money to tune parameters when what the paper is about is an architectural change or a change to optimization methods. We aren't holding variables equal here and very few want to admit it.

RandomWorker 2y ago

ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later

ghxst 2y ago
I tend to not edit drafts as much anymore and just start over, more of a destructive iterative design approach. It makes it harder to plan projects and colleagues don't always like it but my output is high and I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. Do you feel similarly?
- godelski 2y ago
  > I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. I tend to be bad at this because "this isn't working" becomes "oh interesting, this isn't working". Fwiw, very rarely does that not lead to value. Its just that the value add can be later down the line or in a different project. But so often there's that "Ahha!" or "oh it's just like that" moments. But I think a lot of people have difficulties with long term rewards. I think it's good to have both though but I'm not sure any single person is good at both so you need both types of people. Different optimizers for different goals
- RandomWorker 2y ago
  Totally it’s all about the kind games, trying to frame every paragraph, sentence or even word as a first draft. Don’t need to wipe an entire document imho.
godelski 2y ago
I'm not so sure the knowledge acquisition is slower. I'm actually starting to believe it's faster. What my other ADHD friend and I notice is the threshold for thinking you get it is lower. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand any single thing but I do have a lot of peers which will say yes far earlier and it leads to a lot of confusing experiences. A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol). Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work. I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.

ghxst 2y ago

> It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough Adderall that can fix that. My psychiatrist told me that when using any amphetamine-based medication for ADHD, it's important to see it as a way to reinforce routines and habits, whatever they may be, and not necessarily a fix to ADHD itself but rather as a tool to help my brain. With that in mind, I was advised to take my medication and immediately start doing the things I usually struggle with. For me, that just meant getting to work on specific tasks or studying specific things. Sticking to this approach made a huge difference in how well the medication worked for me. Over time, I was able to lower my dose, and now I find it much easier to settle into a routine. While the medication can dull my creativity, I've learned to work around that by adjusting when I take it and planning out my work accordingly. In the case my workload or life changes I tend to get back to my old dosage for a short period until new routines settle, I'm very fortunate to have a family doctor that understands this and is willing to change dosages when needed. I'm not sure how this would play out with extended-release versions or if this applies to your situation, but I figured it was worth sharing. Also curious to know if this approach has worked particularly well for me but not for others, or if you take the same approach already.

_yb2s 2y ago
I think the lowest effective dose of the mildest possible stimulant is a pretty good strategy for people with ADHD doing any type of creative work. It also probably helps to take it intermittently so you can have the benefits of both being with and without it. I find my creativity is still pretty much 100% on a very low (basically small child level) dose of ritalin. I won't even touch adderall- it completely killed my creativity and ability to sleep soundly.
godelski 2y ago
Thanks. I do use a similar strategy though I've only been on Adderall for about 2 years. I do take XR and treat it like a baseline. But I also have an instant that allows me to adjust. Getting better at dosing but yeah it definitely requires flexibility. I do notice it depends on lots of things like sleep, exercise, and diet. Doesn't help that human sensitivity is similar to manufacturing tolerances lol. It's hard to find the routine though as there are a lot of external forces and it doesn't help that everyone acts like they need to be done right away (I mean the big issue with ADHD is triage and prioritization). This is worse in academia than when I've worked and honestly I only went to get diagnosed because the environment made everything more difficult. One thing I found helps is I put desiccant in my bottles and it helps maintain the quality. I do some 3d printing and so store any excess medicine with filament.

_yb2s 2y ago

I'm also an academic researcher with ADHD, and feel exactly the same as you. Sometimes my hyperfocus and sense of adventure leads to big discoveries and resulting publications that keep me successful... but that is interspersed with months or years of guilt and terror over not meeting expectations at regular intervals. I love science, but I do feel like my health is suffering from this, and that I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job. Anyways, you are not alone, there are others like you also going through this. I am thinking about how nice it would be to have a community for ADHD academics to share advice and strategies.

godelski 2y ago
> I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job. God, so much this > Anyways, you are not alone Thanks. Even though I know it's true it helps to have it said. It's easy to forget especially when spending so much time trying to mask it and fit in

thayne 2y ago

This is actually why I decided not to pursue a career in Academia. I originally wanted to work in acadeemia, but as I finished my undergraduate I realized that while I would love to do research, the other aspects, like applying for grants, constantly having to publish, etc. would be extremely taxing and stressful for me.

godelski 2y ago
Yeah a lot of the faculty is surprised I don't want to pursue academia. I absolutely love research and I actually like teaching (and my students really like my teaching style too[0]). Grants I can with but yeah it sucks. Why I won't do it though is all the politics. The admins hired to take care of all the bureaucracy just make things take longer as you need to ask approval for things but can't do so through a direct line of communication so it takes all day. I just get nothing done and am having so many interruptions you can't settle into deep work [0] funny story. My advisor is kinda lazy so pushed it off to me. But he didn't always show up. But he would teach sometimes because the department would get mad if he didn't (politics). But when it'd be just me the student in the front would nervously ask "is it just you?" And when I'd say yes they all relax and get excited lol