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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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