The Price of Discipline
perell.com
perell.com
It’s not the price of discipline, it’s the price of enforcing discipline on others. Discipline can only be learned through personal experience, it cannot be indoctrinated as that leads to resentment.
This makes sense. It’s like telling a smoker that it will kill them. That only annoys them. They need to come to that conclusion themselves.
There are also two kinds of discipline, especially for little kids. There is the type of sacrificing pleasure for future rewards that can be learned naturally. But there is also the type of negative consequence for behavior in small children that is not acceptable but may not carry any inherent tangible negative consequence for the child to actually learn from and the parent needs to fill in. For example, children can be very rude and you can’t treat a rude kid the way you would treat a rude adult, but you need to show them this is unacceptable in some way so you take away toys or other privileges etc.
Turns out that humans learn by example. In other words, the lesson of such punishing actions is that bullying, ultimatums and generally exerting control over others, especially ones with less power, is the proper way to achieve one’s goals.
Is this the desired lesson?
Some additional outcomes are the loss of trust for the parent and the need to constantly police behavior.
Drivers respect the speed limit while driving next to a police car.
Does this mean that they will do so in its absence? Did the policing reform them?
Extrinsic motivation does not magically transform into intrinsic motivation. Instead, coercion causes irreparable harm on parent/child relationships and damages intrinsic motivation.
Humans are not birds nor rats so conditioning and reinforcement do not work as intended. They do work to give the enforcer a sense of power and sadistic pleasure but do not teach anything valuable beyond “violence and bullying work.” Are these your primary goals?
Depressive hedonism is powerful.. The death drive is like playing a tit-for-tat strategy against one’s own lebenswelt. I hope people don’t take me as being dismissive or insensitive or ignoring the contributions of biophysics to drug dependency etiology, but from a free will frame of analysis it resembles a kind of very dark and very negative discipline itself.
Imagine if it were just a thing that people could get help with as unshamefully as eg going to the dentist.
What's more, it is so developed that I can name it. I don't know the name of what society wants me to be. Domesticated citizen? Good boy? Effectless stranger?
I have a project in my head of outlining my "core beliefs": "Better living through chemistry", "All knowledge is accessible through language", "Brains over brawn", etc. The shadow part of me slips things in: "If God exists, God is evil", "Life is meaningless", "Humans are untrustworthy", etc.
If I could go to a doctor and point at some part of my brain, or at some chemical imbalance, it would be amazing. As it stands, I feel like each of our personal psychological maintenance entails us little individual people picking up boulders and moving them to other parts of the neurochemical pit. Sometimes we get help with big machines like lithium or whatever. It just feels like we're still in the dark ages of human neurochemistry, and we can't help piling on more confounding variables.
Anyways, I just wanted to share. I don't have any answers. Or at least, the moment's struggle with my shadow occludes them.
“The way of the warrior kid” by jocko willinck.
I am a self-driven adult, but I even found value in how simply it explains the concept of self discipline. Have you ever had someone explain to you the difference between motivation and self-discipline? I was nodding along because I knew these concepts, but hadn't seen them explained in a way that was just perfectly crystal clear.
Spoilers (funny to write this for a kids book):
In one chapter, the kid learns how to learn, and learns that some people are naturally quick at certain things but others have to work much harder. That it doesn't mean you are dumb if you don't learn something really quick, that there are techniques you can learn that help if you just try.
It also has a bunch of good stuff on humility, working well with others even if they have bullied you in the past, respecting yourself, etc. For example, the kid is getting bullied (amongst other things going wrong with his life). He trains all summer so he can defend himself, stands up to the kid in a way that isn't physical (it doesn't glorify that in any way) and then befriends him. He then invites him to come play with the other kids. The way he becomes friends with him after being bullied by him for an entire year takes an incredible amount of humility and kindness, and made me feel like I could improve in how I relate to other people I have had conflict with.
It is not about exposing them to ideas, it is about making them certain way, because it sounds cool.
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But also with exposure of ideas, pretty much no one exposes jids to all ideas equally with no framing. Approving or disapproving framing is there, whether direct or subtle.
With all things parenting, there are many correct ways to go about raising kids. Whatever you want to call it, I’m trying to raise mine to be resilient, recognize self imposed limitations, to be humble and to recognize the value of hard work and self discipline.
Feel free to disregard the suggestion of those things aren’t interesting to you as a parent raising a child.
Finally, there’s a huge amount of warrior worship these days (I have my own theory why but I’ll hold that back), so I understand skepticism of the book based off its title.
It was snarky comment about book title. Which is super clearly about sounding cool. Unless it has stuff about how to indoctrinate kids into beheading enemies without feeling of guilt or some such. Nothing to do with your motivation.
People who identify with "fighter" will join any army, but especially attacking army. It projects strength and aggression. Pretty much all conquerors to be including genocide first taught young men to have "warrior" values.
I don't specifically want to raise kids to be soldiers either, tho they may join. In that case, army is quite capable of shaping recruits into the mold they need. And it is different mold then civilian life requires.
