Hacker News Reader

Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

I reject your premise entirely. The decades spent living unmedicated taught me that even when I was free to pursue my own interests, I was unable to engage with any of them in any depth, even those artistic or that might otherwise be a more suitable fit to certain spheres of human activity some argue (ignorantly) I'd have an evolutionary advantage in.

It impacts everything: healthy regulation of emotions, satisfaction in relationships intimate and platonic, frequency of damaging behavior like substance abuse, and addiction to novel sensory media.

It's novelty-seeking that is broken, that's all there is to it. We are lucky medication is available. Others who struggle with other mental pathologies are not so lucky.

Self-hatred is not the answer. So is any attempt to make it a virtue. You can just be with the acknowledgement of a maladaptive state.

View on HN

You reject his premise but you did not refute it. Reiterating the adaptive struggles you and other ADHD sufferers face does not invalidate the idea that it is a competitive advantage under certain circumstances.

I did refute it, vociferously. If you have evidence for it being an evolutionary advantage, you are welcome to present it. The only scientific argument I've seen presented is that it made us better foragers but I ask you, who is foraging today? It's an utterly absurd position to take that it is a competitive advantage in a scenario no one in the first world will ever encounter.

Sounds like you don’t even dispute his point, so how could you have refuted it?

To your point about relevance : nobody here has claimed this competitive advantage is wildly useful in a “first world” context, something the GP actually framed explicitly.

Personally I don’t think one needs to invoke post apocalyptic scenarios, as there are plenty of “first world” professions or scenarios that benefit from the same skill sets - military, emergency medicine, firefighting, just to name a few. The first world isn’t all spreadsheets and jira tasks.

I honestly don't know where you're going with this. You're theorizing about a condition you presumably don't have and then extrapolating your theories to professions you imagine to fit your idea of the "skillset" people with ADHD supposedly have.

There is not a skillset attached to the diagnosis of ADHD. There is no time to develop a skillset when the mind is constantly roving and unable to concentrate.

> a condition you presumably don’t have… extrapolating your theories…

You presume incorrectly, and they’re not “my” theories, but they do track with my personal observations and experience.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/38511

There is no physical evidence for the disgnosis of adhd, so if you want to talk science lets start there

Im diagonsed Adhd and I definitely had years of great success before being medicated. Theres advantages to all the things you're saying under the right circumstances.

Also quite frankly just about everyone suffers in one way or another. How do you know your issues were more than average?

I'm sorry to hear about the struggles this has put you through, but I might mention that it is not universal that diagnosed sufferers of ADHD are unable to engage with their interests. In fact often direct interests can be highly engaging, while things that need to be done but are not interesting are debilitatingly difficult (executive dysfunction).

As with ASD and neurodivergency at large, ADHD is a spectrum, with differing impacts for differing people.

Could not disagree more. Nothing is “interesting” in perpetuity. Hence why so many with ADHD engage with various topics in an intense but sporadic manner.

In the overwhelming majority of cases this scattershot approach is deeply frustrating for the individual, and orders of magnitude less productive - in terms of meaningful creation and innovation - than persevering on a focused set of tasks.

But most people I would say dont even take any interest in any tasks.

I don’t think your comments are in conflict, being engaged with an interest does not necessarily mean being directly engaged with a project/task related to that interest. I definitely empathize with the scattershot approach being frustrating, but i think that comes out of an intense interest in a topic, and a lack of ability to focus on a specific task, even if it is self-selected and related to an interest.

I can think of many examples of times where I was unable to complete a project (in part) due to a drive to answer every question that I encountered in the process, and questions branching from those answers. So yes it does definitely impact productivity and perseverance for specific tasks, but I would separate that from the unique ability to learn intensely about interesting topics with reasonable depth and exceptional breadth that ADHD seems to give.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com