3 ms·

I'm noticing that there have been a whole lot of discussions/articles on HN recently relating to ADD/ADHD. Do a significant amount of founders have this disorde

by clicks 14y ago

I'm noticing that there have been a whole lot of discussions/articles on HN recently relating to ADD/ADHD. Do a significant amount of founders have this disorder? I'm wondering what's the explanation here.

chimeracoder 14y ago
Note: This is a response to clicks's comment, not to the linked article. I'm not going to comment about OP, but I will say I've noticed that, in the majority of these posts, the person is self-diagnosed and has received no psychiatric evaluation whatsoever. A significant number of founders may have "ADD"[0] in that they have trouble focusing, etc. This is like self-diagnosing depression based on the fact that they "feel sad". I have no idea how many founders actually have ADHD - ie, DSM 314.xx - but I take any HN post about "ADD" with a whole heaping of salt. It's nothing personal, but let's just say that my internal Bayesian classifier has been trained to detect most as pure noise. [0] I put this in quotation marks because the term has been outdated and deprecated for quite a long time in the medical community - in my experience, most people who say they have "ADD" haven't received any medical treatment recently, because that's not the term that any current psychologist/psychiatrist would use.
- bmac27 14y ago
  In my case, I've gone through a pretty extensive battery of tests with two separate behavioral psychologists that go beyond self-evaluation or those (largely nonsensical) questionnaires that primary care physicians have you fill out. But I agree with what you're saying. There are folks out there who've made claims to being ADD without being officially diagnosed, some in startup spaces. To be fair though, it can be difficult to diagnose even in the medical community, particularly given that it seems to be the default fallback for any parent wanting to medicate a child that may be going through a natural hyperactive phase. On the other hand, I wasn't officially diagnosed until I was 20 so I spent 18+ years in the dark. Others I know went through similar (longer) periods of quiet self-diagnosis before they finally decided to go through what would be considered an appropriate test.
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    > In my case, I've gone through a pretty extensive battery of tests with two separate behavioral psychologists that go beyond self-evaluation or those (largely nonsensical) questionnaires that primary care physicians have you fill out. But I agree with what you're saying. There are folks out there who've made claims to being ADD without being officially diagnosed, some in startup spaces. Exactly - I literally just had this discussion here yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475037). ADHD is incredibly tough (read: expensive) to diagnose properly, and almost impossible to self-diagnose with any appreciable degree of confidence. My frustration comes from the fact that people first misdiagnose themselves or their kids, or diagnose themselves through inappropriate tests, which then leads people to conclude that ADHD doesn't really exist (see randallsquared's reply). In other words, "our [cheap] classifier model is incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore the latent variable we're predicting must be imaginary", instead of "our [cheap] classifiers are incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore those diagnostic models are inadequate".
- nsxwolf 14y ago
  Similar to how many pilots claim to have OCD and how that helps them be a good pilot - but if it were actually medically diagnosed, the FAA would clip their wings.
- reeses 14y ago
  You said the worst three letters for self-diagnosis. "DSM" generates more "Hey, that's me!" than horoscopes. Now that IV will be out of date and available at every used bookstore for $5, expect a run on them. (Or buy up every copy you can and throw them up on Amazon :-))

by clicks 14y ago

chimeracoder 14y ago

Note: This is a response to clicks's comment, not to the linked article. I'm not going to comment about OP, but I will say I've noticed that, in the majority of these posts, the person is self-diagnosed and has received no psychiatric evaluation whatsoever. A significant number of founders may have "ADD"[0] in that they have trouble focusing, etc. This is like self-diagnosing depression based on the fact that they "feel sad". I have no idea how many founders actually have ADHD - ie, DSM 314.xx - but I take any HN post about "ADD" with a whole heaping of salt. It's nothing personal, but let's just say that my internal Bayesian classifier has been trained to detect most as pure noise. [0] I put this in quotation marks because the term has been outdated and deprecated for quite a long time in the medical community - in my experience, most people who say they have "ADD" haven't received any medical treatment recently, because that's not the term that any current psychologist/psychiatrist would use.

bmac27 14y ago
In my case, I've gone through a pretty extensive battery of tests with two separate behavioral psychologists that go beyond self-evaluation or those (largely nonsensical) questionnaires that primary care physicians have you fill out. But I agree with what you're saying. There are folks out there who've made claims to being ADD without being officially diagnosed, some in startup spaces. To be fair though, it can be difficult to diagnose even in the medical community, particularly given that it seems to be the default fallback for any parent wanting to medicate a child that may be going through a natural hyperactive phase. On the other hand, I wasn't officially diagnosed until I was 20 so I spent 18+ years in the dark. Others I know went through similar (longer) periods of quiet self-diagnosis before they finally decided to go through what would be considered an appropriate test.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > In my case, I've gone through a pretty extensive battery of tests with two separate behavioral psychologists that go beyond self-evaluation or those (largely nonsensical) questionnaires that primary care physicians have you fill out. But I agree with what you're saying. There are folks out there who've made claims to being ADD without being officially diagnosed, some in startup spaces. Exactly - I literally just had this discussion here yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475037). ADHD is incredibly tough (read: expensive) to diagnose properly, and almost impossible to self-diagnose with any appreciable degree of confidence. My frustration comes from the fact that people first misdiagnose themselves or their kids, or diagnose themselves through inappropriate tests, which then leads people to conclude that ADHD doesn't really exist (see randallsquared's reply). In other words, "our [cheap] classifier model is incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore the latent variable we're predicting must be imaginary", instead of "our [cheap] classifiers are incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore those diagnostic models are inadequate".
nsxwolf 14y ago
Similar to how many pilots claim to have OCD and how that helps them be a good pilot - but if it were actually medically diagnosed, the FAA would clip their wings.
reeses 14y ago
You said the worst three letters for self-diagnosis. "DSM" generates more "Hey, that's me!" than horoscopes. Now that IV will be out of date and available at every used bookstore for $5, expect a run on them. (Or buy up every copy you can and throw them up on Amazon :-))