That being said, I come from a farm/vineyard and I've lived most of my life in a village, so my perception is certainly skewed. But I do know that you can't force a kid to do what they don't want to. I never liked vegetables so whenever we had a vegetable soup I didn't eat it, which made my mother angry. Her solution was, that I'm not allowed to leave the table until I eat everything that's on my plate. That gives you two options, either eat the food and be done with it... Or just sit there until the evening and then go to bed.
What I'm trying to say is, if a child is full of energy, go outside with them and let them run around, don't give them medication to suppress that energy.
I'm not certain what it's called but, it's better to prevent then to cure. It's better to prevent getting cancer then to cure cancer. Or in other words, would you rather prevent getting cancer or get cancer and then cure it?
It’s also not at all what is being described here; it’s actually a neurodevelopmental disorder, not “full of energy”. The medication doesn’t suppress energy; the medications are actually amphetamines! If it wasn’t being used to an ADHD brain, they’d be considered recreational stimulants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-att...
Go to a local support group and tell people on disability their problems were invented by multibillion pharma business.
You are absolutely free to drop out of the "rat race", aka the evolutionary process, which admittedly can be quite stressful. Just have to accept the consequences first, every choice comes with trade offs.
The diatribes against well established condition as some sort of a pharma conspiracy is just the defence mechanism to avoid facing the disability. Not an uncommon strategy, but probably not very productive.
ADHD is most effectively treated with basic 100 year old generic drugs, as well many thousand old remedies like nicotine. What's next, common cold is the aspirin lobby conspiracy?
Guess what, some people manage to live happy lives, have happy families and success in business (that you call rat race) despite being fully paralyzed waist-down, and some even with limbs severed.
I know some of those personally. I also know others, that chose instead to do nothing but complain. I'm sure you can guess the outcomes easily.
Best of luck in the new year.
Modern American Education is not ‘the evolutionary process’. If anything it is quite the opposite. More like forced domestication.
good luck. i'm sure you'll do great either way.
You seriously think the modern American education system represents ‘the evolutionary process’ or that the only option is to drop out?
Education in its current form is relatively new, but also outdated, having been developed to train workers for an industrial society that no longer exists.
There is no reason we can’t be intelligent about this, and recognize that as a society we can do better if we understand its problems. We do that by discussing it.
If you think it’s perfect, that’s ok, but then it’s odd that you choose to come here and engage.
Your comment made me think of that.
ADHD can very often be due to undiagnosed conditions, or comorbidities that aggravate it.
To put in perspective: there are billions walking around with undiagnosed hypertension, which is trivial to diagnose and treat.
When was the last time you took your blood pressure?
Kinda hard to say how many of them were adhd, but it is quite likely some were.
> I wasn’t able to leave table a few times. One in particular- I used my absent father’s pepper mill and put too much in my mashed potatoes. It burned my mouth and they wouldn’t let me leave until I ate it all. Which I couldn’t do. Crying. Furious. Humiliated. Trapped.
> It got late and I started to fall asleep at table. I was greeted with the potatoes as breakfast. Then when I opened my lunchbox at school- there they were. At least I could throw them away. That was the day my anorexia began. There were incidents after where I didn’t eat enough, where I took too much and wasted it- stuck at table in a power struggle I did not understand nor could I win.
> My Mom did thuis with with my brother. If food is left out overnight, it is a trigger for him. He sees the food, and immediately thinks he has to eat it. I was forced to eat foods that made me sick, or I just didn't like. So, I would eat while dry heaving, and throwing back up into my mouth. I didn't dare not eat after seeing what my brother went through. That was the start of my eating disorder. I'm completely disconnected from my fullness/hunger cues. To eat mindfully is incredibly difficult because my brain is so used to dissociating while eating. My ED is binge eating because I used to eat a lot of anything I liked to get me through eating small amounts of anything I didn't like. I over-salt everything because I used to use salt to cover the taste of things, and need everything overcooked because my mom would undercook meat.
You must then accept that you are ignorant. By comparison, I have seen and experienced children and adults who, without medication, would be unable to live remotely functional lives.
> What I'm trying to say is, if a child is full of energy, go outside with them and let them run around, don't give them medication to suppress that energy.
You demonstrate a lack of understanding of ADHD, so I would recommend further research before commenting in the future. It used to be a common misconception that ADD/ADHD was just being full of energy, but that's not remotely accurate. Briefly, there are two dominant classifications: primarily inattentive and primarily impulsive (or hyperactive). There is also a combined impulsive/inattentive. I am inattentive. Among my numerous issues likely related to ADHD, I have trouble falling asleep and waking, I will stay up far too late reading. I make bad decisions when unmedicated, and I am unable to effectively wield the concept of time. Letting me run around as a child would accomplish nothing.
> I'm not certain what it's called but, it's better to prevent then to cure. It's better to prevent getting cancer then to cure cancer. Or in other words, would you rather prevent getting cancer or get cancer and then cure it?
Sure? But you're now assuming that ADHD is environmental, which I don't believe to be the modern understanding. It's likely hereditary.
In any case, I found your comment quite disheartening.
How often is ADHD misdiagnosed as a result? If it is hereditary, have we found the gene(s) which would enable us to pinpoint the diagnosis, possibly even before birth?
