Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

The study they performed is utter garbage. They saw the result they wanted to see.

They produced a unique game where players were given eight minutes to collect as many berries as possible by hovering a mouse pointer over a bush. Each time they foraged from the same bush a player’s harvest would slightly decline but if they moved to a new bush they would suffer a time penalty.

So what would most players do? Stick to the same reliable berry-supplying bush? Or risk wasting time by trying another bush to see if it had more fruit? Explore or exploit?

Around 450 people participated in the experiment, and all were simultaneously screened for ADHD symptoms. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found those with higher ADHD scores moved on to new bushes sooner than others but more importantly, those with ADHD also tended to collect higher volumes of berries overall.

Writing in the newly published study, Barack and colleagues noted that participants without ADHD characteristics tended to over-harvest single patches. Looking at what would be an optimal harvest strategy for the game it was discovered that players with high ADHD scores were more successful overall.

The outcome of this game is 100% dependent on the parameters: the decline in the harvest from a given bush, and the time penalty. If you change the parameters to favor persistence, then guess what, persistence wins.

Something else that struck me, they said of the ~500 participants, about half of them scored as having a clinical diagnosis of ADHD using some black-box test of 6 self-reported questions.

Given that ADHD diagnoses are about 5% of the global population, something incredibly hinky is going on here.

This is just circumstantial and possibly biased based on the kinds of people I personally encounter, but it seems like at least 1/3rd if not 1/2 of the people I meet claim to have ADHD or be "neurodivergent". If such a large percentage of people had ADHD then it sounds like that is just neurotypical at this point.

Maybe almost everyone experiences similar symptoms to varying degrees and almost nobody gets tested because it doesn't cause them any problems.

I think "neurodivergent" mostly means autistic.

It tends to be used for any learning disorder or mental health diagnosis that either isn't inherently harmful or isn't an overt break with reality. Most people using the term would definitely include ADHD and at least the high functioning end of the autism spectrum. Many would also include things like OCD and perhaps depression.

Another way to say it is that it is used for mental conditions which fall under the social model of disability. That is to say, they are primarily harmful due to society not accommodating them as opposed to being inherently harmful. Things like ADHD and high functioning autism are primarily problems because they don't fit into society's expectations. On the other hand, schizophrenia is much more inherently disabling.

> because it doesn't cause them any problems.

Yes, this is the defining line of a clinical diagnosis: are the symptoms inhibiting your ability to live.

You'll also see similar claims around depression, OCD, and any other mental disorder. Since the disability is not visible, people regularly dismiss them using the same "everybody is a little ADHD" rhetoric.

I'm with you, I think these cannot possibly be disorders if so many people have them, and certainly not if you're living a normal life. People sometimes say they're "high-functioning X", but that just means you're normal. I talk about some of the behaviours I have here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39049655

> I have a bunch of odd behavioural characteristics too that overlap with mental conditions: clanging, rocking and stimming, and until my mid-20s if I 'touched' something (including stepping on a tile-edge or crack at an angle) on my one side I had to symmetrify with the other side.

Since my life is otherwise fine, I think it's probably just the normal variance of the species.

It isn't a black box test, it's the World Health Organization's ADHD self-reported screening scale for the DSM-V [1]. They clearly gathered a research group to include roughly 50/50 positive and negative participants: this isn't a random sample of the population that happens to be 50% positive on a self-reported ADHD scale.

Obviously using the self-report test is nowhere near is useful as getting people with a formal diagnosis, but finding 250 study participants with formal ADHD diagnosis (and verifying each case) is waaaaay more expensive. Trials like this sometimes pave the way for a more expensive and exhaustive study to be funded.. and then people come into these threads to complain "great another study telling us what we already knew."

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5470397/

> The outcome of this game is 100% dependent on the parameters: the decline in the harvest from a given bush, and the time penalty. If you change the parameters to favor persistence, then guess what, persistence wins.

I think that's by design. In situations where exploratory behaviours pay off, ADHD-like behaviours prove beneficial. In settler roles, they do not. The study's hypothesis is to hint that explorer-types could tend to push evolution forward, and that ADHDers could tend to being explorer-types.

I don't think there's any contention that ADHD is necessarily advantageous today - at least not from this study. It would be too complicated to make such a point.

I believe there is some merit to this, or at least similar, hypothesis(es).

Based on population percentages, the disorder seems, to me, to be far too common to be some kind of genetic fluke. We are talking about something that affects ~1/20 - ~1/10 adults. I mean, one is more like to have ADHD than blue eyes, or green eyes, or red hair, etc..

As someone with ADHD, it surely can cause disorder, and believe me, it can cause plenty of it. However, I wouldn't say that it's without its upsides at times either.

In my personal experience, I find that my ADHD has been somewhat more advantageous when in a group setting than individual setting. I feel like I can bring a different angle of creativity to things that neuro-typicals cannot, but perhaps that is just my wishful thinking.

agree wholly. ADHD feels like a real monkey's paw of a condition. Huge benefits but the buts can be crippling.

I can do what most do with just 10% of my time or attention. But the remaining 90% balances it out in terms of my overall usefulness being just about average.

If I could scale that useful 10% even 5x, I'd be in some interesting places. but the more I try to fight the condition, the more futile it seems, like waging war upon yourself.

I'm in my mid-30s and I know no better about dealing with it than I did in my 20s.

>The outcome of this game is 100% dependent on the parameters

Isn't that true of every game? Winning (getting most berries) is not the important variable they are measuring, so unless you you are suggesting people with ADHD are more concerned with winning, I'm not sure how relevant it is to their interpretation.

My ADHD will not manifest in an 8-minute video game that's for sure.

It’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’ persistence becomes suboptimal. If you move too early you’ll collect fewer berries.

Also the premise is BS. If everyone had ADHD then we might not use resources efficiently either. Considering that executive function is pretty uniquely human, the title may as will be “development of non-ADHD humans critical in evolutionary journey”

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