Comment by axoltl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axoltl | Hacker News Reader

I'm always curious when research like this comes out, as it flies in the face of my (admittedly anecdotal) evidence. I myself am diagnosed with ADHD-PI (Primarily Inattentive). I've also been part of a few hacker groups over the years, and they had/have the best and brightest minds I have ever witnessed. They have an uncanny intuition and ability to traverse complex problem spaces, much faster than most people. There is also an unusually high concentration of people with ADHD in these groups (along with some other mental 'inflictions'). My best guess is anywhere from 20-30% of them have ADHD to some degree, sample size is about 30.

Most of these people do fairly well in life. Their skills are extremely valuable and prized. They also almost always (95-99%) did not do very well in school. There are a couple of explanations:

1. Studies like these simply track educational achievements, which do not necessarily correlate with success in life.

2. I only ever see/meet the success stories, each of which there is a much larger amount of failures for.

3. There are multiple conditions that are all erroneously grouped under the moniker of ADHD. Most, if not all, of the successful ADHD people I know lean more towards the inattentive side of things.

4. Some combination of the above theories.

I think for every batch of successful people with ADHD, there are others still finding their way. I have ADD and my brother has ADHD. I'm super quiet, observant, and methodical at times. He's very energetic, passionate, "never give up" kind of personality. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences between us. I'm not sure if it's related to the mental disorder or just hereditary or shared personalities from growing up together, but we both didn't do well in school as our parents would hope. He was definitely a troublemaker and I was just..in my own world I suppose. I'd like to think I'm "successful". I have a steady job and able to pay the bills while affording the thrills of life. I'm extremely grateful. My brother, on the other hand, lives with my parents, working 60 hours a week and has no health benefits or paid time off. Perhaps it's part of "growing up" and I just got lucky. I'd like to think that him and I look at the world from a different lens from others but I don't think it's affording us any sort of life hacks that make us successful or brilliant.

Agreed, the GP comment is classic survivor bias, you notice successful people who are affected by ADHD, you don't notice unsuccessful people (regardless of where on the spectrum they may lie).

I agree. It's just like the myth of gay people (usually being told by conservatives) running the world and being the wealthiest, because watch these famous gay people and Tim Cook. Ignoring the population as whole, many in very bad situations.

Same here, speaking as a fellow ADHD sufferer. Perhaps a part of it is because of how IQ is measured. If memory serves (which it often does not) one of the things IQ tests is short-term working memory, something that ADHD is known to impair. Maybe this is the main culprit. It would be interesting to see the IQ scores broken down into their various categories.

Also, the thing you've observed in your friends is similar to something I've observed in myself (this can be pretty fraught, so big grain of salt). I tend to see patterns or connections between lots of little bits of seemingly unrelated data where others don't. I'm not sure if this is because I'm better at discerning patterns, or if it's because I tend to collect and store all these little odds and ends more than others normally do. It's also possibly a 'involuntarily trained' skill: quite a bit of the time I find myself scrambling to deduce what is going on based on contextual clues, because I'd been daydreaming and all of a sudden I find someone asking me "so what's you opinion?"

Frankly it's more of a curse than anything. I sometimes feel as if I'm pleading with someone to "step off the train tracks" because I can see a train bearing down on them, and they adamantly refuse because they see no such thing.

> 4. Some combination of the above theories.

This gets my vote. I've met brilliant ADHD hacker-types, overall average normal folks, and drop-out homeless people. They all did poorly in school but the rest seems up in the air.

I suspect there are several comorbid complementary/incompatible genetic mutations, which lead to above-average or below-average mental faculties, and a nurture component of learning how to effectively manage the condition. We're probably observing evolution in action here.

> [quoting gilles deleuze] Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.

>What must be discovered is a way out of the motivation/ demotivation binary, so that disidentification from the control program registers as something other than dejected apathy. One strategy would be to shift the political terrain - to move away from the unions' traditional focus on pay and onto forms of discontent specific to post-Fordism. Before we analyse that further, we must consider in more depth what post-Fordism actually is."

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism

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