I also have trouble falling asleep and have made bad decisions in the past. I have effective strategies to mitigate. Do I actually have ADHD and need to take amphetamines? I am not saying this of you, but I find it disheartening when people say "it is just my genes, nothing I can do about it". It's fatalistic and a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there actually are unknown environmental factors, that attitude seems to be ignoring them outright. For instance, exposure to large doses of lead as a child might instead be incorrectly diagnosed and interpreted as "just my genes I guess". There are so many poorly understood chemicals swimming around our water supplies, food systems, cosmetics, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if we're taking drugs to bandaid something much deeper to blame.
> I also have trouble falling asleep and have made bad decisions in the past. I have effective strategies to mitigate. Do I actually have ADHD and need to take amphetamines?
This is a huge tell that you don't have ADHD. Effective strategies! My kingdom for even a somewhat effective strategy.
If you're a child and adults are making decisions for you, obviously without some sort of physical genetic or blood or radiological test there's a fundamental and significant margin of error.
For adults who have spent most of their lives suffering ignorantly to put together the pieces and obtain a diagnosis is basically a triumph. The sort of problems many people face on a regular basis are serious enough challenges that without medical intervention, they would be jobless or homeless or their friends and family would leave them or worse.
Most people don't share unprompted how many times they've been fired, how many tests they failed or classes they flunked out of, flights they missed, bills they didn't pay, gifts they didn't buy, family members they indirectly harmed emotionally or physically (ever put off buying food for you kids?)
The problem is that we have reduced executive function. It's like sitting on a train track with a train approaching head on and thinking "I know I should get out of the way but I think I'll just wait a little longer". Relying only on a fight-or-flight response to progress through life is dangerous.
Finally, yes, sure, it's all a band-aid, but if you're able to tell me what I can do to stop taking drugs I will literally throw money at you. You'd be rich. They're not fun. The side effects are not fun. They don't make you feel good. Don't confuse prescribed amphetamines for recreational drug use. They're not equivalent.
ADHD is just a short hand for "mild brain impairment/damage of unknown cause"
It's not a single disease but a collection of dysexecutive syndromes that impact higher cognitive functions: strategic planning, organization, etc.
This could be due to low oxygen during birth, infections (not necessarily CNS invasive), neck/head injuries, chronic pain, sleep disorders, genetics, vitamin deficiencies and a myriad of other causes, pretty much anything.
The same medication is utilized as in traumatic brain injury: amphetamines. They are quite effective in both ADHD and TBI, and as been in active use for nearly a 100 years. Both can be often diagnosed by the same psychometric tests, and can be pretty much indistinguishable.
Of course, finding mechanisms to cope with impaired executive function can help reduce the need for medication later in life.
If you can find the underlying condition, and it happens to be reversible, as is often the case in case of vitamin/mineral deficiencies or some sleep disorders, it can be often eliminated entirely.
However, due to paranoia around stimulants in our society there is some laymen hysteria about giving essentially lifelong access to stimulants to adults. It is an extremely harmful attitude, as medication is nothing but just a tool.
How many monozygotic twins can you find with a robust diagnosis of ADHD, and how much money can you afford to spend to thoroughly exclude every other possible cause (TBI, sleep breathing disorders, deficiency, thyroid, autoimmune, neuropathies)?
Quite expensive, nobody gonna do that. Science is about finding evidence to support a hypothesis, not some quaint notion of "truth".
All that's needed from such studies is to support the "biological cause" conclusion so that you can substantiate the need for a pharmacological as opposed to talk therapy intervention.
Those studies certainly support that, but all they really say "ok this is biology".
Given a disorder is usually defined by being outside the normal range, as defined by two sigma interval, 5% of people have ADHD by definition. How many of those are due to bad genes, and other causes is actually very hard to say, as there isn't that much profit to be made in discerning this any further.
Is ADHD not a developmental disorder, causing an underdevelopment or delayed development of the frontal lobe? It seems incorrect to refer to this as "brain damage"?
Edit: I guess I'm referring to the official "medical narrative" as it stands.
I do happen to believe that the DSM-5 criteria is wildly out of date for ADHD diagnosis and at odds with the findings of a lot of more recent research. But I'm just questioning the "brain damage" terminology - I've never heard it described in that way before.
Most medical professionals that I've encountered stick firmly to the line that ADHD is a lifelong condition that develops in very early childhood and is not currently curable. You can almost entirely alleviate symptoms. But this is != a cure.
My current understanding is that if your ADHD is "curable" by eg. vitamins or a change in sleep pattern then it is unlikely to be considered to have been ADHD in the first place (but the symptoms may well have been indistinguishable). That's not to say that the symptoms of ADHD can't be greatly reduced by these things.
However, I'm not a doctor. Happy to be corrected by anyone who is.
Some people have car crashes or other traumatic head injuries and receive an ADHD diagnosis after the event, so it is usually from childhood but sometimes from brain damage.
Interesting. I don't know enough to have an opinion on how prevalent this is, but I have read that people with ADHD have a higher risk of being involved in a car crash in the first place, so there is an interesting causation/correlation discussion to be had there!
