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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

That's just normal, not ADHD (which is way too overdiagnosed at this point and would fit 90% of people I meet).

People are lazy, but they also do not want to completely ruin their life, so they will wait until they realize they cant wait anymore, doing the minimum amount at the last minute to meet the goal.

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What do you think ADHD is? It's defined by its diagnostic criteria, and those are very vague. There's certainly no consensus that ADHD is anything other than a term to describe the lowest performers on the metrics which Adderall improves. ADHD is definitely not some kind of genetic defect of the prefrontal cortex or anything of that sort.

Being lazy is not an attention deficit or hyperactivity. Most people can focus just fine, as they do when the deadline approaches. The situation described in the parent post is an issue of motivation and discipline, not attention.

To be more clear as to the diagnosis: there is a definite difference between people who don't want to pay attention to certain tasks (the vast majority) and those who cant (the minority that do have legitimate ADHD).

You're all wrong wrt. the scientific consensus :). The current consensus is that the ability to concentrate for longer periods on all the bullshit our modern lives are throwing at us is a normally distributed trait in the population, and ADHD is an arbitrary cutoff on that distribution. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090523 for details.

I'm not sure where I was off - having the ability to concentrate is different than using that ability, and many people are really in the latter group because of a lack of proper discipline and priorities but end up getting diagnosed all too easily as the former.

I don't think I believe in the distinction. "Lack of discipline" is a good descriptive synonym of not being able to focus on unpleasant tasks, yes, but as a way of pointing out a perceived flaw of character, it doesn't feel very useful. After all, a person that "lacks proper discipline" isn't usually able to fix it themselves. You can't "just get" disciplined.

Also having the capacity to concentrate but refraining from using it is an active choice; people doing that won't be complaining that they can't focus.

You're making a moral judgement here, which is both unproductive and hinges on a convenient separation between "ability to concentrate" and "proper discipline and priorities" as if they were orthogonal.

A premise for Adhd is that, for some reason, developement of the latter is delayed causing an apparent lack of the former. The inpairment is in executive control itself, which is why your argument actually is in favour of diagnosis.

> ADHD is definitely not some kind of genetic defect of the prefrontal cortex or anything of that sort.

Not in the sense that it's definitively tied to a specific pathway disrupted by this or that SNP, but it appears to be heritable in much the same way that height is heritable.

What do you think ADHD is? You say it's "definitely not some kind of genetic defect of the prefrontal cortex or anything of that sort," but there's been growing evidence of exactly that for a long time now:

> New high-resolution, three-dimensional maps of the brains of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) indicate significant and specific anatomical differences within areas of the brain thought to control attentional and inhibitory control systems, compared with brain scans of children without ADHD... The reductions in size of prefrontal regions observed by Sowell and her colleagues are consistent with other reports of reduced frontal lobe volumes in children with ADHD. The more advanced imaging methods and analysis used in the current study, however, suggest that those reductions are localized to more inferior aspects of the prefrontal regions than was previously realized.[1]

> In instances where heredity does not seem to be a factor, difficulties during pregnancy, prenatal exposure to alcohol and tobacco, premature delivery, significantly low birth weight, excessively high body lead levels, and postnatal injury to the prefrontal regions of the brain have all been found to contribute to the risk for ADHD to varying degrees.[2]

> Recently, neuroimaging has led to several important advances in the understanding of the neurobiology underlying the clinical picture of ADHD, and demonstrates a clear brain basis to the disorder in regions involved in attention, and executive and inhibitory control. Furthermore, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has provided evidence that intracortical inhibition, as indexed by the immature ipsilateral motor cortex, normalises with psychostimulant treatment. There is an exciting confluence between emerging studies in basic neurobiology and the genetic, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological analyses of ADHD.[3]

[1] https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/pn.39.1.0...

[2] http://www.chadd.org/understanding-adhd/about-adhd/the-scien...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3016271/

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