Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

The reverse Flynn effect should be by far the most concerning thing on this page. As others have pointed out, some of these trends are specious, but the Flynn effect has held up for a while, and is highly replicated. Even just the disappearance of the Flynn effect would be significant.

An adjacent phenomenon that needs investigation is "Adult ADD". Extending the theory of adolescent ADD to adults doesn't add up. It's surprising that these are considered by default to be the same condition, especially in people who didn't have issues during adolescence. The increase in prevalence demands a non-genetic explanation. Better explanatory theories are: 1. We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults. 2. It's a fad (when will prevalence decrease?), and 3. It's the smartphones/apps.

Personally, I think it's mostly 3, with the infinite scrolling apps having a huge effect on attention and executive function, but also some of 1 given the information economy.

This should go without saying: if an intervention is working for you, or a disease theory has given you explanatory power, you should stick with both.

"We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults"

Damn, now I want this as a spoken word sample on a house music track

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue in the same way as "Feel My Motherf'n Bass in Your Face" though, does it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahJWfGPdqBw

The effect is easy to grasp, we're moving away from Pleistocene communication technology, which is benchmarked in dated tools like reading, math, SAT/ACT scores. Human intelligence isn't going away, another form of expression that measures intelligence that isn't text or numbers based is arriving, we simply don't have the capability to measure that, though, here clearly are markets for that intelligence.

I thought to be diagnosed as ADHD you needed to have the symptoms from childhood, as many other things cause similar symptoms?

Your next sentence seems to suggest you think ADHD only affects children?

The theory of disease for ADD/ADHD in children has explanatory power, which means that the understanding must be at least partially correct. It's impressive that many children outgrow their ADD, and that temporary use of amphetamines during development can help them outgrow it, so they don't regularly take drugs as adults. Some kids don't outgrow it, and continue to medicate as adults. That's also fine, if it helps, it helps.

What doesn't add up is people with new problems with executive function that start as adults, and suspiciously as they have more control over their screen time, and more money to spend on technology and apps. They get an amphetamine prescription, which definitely helps, but they also get a bad explanation. Something like: genetics, or a story about how their brain was better in the ancestral environment or whatever. Doesn't explain the onset of the condition, doesn't explain why it became a problem completely after development.

This seems to completely ignore, and maybe even dismiss, the lived experience of all the kids who weren’t diagnosed or treated but who developed coping mechanisms to survive school and adolescent life, then found those mechanisms incapable of dealing with the ever-increasing burdens of adult life and finally sought diagnosis as adults after years of struggling to understand things that have been complicating their lives all along.

This kind of dismissive rhetoric increases the stigma around seeking a diagnosis as an adult, which is already hard enough because an entire system of caregivers, teachers, and institutions already failed the undiagnosed person throughout their life and navigating the health care system, especially for mental health, is extremely frustrating - and challenging from an executive function perspective.

This also dismisses the medical literature itself that just keeps getting more and more refined on this topic.

Even more important than first order effects are any positive feedback loops we can identify. For example, a stressed person escapes into a screen to quiet their own thoughts, and the screen's contents stresses them out. This feedback loop is common to all forms of addiction, but screens are unique in at least three ways. First, they are legal for all ages. Second, they are personally customized to increase usage. Third, unlike drugs which distort reality, screens effectively replace it for the user. It is to be expected that this would have strong cognitive and even epistemic effects on users, and that these effects are self-reinforcing.

Neoliberal capitalism is not equipped to either identify or solve these problems. Some attempts are being made ("Calm" apps, self help books, etc) but these are sand castles trying to stem the tide. Society as a whole must recognize that screens exist in a superposition of "encyclopedia", "cigarette", "panopticon", and take steps to regulate their use. A bummer for libertarians, but life-saving for society.

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