Eg:
A new study reports that the risk of being involved in car crashes increases for those diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study looked specifically at the rate of car crashes by adulthood, which was 1.45 times higher in those with a childhood history of ADHD compared to adults with no ADHD.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200818142135.h...
"To their credit, my parents didn’t drug me. I had all the features of a kid who would have binged ADHD medications like shots at a New Year’s party. No matter how badly I acted, my parents never caved into the twisted logic that leads doctors to hand out prescription pills faster than candy on Halloween."
Maybe if his parents HAD drugged him he wouldn't have been such a mess in middle school.
I find him to generally be thought provoking but his immaturity (and youth) as a human shows through in a lot of his writing at times...
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07091465
https://doi.org/10.1097/chi.0b013e318157cb3b
https://doi.org/10.1097/01.chi.0000128797.91601.1a
You done much reading on the subject to the contrary you can talk about? Any books on the topic you’ve read that you can name?
Have you? Or did you just find some papers that support your view with a quick search?
Remember, most social science and medical research from this time period is now considered very weak.
A few papers don’t make a ‘well established consensus’.
I also have a pretty heavy background in stats, I’m well aware of the replication crisis, and I’m deeply skeptical by nature. My opinions are backed by an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, which you seem to feel qualified to criticize despite not having been aware of its existence until today, much less having actually read any of it.
Did you try looking for more papers to confirm if it was really just a few? If so, what did you see?
I feel qualified to question anything I like on an Internet forum, as should everyone. To defer to your opinions without you stating your qualifications would be idiotic.
Throwing up a few links and expecting people to know that you have read over 100 papers and 6 books makes no sense at all.
Nobody is going to treat you as if you are an expert on the subject unless you show them why they should. Until this point you’ve just been making claims from authority.
> The drugs have been around for decades. Using them daily with increasing numbers of children during a decade or so of brain development, has not.
is harmful medical misinformation though. I do think most people reading a confident assertion like yours on this particular forum would assume a personal/academic history or at least some solid background knowledge with the topic at hand to be backing the claim.
I would rather not flaunt my credentials. You shouldn't believe me - you should believe the sources available at your fingertips. Wikipedia's not a bad start if you don't like reading academic papers.
“The long-term effects on the developing brain and on mental health disorders in later life of chronic use of methylphenidate is unknown. “
It comes from Wikipedia, which presents nowhere near as rosy a picture as you do. In fact it supports my position that we are nowhere near as clear about the effects of these drugs as you confidently claim.
Here’s another one:
“A 2008 review found that the use of stimulants improved teachers' and parents' ratings of behavior; however, it did not improve academic achievement.[56] The same review also indicates growth retardation for children consistently medicated over three years, compared to unmedicated children in the study.[56] Intensive treatment for 14 months has no effect on long-term outcomes 8 years later.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactiv...
If you think this is harmful Medical misinformation, perhaps you should edit the Wikipedia page rather than asking people to read it.
The first quote is a symptom of you choosing to seek your information from the “ADHD controvieries” page in bad faith instead of reading the normal, better-edited pages on the topic (note the page is flagged and not well-maintained). It’s not bad science, but the citations are outdated - from before the era of mainstream fMRI data, which has been arguably been the biggest new source of understanding on the subject over the past twenty years. Additionally, the second source quoted, which is by far the more relevant one, focuses on preschool-age children and makes its claim in that context - context which you chose to edit out.
Your second quote is a relatively mainstream finding. There’s not a robust linkage between academic performance as determined by grades and medication-based ADHD treatment.
It’s not bad faith. There is much more than what I quoted that is reasonable to question about ADHD research and treatment.
What is bad faith is to tell people not to look at the contradictory results. If you choose not to look at results that don’t confirm your view, then of course you will think there is a consensus.
> Your second quote is a relatively mainstream finding. There’s not a robust linkage between academic performance as determined by grades and medication-based ADHD treatment.
That suggests strongly that the drugs are prescribed to benefit teachers and classmates, rather than the individual with ADHD who doesn’t gain.
What is bad faith is to tell people not to look at the contradictory results. If you choose not to look at results that don’t confirm your view, then of course you will think there is a consensus. There's plenty of evidence to suggest medications benefit individuals with ADHD, e.g. lower rates of substance abuse in adulthood, higher rates of academic achievement (as in graduation rates/highest level of degree attained), visible normalization of volume in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with executive functioning compared to healthy controls.
My primary goal here is to demonstrate publicly that you're an uninformed crank who doesn't know the subject, so that parents don't deny potentially life-changing medication to their kids. You changing your mind would be a nice bonus, but not necessary. Thanks for talking long enough to out yourself.
The only person who has told anyone not to look at anything is you. If you can find somewhere where I am telling people not to look at things, then you might have a point.
> My primary goal here is to demonstrate publicly that you're an uninformed crank who doesn't know the subject,
Inspector Javert enters stage right!
> so that parents don't deny potentially life-changing medication to their kids.
Noble, but you haven’t demonstrated that. You’ve made some unsubstantiated claims to your own expertise on the subject but otherwise you are just another commenter on the internet, who is a strong advocate for medications.
