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Comment by owenpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I felt this when I decided to do dev work while going to school. The structure of work was a break from the chaos of school, and the novelty of school was a break from the monotony of work.

I want to understand the mechanism and purpose behind procrastination. It seems like there's a reason evolution chose for ADHD to exist.

In my experience, sometimes the frustrating signal telling me not to do the superficially "productive" thing is a defense mechanism against doing meaningless shit. It's a voice screaming at you, informing you of your mortality.

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> It seems like there's a reason evolution chose for ADHD to exist.

Well, evolution is not an actor. It didn't 'choose' anything. It's just that people (organisms?) with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past, so it still exists.

> organisms with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past

Yes, that's the real insight. You can be terribly unsuccessful by society's standards and yet immensely successful by evolutionary standards.

If you're broke/in prison/homeless/addicted/(whatever else you want to include) with 6 kids, you're evolutionary more successful than someone who has it all put together with 0 kids.

This is the bell curve meme.

Evolution chose -> NOOOO, evolution doesn't "choose" anything -> Evolution chose

Personification of natural selection is a common way biologists speak about evolution.

Yes, we have an entire part of the language for talking about what actors do. And we have nothing at all to talk about how non-acting structures mold complex systems.

I interpret it differently; it’s usually a signal that my current approach to an activity is not effective. And it’s not static. For example if I feel this signal when practicing piano songs I otherwise want to improve on, I will try an entirely different or new sheet. If I still feel it, I’ll just do some technical practices and then stop. If I feel it when it’s a chore I know I should do, I give myself the option between that chore and another. Whenever I challenge the feeling like this I end up being more in control than simply giving up altogether.

Evolution is a continuous random branching and selective pruning process. And there is not a lot of pruning going on in the current human explosion. So unless ADHD is an old branch and we see other mammals survive because of their distractability, I remain skeptical.

I think of it in terms of explore/exploit. I imagine ADHD is more on the former side of the spectrum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

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