You say, ‘potentially life changing’, and of course there are people who have that experience. But you say potentially, because it would be a lie to claim certainty.
> lower rates of substance abuse in adulthood, higher rates of academic achievement (as in graduation rates/highest level of degree attained), visible normalization of volume in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with executive functioning compared to healthy controls.
None of which can be attributed directly to the effects of medication. Substance abuse and lower executive function are well established sequelae of adverse childhood experiences.
It’s fairly easy to see that if drugs make kids easier for schools and families to manage, then they will have fewer adverse experiences, so there is a causal pathway that supports this outcome.
And frankly if you as a family can’t handle an ADHD kid, or find suitable education for them, such that you won’t end up problematizing them, then indeed medications will be a benefit.
Nobody is questioning that.
However a singleminded focus on medication, a denial of the trade-offs, and a refusal to consider the context, means we can only look at it from this dismal perspective, and renders us incapable of recognizing that medication is not in fact positive for everyone with ADHD.
We know that there is a wide range of different relationships to medication use chosen by diagnosed adults. By no means all of them choose to use it as their only tool, or even at all.
I know you are focused on defending medication, but I think you’re doing so to the exclusion of every other consideration, and it’s not clear why.
Do we know that accidents are the causes of excess mortality for people with unmedicated ADHD, or are they deaths of despair because of a lack of accommodation?
Edit: Looks like there is evidence supporting the idea that it’s accidents.
I would still be cautious about assuming this is true given how weak almost all social science and medical research is.
> The reduced ELE linked to ADHD was found to be a function of the first order variables of less education, less annual income, greater consumption of alcohol and tobacco, diminished sleep, and poorer overall health status relative to the control group. Moreover, ELE was also shown to be a function of the second order traits of deficient behavioral inhi- bition in daily life and, much less so, of low verbal IQ, greater interpersonal hostility, and deficient nonverbal fluency.
and:
> For instance, besides ADHD-C itself, this study showed that behavioral disinhibition (as assessed by EF ratings in daily life), verbal IQ, the comorbid psychopathology of hostility, and the EF of nonverbal fluency (and its associa- tion with nonverbal working memory) all uniquely contrib- uted, in descending order, to variation in life expectancy. The largest percentage, however, by far was contributed by behavioral disinhibition.
Nigg (2013)[2] says:
> ADHD is clearly associated with worse physical health outcomes across multiple domains. These include unhealthy behaviors and outcomes like smoking, illicit substance use disorders, accidental injuries, obesity, and even suicide attempts and completed suicides.
----
Basically, having ADHD means you have less self-control, engage in riskier behaviour (including riskier eating habits, substance abuse, driving, sex. It also means you struggle in life, resulting in suicidality, aggressiveness and anti-social behaviour. You sleep worse. You're more likely to smoke because nicotine is a stimulant which has a medicating effect on ADHD symptoms.
[1]: Hyperactive Child Syndrome and Estimated Life Expectancy at Young Adult Follow-Up: The Role of ADHD Persistence and Other Potential Predictors, Barkley 2018
[2]: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and adverse health outcomes, Nigg 2013 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4322430/)
This is the stuff that seems like it could be dealt with by society being more accommodating rather than drugs.
How do you define “chores”? It’s seems very true that people with ADHD find it hard to get through a to-do list in a linear fashion. If that is what it means to do chores, then maybe there is a way to prevent rubbish accumulating that doesn’t require that of you.
> that doesn't change that most of my friends don't find it difficult to take out the rubbish if they want to.
Do you want to take out the rubbish? Or do you start out wanting to and then want to do something else?
Both can occur but the first one is more problematic: I want to take out the rubbish but it feels like torture to force myself to start the task. It's not something easy to explain if you haven't experienced it, but it feels something like there's an invisible wall that prevents me from starting.
On meds there is almost no wall. I simply choose to do something and start doing it. It feels miraculous to me. Society has nothing to do with it.
I have had that experience and I know others who have it too. From my point of view that wall is me not wanting to do the task. The idea that I want to is not the same as actually wanting to. If I stop thinking that I want to do the task, and just do what I actually want to, then I will do a lot of different things, one of which will be taking out the trash.
The same goes for to-do lists. If I put things on a to-do list, it is almost impossible for me to make myself do any of them, let alone in order.
If instead I write them down on the list, but then just let myself do whatever is in front of me that feels like I can easily do, then things will simply chain together and I’ll find that I’ve done the things on the to-do list along with a l bunch of other turns that turn out to have been worth doing to.
> On meds there is almost no wall. I simply choose to do something and start doing it. It feels miraculous to me. Society has nothing to do with it.
In my view society has everything to do with thinking we need to do things in a linear fashion. I don’t dispute that meds will help you do that, nor do I dispute that work may require that you do it.
I do dispute that we need to operate that way.
I'm hesitant to agree with this statement outright -- on the population level, I do think it makes sense to pursue interventions that increase life expectancy. But on the individual level we must ask, are we comparing apples-to-apples years of life? For example, I would pick 10 years of life with vitality over 12 years with mobility issues.
For ADHD medication specifically, for most people diagnosed with ADHD I would expect to see both improved life quality AND life expectancy. Of course, specific individuals may experience worsened life quality on medication, in which case they will have to weigh up whether they want potentially longer life with lower life quality.
Given the kinds of mortality causes from ADHD, I would think the calculus looks more like "ADHD meds make me feel yuck but maybe that's worth it to not get fired regularly, because my family needs me to support them financially and being fired regularly makes me depressed and suicidal".
Now they seem to have evolved in rigid walled gardens where the prospect of riches make it even worse: you are surrounded by people who do not really care about doing a great job, but just want to strike down tickets.
I seriously hope the author is right, and that indeed, "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
His "enlightenment" moment didn't result in him walking away from his father's world (or the money, or the emptyness of living a life to play tennis). in many ways its the opposite lesson of the article.
It helps to remember of course that the whole anecdote and narrative is likely just more commercial promotional fiction. everyone likes a redemption story, especially when it's somehow a redemption story that doesn't result in recognising the emptiness of fans and fame and money and professional sport but a kind of self- congratulatory reawakening that involves no actual change. This allows the commercial engine of a professional tennis players life to keep turning and draw in new fans and retaining old ones... presumably the whole actual point of publishing his "autobiography".
I'm guessing of course agassi didn't write his biography either. I'm sure his pr team/managers just hired a ghost writer.
I've got nothing personally against agassi, just for he record, don't even know or care much about him. I'm sure his father probably was overbearing: that's the harsh reality of professional sports preparation. But it does well to read these things with a critical eye and recognise the reality behind them rather than the image. At the end of the day, he's still a guy that hit balls back and forth for money just like he was brought up to.
The article assumes discipline needs to be forced on you. Which is false.
The few people I know who have been able to build self discipline on their own are immensely successful.
It seems to comes from an extreme form of self determination.
The whole idea that we have some attribute (willpower or self-discipline) that we can apply to our lives seems really iffy to me.
I'll try reading these books, but I expect it to be less helpful than taking stimulants every day.
It seems to me, and I might be wrong, that desire to do one's duty, If I am correctly interpreting the word "Conscientiousness" comes from finding one's specific purpose. When one is doing a duty that is not in line with one's particular purpose for being alive, then no amount of guidance is going to help. Instead, I would suggest that one go in search of one's purpose in any way that works for that particular person. This is why I think making a living without some focus on purpose is the main problem for many people when it comes to finding meaning in life. If there is no meaning in life, whats the point, hence the lack of "Conscientiousness" maybe.
If someone cannot remember their keys or has trouble playing email tag, their problem may not be that their life is not rich with meaning.
To paraphrase Shopenhauer, you are free to do what you want, but you are not free to will what you want.
Admittedly I don’t know the literature; but I increasingly hear that the so-called Big Five personality traits (of which conscientious is one) are regarded as more plastic than they once were. But perhaps it is simply, as you imply, isolating and substituting the behavioural components of the trait you wish to change. “Fake it ‘til you make it,” in a sense.
The brain is plastic, to an extent.
I can grow my biceps, not through willing them bigger, but by doing dumbbell curls. We absolutely can change our ways of thinking about the world in a similar fashion. Otherwise there would be no point in going to school, of seeing a therapist, of reading a book.
>After mindfulness-oriented meditation training, participants in this group (n = 15) showed an increase in character traits reflecting the maturity of the self at the intrapersonal (self-directedness) and interpersonal (cooperativeness) levels. Moreover, increased mindfulness and conscientiousness and decreased trait anxiety were observed in participants after the training.
In patients with MS.
I made the mistake of reading a number of parenting books, and they pretty much all start out with some form of: "You must be self disciplined or this method won't work."
In one case it was just sheer ambition but he wasn’t poor to begin with and in the other it was practicing a religion focusses on positive thinking which she adopted that also buikt her determination.
It is interesting to juxtapose with Agassi and The William sisters.
These two people are also on the top 0.1% Of their respective disciplines.
About William sisters, wasn't their father the first coach? Not to indicate anything but it falls in childhood experience catalog I think.
How do you know / what does it mean? Are they happy? Or just rich? Are they destroying what's left of the world by building stupid penis-shaped rockets to pretend they're astronauts when they're really not and never will be?
The modern world is way past the point of stupid. And we dare call it "civilization". It's the opposite of civilization. It's active destruction by accelerated accumulation of useless wealth.
I think it's better to not be part of that machine at all.
I grew up with a lot of family friends who chose a hands-off or more “fun” approach to learning for their kids, while downplaying rigid formal education. I can’t think of a single case where this resulted in a natural love of learning or a natural self-discipline. I do know a significant number of people in this cluster who grew up to embrace things like alternative medicine, MLMs, and even conspiracy theories, though.
I think the reality is that self-discipline and academic learning is something that benefits greatly from teaching and coaching, even if it can be uncomfortable or un-fun at times.
I also don’t think it’s helpful to try to make everything as enjoyable, fun, or comfortable as possible for kids. Some amount of struggle (though not too much) is healthy for building resiliency and persistence. I grew up with a number of people who’s parents stepped in and made everything easy or comfortable for them at every step of the way, and as adults they tend to crumble when faced with the slightest adversity or stress. It’s hard to re-learn self discipline and self control as an adult.
>alternative medicine, MLMs, and even conspiracy theories, though.
This is just trait openness in action. Have considered the obvious, they are their parents children?
I know several families with strong OCD tendencies, maybe even clinical idk, and their discipline, follow up, attention to detail and organization is absolutely mindboggling. I'm talking washrooms cleaner than operating rooms. Probably in top 0.01%, def above 0.5%.
None of them learned or were taught, it's just the entire family is the same way, even small kids. They also sleep 4-5 hours habitually, nobody uses alarm clocks, everyone up by 5am.
Genetics is VERY real.
I more meant that I didn’t respond particularly well to formal schooling and it took me years to learn how to learn and if there’s a shorter route towards that it would probably benefit my daughter if she’s similar to me in that way.
I do know such people. And also self disciplined kids from normal schools. It does not seem to me that fun learning ends up with undisciplined people.
Most of the article resonated with me. But I'm not sure I agree with the "ADHD medication is drugging children" part, since I've heard that ADHD medication can (in many cases) help adults who haven't been treated as children put their lives back together. (Sadly I was recently prescribed stimulants, tried them for a bit, and often got anxiety/panic attacks from the pills and caffeine.)
You clearly need therapy. Decide your values, be conscious of your choices they move to/away from your values and wholeheartedly accept the opportunity costs.
1st, regarding Agassi, there are few folks in the history of the world who get to #1 in something and have a "normal" or perhaps "well balanced" life. It takes a lot of innate skill/ability/talent, drive, luck and the willingness to sacrifice. For a really chilling take, look at Ichiro Suzuki's upbringing (baseball).
From a parent's perspective, at least mine, I tried to strike a balance between letting my kids choose their own paths while trying to help avoid closing too many doors. Some kids change A LOT and it would be a shame (to me at least) if they made a short-sighted decision at age 13 that prevented them from doing something later that they might decide they love and are good at. And the reality is, despite the occasional "against all the odds" stories out there where somebody made a late decision to pivot, most of the time the odds win.
I also coached youth sports for a number of years and I struggled because one of my kids was a pretty good athlete but not super intense about it and a bit of a late developer. It meant they got selected out because of these things. I could have forced them to practice more, more intensely, etc. It turned OK because they ended up getting cut from a soccer team (twice no less), decided to work stick with it, lucked into a spot on a good team w/ good coaching and ended up as the varsity keeper on their high school team (well, until COVID became a thing).
Like it or not, the world is super competitive. As a parent, it's hard when you see something that you know will normally close a door for your child. Many times parents are pushing their kids because they themselves are competitive. Other times, it's just trying to keep options open for your child. From a distance, they're indistinguishable.
Finally, the education system is not perfect for all children and situations. It's an XX% solution (pick your number). This didn't sound like a typical ADHD situation. It clearly didn't fit this situation.
Ultimately I see it as helping your children position themselves for situations that are right for them. The hard part is that what's right for them is pretty opaque until they're about 20...
I think this is a choice, at least partly. If you have the good fortune to have been born in a place where the median income affords reasonable housing and healthy food and medical care, you're kind of set, and can get on with enjoying life and finding fulfilling relationships. As long as you're not hung up on having fancier things/higher status than the next guy.
First, in my home country, were 6-day school weeks and hours of evening study. I remember a very specific instance of sitting at my desk at home with a light on when I was 8 or 9 years old, racking my brain over a math problem I just could NOT figure out. My grandmother, a retired math teacher, would come in once in a while to see how I was doing: no progress. I'd write out so many attempts at solutions and all of them were wrong. She grew increasingly frustrated with each visit to my room, and would then leave me to keep sitting, trying to figure it out. At some point what felt like hours later I just broke: I sat there crying onto my notebook after she yelled at me again during her last check-in. No matter how much I tried, I just could NOT figure out this problem. It felt like hitting my head against the wall and like I'd be sitting there for an eternity. I knew she wouldn't let me stop until I got the right answer. Eventually my mom came in to check on me and saw that I was basically sobbing trying to scribble something - anything - that made sense. She didn't realize how upset I was. She comforted me and we stopped the homework session for the night.
When we moved to the US, my parents were more hands-off than my grandmother. I think they grew very relaxed when it became obvious that the math curriculum seemed to cover all the things I already learned in my home country. For several years I didn't need to put any effort in at all, since I already knew all the material. Sure, my classmates thought my way of writing out long division was "weird", but I was the one getting straight As. It was a breeze, and I got complacent. A few years in, I suddenly had to learn new stuff in Math and my discipline for having to actually learn new math concepts again just was not there anymore. My grades slipped really quickly after that and I became an average math student.
In some ways, I wished the situation was somewhere between the strictness of my grandmother and the leniency of my parents. It's not that my parents didn't care or anything, it's just that I felt like I got into the habit of producing mediocre work with mediocre habits. I did love learning, just not learning at school. My mom would take me to the library and I'd check out a bunch of programming textbooks to tinker with my own websites and projects at home. I wish I'd put more effort into math at school, though. It was my own fault of course, but I could've used an adult to push me to put more effort in after moving to the US.
Luckily, I ended up doing what I love via the self-taught route despite not ending up going to university. Looking back on it, I really lucked out with having a relatively supportive mother and a computer at home. My parents thought my computer time was a problem, but they let me pursue my interests in spending hours learning how to code websites, writing stories, and playing video games nonetheless. I think that early and ongoing practice in self-learning via hobby projects is the main reason I ended up OK despite a not-ideal formal education progression. Also luckily (for my specific case), no medication was prescribed.
In your example, when you moved as a child, your brain had to intensely learn the entire new social world - the new language, cultural norms, media that everyone else grew up with, interpersonal comms, your place in the world etc, on top of normal learning in school. It's possible that your brain couldn't maintain the old intensity of learning math because even if you wanted - it was already overloaded. And if you did push it, the math could come at the expense of other learnings - social, emotional, cultural, computer skills etc. To me it sounds like you ended up with the best balance, and sacrificed the learnings (in math) that are least correlated with long-term success or happiness.
Something changed in me after that and I learned a new way of living with the help of the Constructive Living practice by David K. Reynolds and the works of James Allen.
It did make a difference in what institution issued the diploma. But was more about getting a diploma at all. So I'd say I disagree with what this statement implies.
We see this in the dev community, where there is automatic admiration for and an an unspoken belief that our careers are just a big ladder to working at a FAANG. And there’s nothing wrong with working there.
But once you adopt a goal like that, you find you’re in competition with people who are driven more by a feeling of winning rather than genuinely wanting to be there. They’d be gunning for Salesforce if it was en vogue.
Survivor bias?
From my experience, some of the claims seem right on target.
There are a lot of claims in the OP, and I can't agree with all of them.
I would add: In my experience, there is a small fraction of parents and teachers who really understand all that stuff, avoid the dangers, and do well as parents, teachers, whatever. Then there are the rest of the parents and teachers, and, yes, they can do a LOT of really serious damage -- I've seen too much of it close at hand.
I'm an example of avoiding the dangers in the OP: My parents took the attitude that in nearly all things I should not be lectured to, disciplined, etc. and, instead, just left to my own devices.
My collection of interests grew, and it's still huge. I pursued my real interests with a lot of effort with good results.
In grades 1-8, the teachers talked to each other and agreed that I was a bad student. Yup, no doubt, a bad, poor, slow, not very smart student. Then there were some standardized tests, and, oops, no way saying I wasn't smart. But I was still a bad student.
Then I discovered math and science, especially chemistry and physics. I was plenty interested, worked hard, and learned a lot. Some of the math teachers were torqued: I refused to show homework! That's because I found the assigned problems to be too easy and, instead, found the much more difficult supplementary problems in the back of the book and worked ALL of those, made sure I never missed one!
But, there were standardized achievement tests, and again I did well and the teachers had just to swallow their belief that I was a bad student. It appears that the Principal of the school understood me and made sure I got some good opportunities -- I was sent to a math tournament and also a summer NSF funded math and physics program.
When the SAT scores came back, the teacher who read them to me -- I'd had in the sixth grade, she was fully on board that I was a dumb student -- saw the Math SAT score and got confused, "There must be some mistake." I didn't miss 800 by much -- I'd love to know what the CEEB thought I'd missed. It was the city's premier college prep school and had a lot of traditional good students. So, of #1, #2, #3 on the Math SATs I came second. Poor teacher was confused!
In my Ph.D. program, the department Chair was a high discipline, dot i's and cross t's, straight As type of guy. But his research didn't amount to anything. At one point I pursued my interests instead of a course beneath me, and he got really torqued! Ah, to heck with him! From an advanced course, I saw a problem in an old field and asked for a reading course to address it. I already had an idea for a solution -- "Never give a sucker an even break.". Two weeks later I had a nice solution, ready to publish -- later did publish it in JOTA (Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications).
Net, doing that research got all the faculty and all the high discipline guys totally OFF my case. The rest of the way through my Ph.D. I had some secret help at least from the Dean and maybe from the President -- the department Chair was soon fired.
Net: In my experience, most of all students need to be INTERESTED and, then, given maybe a little very well considered advice but a LOT of freedom. THEN the student will likely work REALLY hard and maybe do some good things.
If I have to hire some people, I may reject straight A, Valedictorian, PBK, Summa Cum Laude applicants as people who worked for grades but not really for interests or learning -- someone with strong interests will likely do a LOT better.
It's a set of educational standards, and every such set newer than the 1800s is right-wing boogeyman that is attacked for things that are completely unrelated to it's actual content.
(Often for doing the exact same thing they accused the last one of doing, where they hope you forget that the collapse of civilization they are predicting from it is the same thing, for the same supposed reason, they predicted from the status quo it is replacing.)
I think Common Core just gave people an easy focal point of attack, like publishing the salaries of teachers.
I was reminded of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734242 from a few days ago. :)